How is radium used within the real world?
What is made with Radium?
- Radium is used to make radon gas, one of the decay products of radium. This gas is safer to work with compared to radium.
Industrial/Human Body uses?
- Radium and the compounds associated with it have few uses because of how the radiation it gives off kills living, healthy or unhealthy cells. Original uses included using radium for health and safety reasons, such as cancer treatment to kill infecting cells.
- Radium was used as luminescent paint in World War Ⅱ due to its glow when mixed with a phosphor. The glow would help operators see aircraft dials and gauges visible at night.
- Used as a radiation source in some radiography devices, but is now considered too dangerous to use.
Additional uses:
Radium toothpaste was used during World War II. Zinc and radium combine to help make paint glow. Here are female employees at the U.S. Radium Corporation in 1922 painting radium onto watch dials. This radiation was extremely harmful to the workers who used it to apply the radium paint to watches or clocks. Workers twirled the brush between their lips, then dipped it into the radioactive paint consisting of radium. This caused painters to get radium on their lips when the process was repeated so the painters ended up getting mouth and lip cancer. This is why radium is not used on clocks and watches anymore. |
Uses in the Human Body?
- As said before, radium is used for medical purposes like treating cancer. Although, radium is extremely dangerous because it is radioactive. Its radiation can kill healthy cells which isn't good, and cancerous cells.
Compounds, properties, and Reactions radium is found in?
- Combines with most non-metals: oxygen, fluorine, chlorine, and nitrogen.
- Reacts with acids when hydrogen gas is formed: more volatile than barium.
- Reacts violently with air forming radium nitride, causes this white metal to blacken. Properties include having higher solubilities in water.
- Radium salts turn white when "freshly prepared", then yellow and dark when ageing.
- Mixed with barium in uranium ore: used as a precipitating reagent for polonium and elements in ore. Spectral colors included red and other colors associated with barium's spectra.
- RaCI₂(Radium chloride) is produced from ore, less soluble than barium chloride, BACI₂ in water/alcohol.