Toward the latter half of the 1950s, the United States was more invested in keeping the uranium out of Soviet hands than actually mining the element itself. These obstacles played a large role in the diminishing importance of Congolese uranium after the war ended. Costs also skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions as the Shinkolobwe site and the roads connecting it to port cities needed to be drastically modernized. Indeed, two of the forty uranium shipments from Congo to the United States were torpedoed and lost. German U-boats harassed Allied shipping constantly, making the route dangerous as well. The journey needed to be quick and secretive. However, the transportation of uranium across the Atlantic Ocean was an arduous task. dropped on Hiroshima on Augused Congolese uranium. Most of the uranium used during World War II was from the Congolese mines, and the “Little Boy” bomb the U.S. Production at the mine would continue throughout the war, with several hundred tons being shipped monthly to the various Manhattan Project sites. With an initial stockpile of 1,000 tons of uranium in New York, Sengier shipped an additional 3,000 tons from the African colony to America. Edgar Sengier, director of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, helped with the project. Groves struck a deal with the Belgian government - which was exiled in London at the time - granting them rights to the mine for uranium extraction. The uranium in Congo was especially pure at times, the pitchblende where the uranium was embedded created sixty times more usable uranium than the average mine. It is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (previously known as the Belgian Congo and later Zaire), approximately 100 miles northwest of Lubumbashi. Uranium mining in the Belgian Congo primarily took place at the Shinkolobwe Mine owned by the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (Mining Union of Upper Katanga). Owned by The Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (Mining Union of Upper-Katanga) during the 1940s, Shinkolobwe uranium mine was located in the Belgian Congo. This meant there would also be a tremendous human cost, both in Africa and the United States. Early uranium mining techniques and poor health and safety standards, coupled with rudimentary knowledge about radiation exposure, made working in the mines unsafe. This cost would not just be monetary, although the CDT spent close to $40 million in its first three years. Such large scale procurement and mining would come at a cost, however. Using funds provided by the CDT, in 1944 Groves would purchase more than 3.4 million pounds of uranium from the Belgian Congo alone, with lesser amounts purchased from Canadian and American companies. Outside of central and eastern Europe in countries like the Czech Republic, Germany, and Ukraine, most uranium was located in central Africa, Kazakhstan, and Canada, with smaller quantities found in many western American states. Created in 1944 and chaired by Brigadier General Leslie Groves, the Combined Development Trust (CDT) was tasked with this project. Immediately, leaders of the Manhattan Project knew they would need to purchase and mine large amounts of uranium in a short amount of time. Radium isolation continued to be uranium’s main purpose until the outbreak of World War II and the discovery that uranium could be converted into plutonium when using a nuclear reactor. Uranium mining began on a large scale in the Czech Republic in the late 19th century as a way to procure ores for use in Marie Curie’s studies to isolate radium. ![]() The demand for uranium mining and men to work those mines skyrocketed in the early days of the Manhattan Project, and would become one of its enduring legacies. ![]() Uranium could also be transformed into plutonium in a nuclear reactor. Uranium-235, which is fissile, would need to be separated from the much more common isotope uranium-238. For the fuel for atomic weapons, scientists needed fissile isotopes of uranium and plutonium. ![]() Scientists learned that uranium-238 could be converted into a separate element, plutonium-239. The discovery of uranium fission in 1938 led several countries to begin research into the possibility of developing an atomic bomb. It was isolated shortly after, but its radioactive properties were not discovered until 1896 by Henri Becquerel. Uranium was discovered in 1789 by German scientist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in the mineral pitchblende.
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