Science: Radium

Mrs. Josie Bishop is a small, bright, sun-browned widow with four grown children. Twenty years ago she moved to California’s Mojave Desert from New Mexico, arriving with “a can of beans, a loaf of bread but no butter.” She owns a patch of mining territory 27 miles north of Mojave, near wild, scenic Red Rock Canyon. Her claim to this land was recently in litigation, was cleared a few weeks ago after the case reached the California Supreme Court. Last week it looked as though Mrs. Bishop’s troubles were over. Newsstories from Southern California made it appear that Mrs. Josie Bishop owns an extremely rich deposit of radium-bearing ore—one of the richest, in proportion of radium to the ton, ever discovered.

A rich radium deposit is one which yields 90 to 120 milligrams (.00315 to .0042 oz.) nearly pure radium bromide salt per ton of concentrated ore (50 tons of crude ore). From ore bodies of such richness in northwestern Canada the refining plant is able to extract one gram of commercially pure radium from 550 tons of mined ore. A San Diego mining engineer and chemist named F. S. Kearney, now working in Mexico, assayed Mrs. Bishop’s ore at 130 milligrams of radium per ton. This high figure, Mrs. Bishop said, was confirmed when she sent a sample to the Institut de Radium in Paris (once presided over by the late Marie Curie). Present price of radium is $25 per milligram, $25,000 per gram, $700,000 per ounce. Mrs. Bishop suspected for years that she had radium ore on her property, kept it quiet until her claim was cleared in the courts. Last week the excited little woman did not know just how extensive her deposit was, but she and her lawyers laid plans for a thorough survey and hoped to write a new chapter in the shifting course of world radium production.

The radium discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie was laboriously extracted from a radioactive mineral called pitchblende, found in what is now Czechoslovakia. For years those deposits remained the only source of the world supply. Then a radium-bearing ore, carnotite, was discovered in Utah and Colorado. This was a low-grade ore but with the help of the U. S. Bureau of Mines and several corporations, the U. S. became the biggest radium-producing country, at one time turning out 80% of world production. Between 1912 and 1922 the U. S. produced more than 170 grams. In those early days the price ranged around $110,000 per gram.

Meanwhile, Belgian prospectors had discovered veins of pitchblende in the Belgian Congo no less than 20 times richer than the U. S. carnotite. After the War, Belgium’s Union Minière du Haut Katanga started mining this material, shipping it to the mother country for refining. The U. S. with its low-grade carnotite could not compete and soon dropped out of the world picture. The Belgian company enjoyed what amounted to a monopoly, producing just enough to fill thedemand at its arbitrarily maintained price of $70,000 per gram. Since the medicinal uses of the element were rapidly expanding, grumblings were heard from other nations that the Belgian monopoly was cruelly greedy, especially since the cost of processing the African ore, exclusive of actual digging costs and overhead, was estimated to be not more than $10,000 per gram.

In 1930 a prospector and promoter named Gilbert LaBine, who had started a company called Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd., was driving his dogsled across the frozen surface of Canada’s Great Bear Lake, which is cut by the Arctic Circle. He spotted a vein of curious, glossy stuff which looked something like anthracite coal, with gleams of yellow, pink and green, recognized it as pitchblende. Surveys and assays showed that the deposit was rich and copious. In 1933 a refining plant was completed at Port Hope on Lake Ontario, 3,500 miles away. The Great Bear Lake find broke the Belgian monopoly, reduced the price of radium to its present level of $25,000 per gram. Few months ago Canada celebrated production of its first ounce of radium.

Modern radium extraction is a highly complex process, started with big ovens, reaction vats, filter presses and decanters, working down to delicately controlled processes in vessels hardly larger than thimbles. When the concentration of radium is as high as 1%, trained chemists take over the job, wearing protective gloves and clothing and working intermittently to avoid injury from the potent gamma, beta and alpha rays. The final product is not pure radium but 90 to 94% pure radium bromide.

Director of operations at the Port Hope refining plant is Marcel Pochon, a tall, well-knit Frenchman who once studied under the saintly Pierre Curie. Born in Versailles 48 years ago, Pochon graduated in chemical engineering at the School of Physics and Industrial Chemistry in Paris, studied dyestuff chemistry in Germany, was at War for four years in the French artillery, worked in various laboratories in France and England. In 1932 he joined Eldorado Mines, supervising the transportation and installation of all equipment for the Canadian refining plant. Marcel Pochon speaks fairly good English with a strong accent, wears modish clothes, tells humorous frontier anecdotes with a grave face.

Present rate of production for M. Pochon and his staff is 3½ grams of commercially pure radium bromide per month. This rate is expected to be tripled at the end of 1937 when installation of new equipment is completed. To estimate how well this enlarged output would beabsorbed by U. S. hospitals, M. Pochon recently visited the U. S., asked 103 hospitals how much radium they had on hand, how much they thought they would need in the future. Answers showed a combined holding of 51,895 grams, prospective need of 47,470 grams more. Where the hospitals would find the money to pay tor this future supply was not dealt with in the questionnaire but M. Pochon loped that generous donors would come forward.