March 27 (Reuters) - Uranium prices have jumped to $95 a lb this week, with more gains expected as governments embrace atomic energy as a means of lowering their carbon emissions and producers face lengthy delays opening new mines.

Here are some key facts about uranium's historical uses.

HISTORIC USES, NAMING, DISCOVERY:

- The hard, dense, silvery-white metal was named and discovered in 1789, by German chemist Martin Klaproth, while analysing silver mine samples in the present day Czech Republic.

- Klaproth named it after the planet Uranus, itself newly discovered in 1781. The element was isolated in 1841 and added to the periodic table as element number 92.

- Throughout the 1800s uranium was used mainly as it had been historically -- to tint glass and ceramics in shades ranging from yellow-green to orange and red. Yellow-tinted glass, containing uranium oxide, has been dated back to 79 A.D. in Naples, Italy.

RADIOACTIVE PROPERTIES:

- Over a century later, in 1896, a student of Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, first noticed uranium's radioactive properties. Working with her husband Pierre, Curie used tonnes of uranium to obtain fractions of a gram of a new radioactive element they discovered in 1898 -- radium.

- With radium touted as a miracle cure for cancer, prices shot as high as $75,000 per ounce.

- Uranium ore mining surged in the early 1900s, with discoveries made in the U.S., Australia, Portugal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplied the material used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs when it was a Belgian colony, and Canada.

NUCLEAR FISSION TO ATOM BOMBS:

- In 1938, German chemist Otto Hahn and radiochemist Fritz Strassman split uranium by bombarding its nucleus with low-velocity subatomic particles, in the world's first neutron-induced nuclear fission.

- Huge amounts of energy were released when the uranium nucleus was split. Scientists immediately saw the experiment's potential for the creation of atomic weapons and the modern nuclear power industry.

- The Germans' discovery kickstarted the U.S.'s Manhattan Project, aimed at building an atomic weapon before either the Nazis or Japan did.

- In 1945, the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, began producing the bomb-grade U-235 used in Little Boy, the world's first nuclear bomb. Dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in Aug. 6, 1945, it killed between 70,000 and 130,000 people immediately, while the second bomb, Fat Man, using plutonium, was dropped on Nagasaki causing 45,000 immediate deaths.

NUCLEAR FUEL AND MODERN MINING:

- Nuclear power was first used in 1951, when an experimental nuclear reactor at research centre in Idaho Falls lit four ordinary light bulbs. Six years later the U.S. opened its first full-scale power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, with a 60- megawatt generating capacity.

- Mine production has generally risen since 1993, with 41,595 tonnes produced from mines worldwide in 2005, the World Nuclear Association says.

- Extracted by underground/open pit mining or in-situ leaching, over half of the world's production of uranium from mines comes from Canada (28 percent of the world's supply) and Australia (23 percent).

Sources: Reuters, World Nuclear Association (www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf23.html), Atomic Museum (www.atomicmuseum.com/Tour/manhattanproject.cfm) ((Writing by Gill Murdoch, Singapore Editorial Reference Unit, editing by Ben Tan; gill.murdoch@reuters.com, Reuters Messaging gill.murdoch.reuters.com@reuters.net; +65 6870 3922))

AlertNet news is provided by