uranium

This is a picture of un refined uranium.

Uranium being carried by a person wearing radiation protecting clothes.

In 1789 a scientist named Martin Heinrich Klaproth discovered the element uranium while analyzing a block of pitchblende and found that some of the block was not pitchblende he had discovered uranium
One of the most famous things that the mineral uranium was a major part of was both WWII when a nuclear bomb called the Enola Gay was dropped on a Japanese city called Hiroshima. Another appearance was during the cold war when both Russia and America were making threats against the other with nuclear weapons. Luckily no a single bomb or shot was shot or launched or the world would likely gone through a process called mass assured destruction of the planet earth.
       The element uranium existence was proven when a person put a uranium cross on a piece of photograph paper and left it for three months in a drawer. When the drawer was opened three months later the uranium cross had copied itself onto the photograph paper. The reason for this is from uraniums radioactivity. Uranium is part of the actinide family because uranium meets both the qualifications of being a rare earth metals and is radioactive. Uranium is found in the same state as iron making it a compound, in fact their are 18 different compounds that uranium can be commonly a compound of.

This is a pie chart of how much uranium was mined in 2012