Abstract
The story of uranium can be traced back to the bad luck of some Bohemian miners, looking for rich silver ore. But until the percentage of the uranium-235 isotope was enriched above its natural 0.7% occurrence to make the atomic bomb, the world cared little about the heaviest natural element. Here the politics of this enrichment are recalled, the agreements and disagreements between Great Britain and the USA, the efforts of France to catch up, and how monopolies in the gaseous diffusion process for enrichment arose, ending with URENCO and Eurodif, the former using the more efficient centrifuge process.
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