Uranium Fuel used for United States Navy reactors is typically highly enriched in uranium-235 (the exact values are classified). In a breeder reactor, uranium-238 can also be converted into plutonium through the following reaction: Before (and, occasionally, after) the discovery of radioactivity, uranium was primarily used in small amounts for yellow glass and pottery glazes, such as uranium glass and in Fiestaware. The discovery and isolation of radium in uranium ore (pitchblende) by Marie Curie sparked the development of uranium mining to extract the radium, which was used to make glow-in-the-dark paints for clock and aircraft dials. This left a prodigious
Stephanie Horovitz radiochemistry. It predicted that lead resulting from the radioactive decay of uranium or thorium would have different atomic weights than typical lead. Early experimental data was not considered authoritative by analytical chemists. Hönigschmid had studied under leading expert Theodore Williams Richards at Harvard and his work in determining precise atomic weights was well respected. Horovitz isolated lead from uranium-rich pitchblende samples from the St. Joachmistal mine. Her gravimetric analysis to the thousandth of a gram proved that lead created from the radioactive decay of uranium had a lower atomic weight than typical lead. This was the first widely-accepted experimental proof