Surplus of Radium

Radium, the most widely publicized of earth's 92 elements, is now being advertised for sale in the back pages of metallurgical journals. Reason: despite 40 years of hullabaloo, man has found very few uses for it.

Most widely touted use has been for treatment of some cancer conditions, and possibly 300 grams have been sold to U.S. hospitals and doctors. But few specialists are expert enough to use it effectively, few are the cases (less than 20%) in which it could be 100% effective no matter what their skill. Moreover, high-voltage X-rays have increasingly replaced radium for use on cancers located in parts of the body accessible to X-ray tubes. And the cyclotron has created a very serious rival, since other minerals can be made radioactive artificially.

Second biggest market for radium--to which advertising is now addressed--is only four or five years old. It is radiography, i.e., inspecting the insides of metals, weldings, castings, molds by taking photographs with radiation of smaller wave length than light's. The gamma rays which radium gives off can penetrate eleven inches of steel; X-rays can get through but six. (X-rays have until now dominated this field.)

Radium's third best market is the luminous paint industry, which is booming. A very little radium goes a long way: combined with zinc sulfide, one-thousandth of one gram (there are 28.35 grams in an ounce) can illumine thousands of needles on thousands of aircraft dials.

Fourth largest user of radium is the research physicist, and most of the world's radium outside hospitals is to be found in university and other research laboratories. Radium lasts a long time: one gram will be half a gram in 1,580 years.

There are possibly three pounds of radium in the world, but accurate figures on anything to do with radium are hard to extract from the few men who control its production and sale. The price of radium has fallen from $125,000 a gram to $25,000--in terms of an ounce, a decline from $3,500,000 to $708,750. The price fell first when the carnotite mines of Colorado and again when the Belgian Congo ceased to be the only profitable sources of radium. The third break in price occurred soon after the discovery in 1930 of a rich vein of pitchblende--the ore containing uranium and radium--at Great Bear Lake on the Arctic Circle in Canada (in North America only Lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan are larger).

The discovery was made by a frugal, intelligent French Canadian prospector, Gilbert LaBine of Toronto. In the '20s LaBine had organized Eldorado Gold Mines, Ltd., to exploit one of his claims. Little or no gold was found. The stock holders voted to stop operations, disburse among themselves the $250,000 remaining in the treasury. LaBine had a different idea. He had read a geologist's report of cobalt bloom staining on rocks along Great Bear's shore--a sign of silver, and possibly of gold and copper. LaBine told the stockholders he intended to go there and prospect, for himself, if he must, for Eldorado Gold Mines, Ltd. if they wanted to take another chance. They decided to. Result: in a climate of 70DEG below, in a land without sunlight four months out of twelve, Gilbert LaBine found pitchblende. He was 1,500 miles from a rail head, 4,000 miles from refining equipment, and several years away from breaking the Belgian monopoly on the process of extracting radium from its ore.

New uses for radium may be found, and scientists are being paid to think them up. Some of their thoughts: radium may possibly be used in soap, chicken feed, fertilizers, and devices for removing static.

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