Radium Facts
Radium Facts
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| Interesting Radium Facts: |
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| Radium was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898. |
| They extracted the element from a sample of the mineral uraninite. |
| Radium was discovered after the radioactive uranium was isolated, leaving behind another material that was still radioactive. |
| Twelve years after its discovery, Marie Curie and Andre-Louis Debierne isolated the pure metal form of radium. |
| Radium was the first radioactive element to be made synthetically. |
| The standard unit used to measure the radioactivity of a substance is called a becquerel, another unit, the curie, is derived from the comparative radioactivity of a radium isotope, Ra-226. |
| Radium is not a primordial element, but is a trace element that occurs from the decay of other heavier elements. |
| There are no large deposits of radium due to the extremely short half-life of the element and all its isotopes. |
| As an example, one ton of the uranium-containing mineral pitchblende is estimated to contain 1/7th of a gram of radium. |
| At its concentration, however, an equivalent amount of radium would be three million times more radioactive than uranium. |
| Radium has twenty-five known isotopes, all of which are unstable, while there have been thirty-four synthesized isotopes. |
| Four of those isotopes occur in nature as the product of radioactive decay of other elements. |
| The most common isotope of radium is Ra-226. |
| It is also the most stable, with a half-life of 1,601 years. |
| Due to its scarcity, radium had very few commercial applications, and even those are slowly being replaced by substances that are more abundant and safer to work with. |
| The human body treats radium exposure as it does calcium, meaning it gets deposited in the bones, teeth, and marrow. |
| A landmark case in the 1920s involved employee exposure to radium in a factory that produced glowing hands and markers on watch and clock faces. |
| The case resulted in a more widespread understanding of the effects of radioactivity. |
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