**7. Uranium as fuel in the nuclear weapons and in the nuclear power industry**

Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann conducted the experiments leading to the discovery of uranium's ability to fission and release binding energy in 1934. Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch published the physical explanation in February 1939 and named the process "nuclear fission". Further work found that U238 isotope could be transmuted into plutonium, which like U235 isotope is also fissile by thermal neutrons. These discoveries led to the United States, Great Britain and Soviet Union to begin work on the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. After World War II, following the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, huge stockpiles of uranium were amassed and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were created using enriched uranium and plutonium made from uranium ores. Uranium ore was, after 1949, a highly strategic mineral material. In Central Europe, the principal uranium ore deposits were discovered in the Czechoslovakia and the East Germany (GDR). Some small uranium ore deposits were also found in Poland. The uranium ore from these deposits was in the first place used for the Soviets' nuclear weapons, later also for nuclear power industry [9, 26–29].
