£1,000,000 PER OUNCE.

Hokitika Guardian, 17 April 1923, Page 2

£1,000,000 PER OUNCE.

Just fancy having to pay one million pounds an ounce for anything! II one wanted an ounce oi radium this is the price you would have to pay. There is a market for radium although it is very limited. The demand comes chiefly from doctors, from phvsicists tor rcsearoh woik. and trum certain industries where knowledge and ox]h.-rienee are slowly marking out spheres of usefulness for radio-active substances.

The cotton industry shows uses for radium, and possibly agriculture, too may in time iiml a use for radioactivity. Although at the present it seems premature to be able to place a definite use for radium in agriculture. recent investigations have tended to prove that plant life is affected if brought into contact with the rays given off by radium. In years to come this fact may be useful for producing a hot-house forcing effect.

Radium is very rare at present, and an exceedingly tedious, laborious, and costly process must be employed to extract it from its natural sources. Uranium was -the first radioactive metal discovered ; this is obtained from a natural substance called pitch-blende, a mixed ore containing over fifty per tent of uranium, together with a proportion of the metal called thorium, which is so much used in the manufacture of incandescent mantles.

In pre-war days the world’s chief supply of radium came from Austria. From Joaehimsthal, now in the new territory of Czeeho-Slovakia, where pitch-blende is most plentiful, the supplies were sent to the laboratories. This was the richest ore for the production of radium, and yet the metal was found only in the proportion of one to a million. To-day most pf the radium comes from America,