when did uranium become a sought after commodity
Uranium market Global demand for uranium rose steadily from the end of World War II, largely driven by nuclear weapons procurement programs. This trend lasted until the early 1980s, when changing geopolitical circumstances as well as environmental, safety, economic concerns over nuclear power plants reduced demand somewhat. The production of a series of large hydro-electric power stations has also helped to depress the global market since the early 1970s. This phenomenon can be traced back to the construction of the vast Aswan Dam in Egypt, and to a certain extent with the ambitious Three Gorges Dam in China. During this time, large uranium inventories accumulated. In fact, until 1985 the Western uranium industry was producing material much faster than nuclear power plants and military programs were consuming it. Uranium prices slid throughout the decade with few respites, leaving the price below $10 per pound for yellowcake by year-end 1989.[citation needed]
History of chemistry Marie Skłodowska-Curie was a Polish-born French physicist and chemist who is famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She and her husband are considered to have laid the cornerstone of the nuclear age with their research on radioactivity. Marie was fascinated with the work of Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who discovered in 1896 that uranium casts off rays similar to the X-rays discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen. Marie Curie began studying uranium in late 1897 and theorized, according to a 1904 article she wrote for Century magazine, "that the emission of rays by the compounds of uranium is a property of the metal itself—that it is an atomic property of the element uranium independent of its chemical or physical state." Curie took Becquerel's work a few steps further, conducting her own experiments on uranium rays. She discovered that the rays remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium. The rays, she theorized, came from the element's atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics and the Curies coined the word radioactivity to describe the phenomena.