Uranium mining Cornwall. The first deliberate mining of radioactive ores took place in Jáchymov, a silver-mining city in the Czech Republic. Marie Curie used pitchblende ore from Jáchymov to isolate the element radium, a decay product of uranium. Until World War II uranium was mined primarily for its radium content; some carnotite deposits were mined primarily for the vanadium content. Sources for radium, contained in the uranium ore, were sought for use as luminous paint for watch dials and other instruments, as well as for health-related applications, some of which in retrospect were certainly harmful. The byproduct uranium was used mostly as
Peak uranium amount of energy to be produced per mass unit of uranium, because U-238, which constitute 99.3% of natural uranium, is not used in conventional reactors which instead use U-235 which only represent 0.7% of natural uranium. In 1983, physicist Bernard Cohen proposed that the world supply of uranium is effectively inexhaustible, and could therefore be considered a form of renewable energy. He claims that fast breeder reactors, fueled by naturally-replenished uranium-238 extracted from seawater, could supply energy at least as long as the sun's expected remaining lifespan of five billion years., making them as sustainable in fuel availability terms as