RADIUM IN DEVON?

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 144, 19 June 1937, Page 8

RADIUM IN DEVON?

A CIVIL SERVANT'S FIND

The red cliffs of Budleigh Salterton, Devon, may provide a new source of radium, said the "Morning Post" on May 5. ' White nodules, suggestive in appearance of a fungoid growth, which have been found in the cliffs by Mr. G. E. L. Carter, a retired Indian Civil Servant, have been pronounced by the Crystallo- ■ graphy Laboratory, Cambridge, to contain uranium. This is the parent substance of all radio-active materials of the radium family. - Owing to the fact that radium is naturally formed by the breakdown of uranium, the normal supposition is that any rock which contains uranium also contains radiumThese new radio-active nodules were exhibited for the first time at a conversazione held by the Royal Society at Burlington House, London, last night. They are believed to date from the time when dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters were reaching the end of their supremacy on earth. The presence of another rare chemical element, vanadium, in the nodules may, it is suggested, be connected with the power possessed by certain primitive fish to concentrate this element in their bodies. Since vanadium has a chemical attraction for uranium, this theory would also account for the radio-active quality of the nodules. The reason that the nodules have not before been discovered is. it is suggested, that the base of the cliff at this point—-for some distance west of Budleigh Salterton—is unusually difficult walking. Even the Geological Survey, it is understood, has been content to examine this stretch of cliff from the top. There had been no previous reason to suspect that there was anything unusual about It.