What are the isotopes and uses of Uranium?
Uranium occurs in most rocks in concentrations of 2-to-4 parts per million, it occurs also in seawater, and can be recovered from the oceans. Natural uranium as found in the Earth's crust is a mixture largely of two isotopes: uranium-238 (U-238), accounting for 99.3% and uranium-235 (U-235) about 0.7%. The isotope U-235 is important because under certain conditions it can readily be split, yielding a lot of energy. It is therefore said to be 'fissile' and we use the expression 'nuclear fission'. Meanwhile, like all radioactive isotopes, they decay. U-238 decays very slowly, its half-life being about the same as the age of the Earth (4500 million years). Uranium is now used to power commercial nuclear reactors that produce electricity and to produce isotopes used for medical, industrial, and defense purposes around the world.
