RADIUM REFINERY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 22, 22 December 1932, Page 7

RADIUM REFINERY.

OPERATIONS IN CANADA. PORT HOPE (Ontario), Dec. 20. The only radium refinery in the British Empire will be operating within ten days. Made from Canadian ore, the radium will prove Canada’s challenge to-the Belgian syndicate which controls the world’s supply. Fifty-six tons of pitchblende of almost unbelievable richness, mined in tho Great Bear Lake districts in the far north of Canada, are stacked at the plant here. According to the Clan ad inn Government geologists it averages between 40 and 50 per cent, uranium oxide and will produce about 125 milligrammes of refined radium per ton. The principal minerals containing uranium, and therefore radium, are pitchblende, carnotite, and antunitc. The first of these consists of the oxide of uranium, more or less pure, and is found principally in Czecho-Slovakia and in Belgian Congo; tho second is a vanadate of uranium and pottasium mined in _ Colorado, Utah and Australia; tho third is a phosphate of uranium and calcium mined in Portugal and in the U.S.A. The method of extracting radium varies with the nature and quality of tho ore, but in broad outline all processes consist of five main steps first worked out by Mme. Curie. Tlieso consist in getting tho uranium mineral into solution, separating from the solution all metalic sulphates which are insoluble in water (these include the whole of the barium and radium constituent of the mineral), the conversion of tho sulphates into double salts, tho purification of tlio compounds of radium and barium, and finally the separation of tho radium from its accompanying barium by a process of fractional crystallisation.