Is radium essential to life?

Question

If radium had never been discovered, would it have had a large impact on everyone? Do we need it in everyday life?

Answer 1

Radium is not essential to life and has no modern uses due to its intense radioactivity. Uranium was discovered first, but the study of Radium contributed to the understanding of what radioactivity was. Radium was once used in phosphorescent paint for the hands of clocks. Unfortunately it poisoned many factory workers and was replaced with non-radioactive materials. Radium was once a "health food". In the early 20th century a weak solution of Radium chloride was sold as an American "patent medicine" under the name of "Radiothor". A popular athlete was hired to promote the product but eventually poisoned himself. It was said the contamination was so bad, photographic plates laid on the coffin recorded the images of his bones. The scientist who discovered Radium was also eventually poisoned. M. Curie's notebooks are so badly contaminated they have to be kept in sealed containers. The only impact radium has in the modern world is "Radon proofing". Radium decays into an inert, radioactive gas called Radon. Radium ocurrs in many types of minerals, especially granite. Minute amounts of Radon can accumulate underground and some studies found a correlation between elevated Radon levels in basements and cancer. Hence, a very lucrative industry began. Radioactivity might be essential to life however. Potassium is an electrolyte needed by both plants and animals. However, it has radioactive isotopes. The radiation is mild but might be enough to cause mutations and perhaps this is one of the driving forces in evolution.

Answer 2

Radium is not essential to life. An interesting point of its history is with radium ,glow in the dark watches and clocks . The numbers were painted on by hand. The artists tipped their brushes by putting them in their mouth. This gave them mouth cancers because of the intense radiation in the radium paint, which of course is what made it glow also. Their are still some of th old watches and clocks around from the 1940's and 50's, that still glow.

Answer 3

I think the problem nowadays is that most people understand success in a distorted way, meaning that they do not think about is as a goal that must be reached, but rather than a state (the state of being successful). So in more than one way this becomes their choice of living their lives. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to know what success means to most of the people then it probably means a combination of having a flourishing career/business, a family (in some cases just having beautiful women around), a big house (and 1 or more holiday houses) and the luxury of affording to hire people to do things for you. On the other hand if I would give you an answer about what I think is a successful life I would have to say a life in which a person experiments as much as he/she can, in which you learn that lesson you came here for (here meaning on earth, as a human being). In the case that a person decides (and this does take courage) to follow his own way and find true values beyond the material realm, to live his life by those values and always strive to better himself, to be not just a human being, but also human, then i think that when the time comes he will look back at his life and be happy of all that he has realized. That is the person that can say (in my opinion) he/she had lived a successful life.

Answer 4

It's not essential, no. But it does give us a more complete understanding of the way the elements themselves all work, and its discovery was a stepping stone into the science of all other radioactive elements.

Answer 5

Useful to help in some types of cancer

Was interesting in sciences history

Answer 6

Not in everyday life.

It has its applications.

And its dangers.

Answer 7

Radium (IPA: /ˈreɪdiəm/) is a chemical element, which has the symbol Ra and atomic number 88 (see the periodic table). Its appearance is almost pure white, but it readily oxidizes on exposure to air, turning black. Radium is an alkaline earth metal that is found in trace amounts in uranium ores. It is extremely radioactive. Its most stable isotope, 226Ra, has a half-life of 1602 years and decays into radon gas.

[edit] Notable characteristics
The heaviest of the alkaline earth metals, radium is intensely radioactive and resembles barium in its chemical behavior. This metal is found in minute quantities in the uranium ore pitchblende, and various other uranium minerals. Radium preparations are remarkable for maintaining themselves at a higher temperature than their surroundings, and for their radiations, which are of three kinds: alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. Radium also produces neutrons when mixed with beryllium.

When freshly prepared, pure radium metal is brilliant white, but blackens when exposed to air (probably due to nitride formation). Radium is luminescent (giving a faint blue color), reacts violently with water and oil to form radium hydroxide and is slightly more volatile than barium.


[edit] Applications
Some of the practical uses of radium are derived from its radiative properties. More recently discovered radioisotopes, such as 60Co and 137Cs, are replacing radium in even these limited uses because several of these are much more powerful, they are safer to handle, and they are more concentrated.

