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Biraco
Biraco is the acronym of Bismuth, Radium, and Cobalt. It was the name of a now-defunct subsidiary company of Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) and Société Générale de Belgique created to refine these elements from the copper and uranium ores coming from the Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Radium was industrially produced in the beginning of the 20th century by Biraco in its Olen plant near Antwerp in Belgium. The radium production plant was demolished during the years 1970 and the radium production wastes confined in a shallowly buried vault. The Olen site is still the object of remediation works financed by Umicore in the frame of its historical liability. See also * Radium * Bismuth * Cobalt * Société Générale de Belgique * Union Minière du Haut Katanga * Umicore Umicore N.V., known as ''Union Minière'' before 2001, is a Belgian-French multinational materials technology company headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. It was formed in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radium
Radium is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is the sixth element in alkaline earth metal, group 2 of the periodic table, also known as the alkaline earth metals. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen (rather than oxygen) upon exposure to air, forming a black surface layer of radium nitride (Ra3N2). All isotopes of radium are radioactive, the most stable isotope being radium-226 with a half-life of 1,600 years. When radium decays, it emits ionizing radiation as a by-product, which can excite fluorescent chemicals and cause radioluminescence. For this property, it was widely used in Self-luminous paint, self-luminous paints following its discovery. Of the Radionuclide, radioactive elements that occur in quantity, radium is considered particularly Toxicity, toxic, and it is Carcinogen, carcinogenic due to the radioactivity of both it and its immediate decay product radon as well as its tendency to B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acronym
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation. For some, an initialism or alphabetism connotes this general meaning, and an ''acronym'' is a subset with a narrower definition; an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters. In this sense, ''NASA'' () is an acronym, but ''United States, USA'' () is not. The broader sense of ''acronym'', ignoring pronunciation, is its original meaning and in common use. . Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term ''acronym'' can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and they do not agree on acronym space (punctuation), spacing, letter case, casing, and punctuation. The phrase that the acronym stands for is called its . The of an acron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bismuth
Bismuth is a chemical element; it has symbol Bi and atomic number 83. It is a post-transition metal and one of the pnictogens, with chemical properties resembling its lighter group 15 siblings arsenic and antimony. Elemental bismuth occurs naturally, and its sulfide and oxide forms are important commercial ores. The free element is 86% as dense as lead. It is a brittle metal with a silvery-white color when freshly produced. Surface oxidation generally gives samples of the metal a somewhat rosy cast. Further oxidation under heat can give bismuth a vividly iridescent appearance due to thin-film interference. Bismuth is both the most diamagnetic element and one of the least thermally conductive metals known. Bismuth was formerly understood to be the element with the highest atomic mass whose nuclei do not spontaneously decay. However, in 2003 it was found to be very slightly radioactive. The metal's only primordial isotope, bismuth-209, undergoes alpha decay with a half-l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cobalt
Cobalt is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, somewhat brittle, gray metal. Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since antiquity for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass. The color was long thought to be due to the metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name ''kobold ore'' (German language, German for ''goblin ore'') for some of the blue pigment-producing minerals. They were so named because they were poor in known metals and gave off poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), which was ultimately named for the ''kobold''. Today, some cobalt is produced sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Union Minière Du Haut Katanga
Union commonly refers to: * Trade union, an organization of workers * Union (set theory), in mathematics, a fundamental operation on sets Union may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * Union (band), an American rock group ** ''Union'' (Union album), 1998 * ''Union'' (Chara album), 2007 * ''Union'' (Toni Childs album), 1988 * ''Union'' (Cuff the Duke album), 2012 * ''Union'' (Paradoxical Frog album), 2011 * ''Union'', a 2001 album by Puya * ''Union'', a 2001 album by Rasa * ''Union'' (Son Volt album), 2019 * ''Union'' (The Boxer Rebellion album), 2009 * ''Union'' (Yes album), 1991 * "Union" (Black Eyed Peas song), 2005 Other uses in arts and entertainment * ''Union'' (film), a labor documentary released in 2024 * ''Union'' (Star Wars), a Dark Horse comics limited series * Union, in the fictional Alliance–Union universe of C. J. Cherryh * ''Union (Horse with Two Discs)'', a bronze sculpture by Christopher Le Brun, 1999–2000 * The Union (Marvel Team), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Société Générale De Belgique
The ' (, ; often referred to in Belgium simply as "Société Générale" or SGB) was an investment bank and, subsequently, an industrial and financial conglomerate in Belgium between 1822 and 2003. It has been described as the world's first universal bank. The banking element was split in 1935 and became the '' Générale de Banque''. At its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Société Générale exercised significant control over large portions of the national economy of Belgium and the Belgian colonial empire. The Société Générale was originally founded as an investment bank called the or () by William I of the Netherlands in 1822 when Belgium was under his rule within the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. After the Belgian Revolution in 1830, it was the new country's dominant financial institution and remained so even after the creation of the National Bank of Belgium in 1850. Its investments in the national economy contributed to the rapid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copper
