1/1/2024 0 Comments American radium orange njIn this crystallization laboratory, workers toiled without respiratory protection in a radon-saturated atmosphere, leaning over unshielded, visibly-glowing, open dishes of radium and barium bromide salt solutions containing massive radioactivity. This messy job was done in the single-story structure shown in the two photos below. Radium was purified from barium by laborious fractional crystallization as the bromide. The ore was contacted with hydrochloric acid to leach the metal values, leaving behind silicate tailings that went on to be problematically used as building fill in the neighborhood. A fantastic summary of the technical processes at the Orange site is provided here. Ore mined by Sochocky’s company traveled to Orange, New Jersey, to a repurposed steel works with a rail spur and plenty of water supplied by Wigwam Brook at the corner of High and Alden Streets. This photo was taken underground in the abandoned Hummer Mine. Burro trains hauled hand-graded, burlap-sacked carnotite ore to distant railheads, and thence it would be carried back by train to Orange, NJ for processing.ĭelicious, buttery yellow carnotite replaces wood in a showy but typical occurrence of uranium and radium in Paradox Valley. However, this was high-paying work in order to entice men to the remote camps. Their work involved heavy manual labor, explosives, and exposure to radon gas, then poorly understood. It would be joined by several other competing companies in the region. The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation established very productive mines on the north wall of Paradox Valley, such as the Cripple Creek Mine (pictured below), during 1917-1920. Uranium concentrated in fronts of organic debris trapped in the alluvium of the Jurassic coastline, and surfaced in exposures of these sandstone strata as bright-yellow carnotite (example shown below). One of the epicenters of early American radium mining was along the walls of Paradox Valley, Colorado-an incredibly remote collapsed salt anticline in the canyon country of the state’s far southwest. In the early 20th century, known deposits of radium and uranium were few. Radium is a product of the radioactive decay of uranium, and accompanies it in nature. 38 years old, Sochocky would have only seven years to live from the time this photo was taken he would be one of many victims of the rapid industrialization of a commodity with a poorly-understood safety profile. The founder of US Radium, sitting next to a gram of radium in 1921. He promised that “The time will doubtless come when you have in your own home a room lighted entirely by radium.” (You’re probably sitting in your radium room while you read this, right?) Although there would eventually be many competitors in the radium business, Sochocky was first out of the gate. Simultaneously, Sochocky built a plant to process the ore, extract radium, make paint, and apply the paint to dials at the corner of Alden and High Streets in Orange, New Jersey. Gregory’s well-known “Radium Girls” stage play: it is transliterated from Сохоцький, pronounced “Sokhotsky”.) Sochocky invented a stable and brightly-luminous paint formula using radium, and in 1917, his company-then called Radium Luminous Material Corporation-started mining the remote carnotite deposits of Paradox Valley, Colorado for radium. (Aside: for anyone who might perchance have to choke on this man’s name in D. That is one Curie of activity in the little evaporating dish, a massive uncontained radiation source by today’s standards. Let’s begin with an historical image, showing Ukrainian immigrant inventor Sabin Arnold Sochocky sitting casually next to one gram of radium bromide. In this post commemorating 100 years of the American radium paint industry, I will illustrate some of the landscapes associated with the nascent radium industry of a century ago, taken with my own camera (and there are historical photos thrown in for then-and-now comparisons). Its lessons underlie the modern practice of workplace radiation safety central to my career as a nuclear engineer. It is a cautionary, Promethian tale of commercial technological advances outpacing deliberate exploration of the relevant hazards. The radium paint episode lies at the nexus of competing American traditions of corporate greed and progressive social justice. Powered by the radioactive decay of radium, this toxic paint has a special prominence in the history of workplace safety regulation and workers’ compensation law in the United States. In April 1917, the United States entered World War I, and a massive industrial demand immediately arose for a product that had existed only as a scientific curiosity: paint that glowed in the dark.
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