ROMANCE OF RADIUM

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 4, 6 January 1939, Page 3

ROMANCE OF RADIUM

Half-Frozen Prospector Found New Supply in Canada

H ALF a million pounds’ worth of

radium. That is the order which, says Mr. Walter Elliot, Minister of Health, England, contemplates placing in the near future in order to embark on a new drive against cancer. Half a million pounds could hardly be spent with so little, in bulk, to show for it. Radium costs £SOOO a gramme, so £500,000 will purchase 100 grammes, or about 3| oz. The whole world’s available supply is only 700 grammes. You could put in your pocket. The price sounds a lot. But it has dropped considerably in the last few years. It used to be £16,000. The fall was the result of the romantic discovery, eight years ago, of a rich new source of supply in Canada. It broke the virtual monopoly enjoyed by the Belgian Congo. To-day the British Empire gets most of its radium from within its own borders. It not only costs a lot, but it is continually wasting because of its radioactivity, states a writer in the Evening Standard, London. A radium research man expressed it to me: “As soon as you have a gramme of it you haven’t got it.” But the rate of wastage is so slow that it hardly matters. Any given amount decreases in its activity by approximately 0.1 per cent, every ten years. In 1700 years it would be reduced to half its size. So there is obviously nothing for us to worry abut. The annual world production of 90 grammes (about one-fifth of a pound) is contributed to, to a small extent, by territory which used to be in Czechoslovakia—the mines are German now—but Canada and the Belgian Congo put out the main bulk. Lately the two companies controlling the rival supplies have been discussing a price-fixing arrangement. Probably that is one reason why the British Government contemplates buying half a million pounds’ worth at once; it may not be possible to get it so cheap much longer. Another reason may be the growing tendency to use radium in bigger (10-

gramme) units. If that goes on, the demand will tax the supply. Radium has been the making of one oi the world’s most romantic millionaires, Gilbert Laßine, the man whose discovered the element in Canada. Eight years ago he was a poor man prospecting for copper on the frozen shores of the Great Bear Lake. Hp was almost down and out. With a partner named Paul he had tramped north against the terrible weather of that sub-Arctic region. Their eyelids froze together when they slept. Paul was smitten with snow blindness, so Laßine left him in a temporary camp on the shore and crossed the ice to examine the rocks. He found, to his astonishment, pitchblende, the ore of radium, that was then worth £16,000 a gramme. The National Research Laboratory, Ottawa, reported upon the sample he sent that it was the richest in radium that it had ever handled. When the news of the find got out there was an immediate rush of prospectors to the new field. All that territory, lying just within the Arctic Circle formed one of the most forbidding countries upon which the dismayed eye of an explorer could rest. Great Bear Lake itself, with an area of nearly 12,000 square miles, is the largest of the Canadian lakes and the feurth largest on the North American continent. The grim “Barren Lands,” where no trees grow, stretch away to the east. The shores are bordered by a vast, thinly-wooded wilderness which, before 1930, was unknown except to a few Indians, trappers and fur-traders. The sub-Arctic summer gave two and a-half months of continuous daylight, but for six weeks of the winter the sun was never seen and the temperature was 62 degrees below zero. But these conditions have lost more than half their terrors to the modern prospector. The rush to Great Bear Lake

was a very different affair from the gold rushes of the old Yukon days Then thousands toiled to the magic lands by canoe and on foot by Redskin trails and over mountain passes. But these came mostly by aeroplane, easily transporting themselves and their supplies in a few hours over distances that would otherwise have required weeks of laborious water travel. In summer the machines carried pontoons and in winter skis. They were armed against all weathers. But the work, when they got there, was appallingly difficult At the outset, the country was “blanket-staked” for miles—that is, staked first and examined afterwards. The examination was the main trouble, for although there was practically no soil, the breaks and depressions that were the most favourable places to explore for mineralisation were covered with drift and silt, perpetually frozen to within inches of the surface. The “Can’t-be-Done Land” was the bitter name it went by. There is a curious legend to the effect that the mineral deposits in one area of this bleak and frozen country were revealed by smell. Indians who were accustomed to camp at Laßine Point (where the first discoveries were made), long before it was no named, claim to have noticed a peculiar smell there. They reported a similar smell at a spot on Beaverledge Lake 100 miles distant. It was then mid-winter, however, and when the prospectors, following the Indians’ noses, got there, the snowblanketed ground revealed no outcrops. But as soon as the snow cleared a rich pitchblende vein was duly uncovered. The scene to-day is a marvellous transformation. There is a busy township where a few years ago man was so unusual a creature that wild animals showed no fear of him. Laßine is a millionaire, owning his fleets of steamships and aeroplanes, making the 4000 miles from the mine to the refinery at Port Hope, Ontario, a quick and easy trip. The use of radium will certainly be substantially increased in the near futqre, for the plan of the British Ministry of Health, as part of its new cancer drive, is to open a series of cancer clines in various parts of the country. There is practically only one important use to which radium is put—the treatment of cancer.