When a radioactive atom explodes, that atom is changed permanently into a new substance. And radium turns out to be one of the results of exploding uranium atoms. So wherever you find uranium on the earth, you will always find radium with it because it is one of about a dozen so-called "decay products" of uranium.
To be more precise, when uranium disintegrates it turns into a substance called protactinium, which is also radioactive. And when that disintegrates it turns into a substance named thorium, which is likewise radioactive. When thorium disintegrates it turns into radium; when radium disintegrates it turns into radon gas. And when radon gas atoms disintegrate, they turn into what are called the "radon daughters", or "radon progeny", of which there are about half a dozen radioactive materials, including polonium.
Finally, in this progression, you end up with a stable substance, which in itself is highly toxic: lead.
But because the radioactivity of the other materials is so much more dangerous than this toxic heavy metal, people don't even talk about the lead at the end of the chain. They think that once all the radioactivity is gone, what's left is perfectly safe. It isn't -- but the lead that remains is just a whole lot less dangerous than the radioactive materials that produced it.
So all the radioactive decay products of uranium remain in the crushed rock when uranium is separated from the ore. That's why Marie Curie found most of the radioactivity left behind in the residues, including all the radium and all the polonium.
Radium
Now, the other main use for radium was as a luminous paint, because of the glow-in-the-dark phenomenon that Marie Curie had observed. Believe it or not, the price of uranium in the 1920s was $100,000 a gram -- and this is using dollars of the twenties! It was a very expensive commodity, but only very little was needed for any given purpose. Some of it was used to make luminous paint, with which they would paint dials so they could be read even in the dark.
Now the young women who painted these things began to get sick. This was first reported by an American dentist called Blum, who said that he had some very young women -- 19 years old, 18 years old, 20 years old -- coming into his dentistry office. Their teeth were falling out, their gums were badly infected and bleeding profusely, they were anemic, their bones were soft, and in some cases their jawbones had spontaneously fractured. Some of them died of severe anemia.
The only thing these women had in common was that they worked in a radium dial painting factory in New Jersey. Blum called this phenomenon "radium jaw". A few years later, the women who had recovered from these symptoms started developing problems in the rest of their skeleton. They suffered weakening of the bone, spontaneous fractures of the hip and of other bones, and growths -- tumors, some of which were cancerous -- in the bones themselves. Now, bone cancer is such an exceedingly rare disease, that there was little doubt that this cancer was caused by exposure to radium.
It was discovered that simply by wetting the tip of the brush in order to get a nice clean figure on the dials, these women were ingesting minute quantities of radium. And that was sufficient to cause all these symptoms. When autopsies were performed on the corpses of these women, doctors discovered that in their entire skeleton there were only a few micrograms of radium. This quantity was so small, that no conventional chemical analysis could detect it. Nevertheless, this tiny amount of radium had distributed itself so thoroughly through their skeleton, that you could take a picture of any one of their bones just by laying it on a photographic plate in a dark room, It is called an auto-radiograph -- that is, an x-ray picture with no x-ray machine.
So this was our first introduction to the harmful effects of even minute quantities of such substances.
By the way, many of the women who survived this phase of the assault later on developed cancers of the head -- cancer of the sinuses, cancer of the soft palate, and other types of head cancers. We now know how these were caused. Remember, radium is radioactive -- even inside the body.
As I told you earlier, when radium atoms disintegrate, they turn into radon gas. So radon gas was being produced inside the bodies of these women. In fact, one test for radium contamination is to check a person's exhaled breath and see if it has radon gas in it; if it does, that person must have radium in his or her body. In the case of the radium dial painters, the radon gas was being produced in the bones, dissolved in the blood, and pumped by the heart up to the head where it collected in the sinus and other cavities. And there it was irradiating the delicate living tissues and causing head cancers.
Read more:
http://ratical.org/radiation/WorldUraniumHearing/GordonEdwards.html#N5
.jpg)
0 comments:
Post a Comment