Copper is a chemical element; it has symbol Cu (from Latin ) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orange color. Copper is used as a conductor of heat and electricity, as a building material, and as a constituent of various metal alloys, such as sterling silver used in jewelry, cupronickel used to make marine hardware and coins, and constantan used in strain gauges and thermocouples for temperature measurement. Copper is one of the few metals that can occur in nature in a directly usable, unalloyed metallic form. This means that copper is a native metal. This led to very early human use in several regions, from . Thousands of years later, it was the first metal to be smelted from sulfide ores, ; the first metal to be cast into a shape in a mold, ; and the first metal to be purposely alloyed with another metal, tin, to create bronze, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uranium
Uranium is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium radioactive decay, radioactively decays, usually by emitting an alpha particle. The half-life of this decay varies between 159,200 and 4.5 billion years for different isotopes of uranium, isotopes, making them useful for dating the age of the Earth. The most common isotopes in natural uranium are uranium-238 (which has 146 neutrons and accounts for over 99% of uranium on Earth) and uranium-235 (which has 143 neutrons). Uranium has the highest atomic weight of the primordial nuclide, primordially occurring elements. Its density is about 70% higher than that of lead and slightly lower than that of gold or tungsten. It occurs naturally in low concentrations of a few Parts-per notation#Parts-per expressions, parts per million in soil, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Katanga Province
Katanga was one of the four large provinces created in the Belgian Congo in 1914. It was one of the eleven provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1966 and 2015, when it was split into the Tanganyika Province, Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba Province, Lualaba, and Haut-Katanga provinces. Between 1971 and 1997 (during the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko when Congo was known as Zaire), its official name was Shaba Province. Katanga's area encompassed . Farming and ranching are carried out on the Katanga Plateau. The eastern part of the province is a rich mining region which supplies cobalt, copper, tin, radium, uranium, and diamonds. The region's former capital, Lubumbashi, is the second-largest city in the Congo. History Copper mining in Katanga dates back over 1,000 years, and mines in the region were producing standard-sized ingots of copper for international transport by the end of the 10th century CE. In the 1890s, the province was beleaguered from the south by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Democratic Republic Of Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Republic of the Congo), is a country in Central Africa. By land area, it is the second-largest country in Africa and the 11th-largest in the world. With a population of around 112 million, the DR Congo is the most populous nominally Francophone country in the world. French is the official and most widely spoken language, though there are over 200 indigenous languages. The national capital and largest city is Kinshasa, which is also the economic center. The country is bordered by the Republic of the Congo, the Cabinda exclave of Angola, and the South Atlantic Ocean to the west; the Central African Republic and South Sudan to the north; Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania (across Lake Tanganyika) to the east; and Zambia and Angola to the south. Centered on the Congo Basin, most of the country's terrain is co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olen, Belgium
Olen () is a municipality located in the Belgian province of Antwerp. The municipality comprises three towns, situated on a south–north axis: *South of the motorway E313 and the Albert Canal is Olen proper, also called Olen-Centrum (Saint-Martins parish). *Between the Albert Canal and Olen-station (railroad from Antwerp to Neerpelt and Hasselt) is the town of Boekel, also called Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Olen (parish) or Achter-Olen (Behind-Olen). *North of the railroad is the town of St.-Jozef-Olen (parish), also called Olen-Fabriek (Olen-Factory, a refinery along the old canal Herentals-Bocholt that was at its origin). In 2021, Olen had a total population of 12,600. The total area is 23.10 km2. History of Uranium mining In the 1920s and 1930s the Union Minière du Haut Katanga company, operating in the then Belgian colony of Congo, had a virtual monopoly of the world uranium Uranium is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antwerp
Antwerp (; ; ) is a City status in Belgium, city and a Municipalities of Belgium, municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of Antwerp Province, and the third-largest city in Belgium by area at , after Tournai and Couvin. With a population of 565,039, it is the List of most populous municipalities in Belgium, most populous municipality in Belgium, and with a metropolitan population of over 1.2 million people, the country's Metropolitan areas in Belgium, second-largest metropolitan area after Brussels. Definitions of metropolitan areas in Belgium. Flowing through Antwerp is the river Scheldt. Antwerp is linked to the North Sea by the river's Western Scheldt, Westerschelde estuary. It is about north of Brussels, and about south of the Netherlands, Dutch border. The Port of Antwerp is one of the biggest in the world, ranking second in Europe after Rotterdam and List of world's busiest container ports, within the top 20 globally. The city ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
