RADIUM ROMANCE

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 31 August 1929, Page 11

RADIUM ROMANCE

Ti OWARDS the close of 1927 the Commonwealth Government set aside £IOO,OOO for the purchase of 10 grammes of radium for

use in hospitals in the Commonwealth and for research work; at the present time a fund of £200,00 is being raised in England for similar purposes. Incidentallj’ the questions arise as to the nature of radium and why it is so costly (writes J.S.D. in the “Sun News Pictorial.”) Radium is the rarest of all minerals; it is found only in the scarce element uranium, and in pitch-blende a mineral which is composed fundamentally of uranium oxide. The only known sources are small in extent and scattered over the earth. Generally from 200 to 500 tons of crude ore have to be treated to obtain the residual small quantity, up to a gramme, of radium.

The price paid by the Commonwealth, £IO,OOO per gramme, is slightly under the average price for the world. A gramme is equivalent to nearly 15J grains; compared with a 3d piece which, fresh from the mint, weight 21 4-5 grains, the coin is heavier in the proportion approximately of 4to 3; in other words, 4 grammes of radium costing £40,000 would about balance in weight three 3d pieces. A gramme of pure gold at current rates is worth only 3s. Small as the weight appeal’s, a gramme of radium is of the order of wholesale quantity; for actual use the scale is of the order of milligrammes, 1000 of which constitute a gramme. For hospital and medical purposes the tubes used contain quantities ranging from 5 to 50 milligrammes respectively. It lias been estimated that in breaking up, the transformation of radium produces 1,000,000 times more heat than all the other known transformations; the disintegration is spontaneous;

WORLD’S RAREST MINERAL

WHERE IT IS FOUND

no amount of heat or cold that can be produced in the laboratory will hasten or retard the breaking up.

Professor Dewar, of London, placed some radium in a medium, almost the coldest that can be produced artificially, viz., liquid air, which in turn was surrounded by liquid hydrogen so that no heat, could reach tho medium from outside; the radium still gave out its heat, boiling away the liquid air until it disappeared. Radium is one of four radio-active elements, the others being uranium, thorium, and actinium. From the disintegration of radium the element helium and finally the element lead, are evolved.

The criterion of a radio-active body is not. only that it emits radiation, but that it changes spontaneously into some other substance. Scientists use the expression “time to half” to indicate the period which it takes for half of n radio-active body, to disappear. The time for half-value in uranium is 2,000,000 years; for radium about 1800 years.

The alchemists dreamt of the transmutation, to gold from inferior metals; research shows that the transmutation is from superior to inferior.

The principal known sources of the ores from which radium is obtained are the United States, Belgian Congo, Czecho-Slovakia, and Portugal; there are also known deposits in Madagascar, Cornwall, England, and South Australia.

According to an estimate of the Bureau of Mines, United States, made in 1928, the world’s total production of radium up to that date was 560 grammes, of which the United States supplied 250, Congo 180, Czecho-Slovakia 42, Portugal 15, Madagascar 8, Russia 6, Cornwall 4, and South Australia 1.