Formerly used in self-luminous paints for watches, nuclear panels, aircraft switches, clocks, and instrument dials. More than 100 former watch dial painters who used their lips to shape the paintbrush died from the radiation. Soon afterward, the adverse effects of radioactivity became widely known. Radium was still used in dials as late as the 1950's. Objects painted with this paint must be handled properly. Although tritium's beta radiation is potentially dangerous if ingested, it has replaced radium in these applications.
When mixed with beryllium it is a neutron source for physics experiments.
Radium (usually in the form of radium chloride) is used in medicine to produce radon gas which in turn is used as a cancer treatment.
Radium was also put in many foods for taste and as a preservative, but also exposed many people to radiation.
223Ra is currently under investigation for use in medicine as cancer treatment of bone metastasis.
One unit for radioactivity, the non-SI curie, is based on the radioactivity of 226Ra (see Radioactivity).
At the turn of the 20th century radium was a popular additive in products like toothpaste, hair creams, and even food items due to its supposed curative powers. Such products soon fell out of vogue, and were prohibited by authorities in many countries, after it was discovered they could have real and serious adverse health effects. (See for instance Radithor.)
Spas featuring radium-rich water are still occasionally touted as beneficial, such as those in Misasa, Tottori, Japan.

[edit] History
Radium (Latin radius, ray) was discovered by Maria Skłodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre in 1898 in pitchblende/uraninite from North Bohemia (area around Jáchymov). While studying pitchblende the Curies removed uranium from it and found that the remaining material was still radioactive. They then separated out a radioactive mixture mostly consisting of barium which gave a brilliant red flame color and spectral lines which had never been documented before. In 1902 radium was isolated into its pure metal by Curie and André-Louis Debierne through the electrolysis of a pure radium chloride solution by using a mercury cathode and distilling in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas.

Historically the decay products of radium were known as Radium A, B, C, etc. These are now known to be isotopes of other elements as follows:

Isotope
Radium emanation 222Rn
Radium A 218Po
Radium B 214Pb
Radium C 214Bi
Radium C1 214Po
Radium C2 210Tl
Radium D 210Pb
Radium E 210Bi
Radium F 210Po

On February 4, 1936 radium E became the first radioactive element to be made synthetically.

During the 1930s it was found that workers exposure to radium by handling luminescent paints caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia and bone cancer. This use of radium was stopped soon afterward. This is because radium is treated as calcium by the body, and deposited in the bones, where radioactivity degrades marrow, and can mutate bone cells. The litigation and ultimate deaths of five "Radium Girl" employees who had used radium-based luminous paints on the dials of watches and clocks had a significant impact on the formulation of occupational disease labor law.

Handling of radium has been blamed for Marie Curie's premature death.


[edit] Occurrence
Radium is a decay product of uranium and is therefore found in all uranium-bearing ores. Radium was originally acquired from pitchblende ore from Joachimsthal, Bohemia (One metric ton of pitchblende yields 0.0001 grams of radium). Carnotite sands in Colorado provide some of the element, but richer ores are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Great Lakes area of Canada and can also be extracted from uranium processing waste. Large uranium deposits are located in Ontario, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, Australia, and in other places.


[edit] Compounds
Its compounds color flames crimson carmine (rich red or crimson color with a shade of purple) and give a characteristic spectrum. Due to its geologically short half life and intense radioactivity, radium compounds are quite rare, occurring almost exclusively in uranium ores.

radium fluoride (RaF2)
radium chloride (RaCl2)
radium bromide (RaBr2)
radium iodide (RaI2)
radium oxide (RaO)
radium nitride (Ra3N2)
See also radium compounds.


[edit] Isotopes
Radium has 25 different known isotopes, four of which are found in nature, with 226Ra being the most common. 223Ra, 224Ra, 226Ra and 228Ra are all generated in the decay of either U or Th. 226Ra is a product of 238U decay, and is the longest-lived isotope of radium with a half-life of 1602 years; next longest is 228Ra, a product of 232Th breakdown, with a half-life of 6.7 years.


[edit] Radioactivity
Radium is over one million times more radioactive than the same mass of uranium. Its decay occurs in at least seven stages; the successive main products have been studied and were called radium emanation or exradio (this is radon), radium A (polonium), radium B (lead), radium C (bismuth), etc. The radon is a heavy gas and the later products are solids. These products are themselves radioactive elements, each with an atomic weight a little lower than its predecessor.

Radium loses about 1% of its activity in 25 years, being transformed into elements of lower atomic weight with lead being a final product of disintegration.

The SI unit of radioactivity is the becquerel (Bq), equal to one disintegration per second. The curie is a non-SI unit defined as that amount of radioactivity which has the same disintegration rate as 1 gram of Ra-226 (3.7 x 1010 disintegrations per second, or 37 GBq).


[edit] Precautions
Radium is highly radioactive and its decay product, radon gas, is also radioactive. Since radium is chemically similar to calcium, it has the potential to cause great harm by replacing it in bones. Inhalation, injection, ingestion or body exposure to radium can cause cancer and other disorders. Stored radium should be ventilated to prevent accumulation of radon.

Emitted energy from the decay of radium ionizes gases, affects photographic plates, causes sores on the skin, and produces many other detrimental effects.