This was hardly the best way to introduce the public to the sensitive topic of radiation safety. Isotopes of radium, the first nuclear radiation sources to be commercially exploited, are probably the worst examples out of thousands of radioactive isotopes. Radium has nearly absolute body burden, or a tendency to stay in the metabolism forever, and there are few ways it can escape the biological systems. Its radiations cover a wide spectrum, from alpha to gamma, with unusually energetic rays, and it targets many essential organs. It destroys everything around it, so quickly that cancer doesn’t even have time to develop.
Still, there are ironies and unanswered questions concerning this baptism by fire. Radium dial watches were still being made until 1963, when finally they were banned in the State of New York. The US Radium name went away in 1980, when the plant in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania was renamed Safety Light Corporation, specializing in luminous paints incorporating tritium.[23]
That these radium-dial factories continued operation for decades is not surprising, given the renewed needs for self-luminous equipment during the Second World War, but the persistence of radioactive water for drinking and bathing is astounding. In the 1980s, mineral water became all the rage. It was obviously a better beverage than municipal tap water, which is basically rain-water fortified with fluoride and sanitized with chlorine. Mineral water bubbles up from deep underground, and that (plus its cost) makes it superior to tap water, but we had forgotten why. It is supposedly health-giving because it is radioactive, using the ancient logic of homeopathic medicine. A trace of something that will kill you will only make you stronger. Spring water dissolves soluble mineral substance out of the deep rock, and that would be uranium oxide.[24] Spring water is further fortified with microscopic radon gas bubbles from the radium decay in these same rocks.
This fascination does not end there. Incredibly, the world remains studded with thousands of disease-curing radium springs from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to the Gastein Healing Gallery in Austria. Japan, a country that seems particularly sensitive to the concept of trace radioactivity in the biosphere, has 1,500 mineral spas. An example, Misasa, in the Tohaku District in Tottori, boasts springs of radium-rich water with radon bubbles. The name “Misasa” means “three mornings,” meaning that enjoying an early soak in the magic water thrice will cure what ails you. The town organizes a yearly Marie Curie festival to honor the discoverer of the active ingredient.
Probably no health spa currently does it with more enthusiasm than Badgastein. In 1940 the Third Reich, desperate for wealth, decided to reopen the ancient gold mine running through the Hohe Tauern range in southern Austria. Pickings for gold turned out slim, but they noticed that the enslaved workers were getting healthy working in the hot, radon-contaminated tunnel. This observation was not lost, and in 1946 the Heilstollen or Thermal Tunnel was opened up and equipped with small cars to carry bed-ridden patients through the radon surrounded by rock walls, crusty with uranium. By 1980, a million patrons had stayed at least one night at Badgastein. The current brochure for the spa facility, listing diseases that are cured in the tunnel, puts radium advertising copy from 1925 to shame:
Inflammatory rheumatism; Bechterew’s disease; arthroses; asthma; damage to the spinal column and ligament discs; inflammatory nerves; sciatica; scleroderma; paralysis and functional disturbances after injuries; circulatory problems of the arteries; smoker’s leg; diabetes, arterio-scleroses; problems with venous blood circulation; heart attack risk factors; infertility problems; premature aging; potency disturbances; urinary tract, gout, and suffering due to stones; and paradontosis.
Even America, home of the Radium Girls, has not lost its love of radioactive water. The use of medicinal springs in the New World dates to prehistory, when the aboriginal residents flocked to the healing fluids, and there are now five towns named “Radium” and three named “Radium Springs” in the United States. One of the most patronized spas in the Western Hemisphere is Radium Hot Springs, in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, Canada.
There is further paradox to the discovery of radiation sickness. William Bailey, the entrepreneur who killed Eben Byers, had ripened to the age of 64 when he died of bladder cancer unrelated to radium in 1949. Twenty years later, his remains were disinterred for study by Professor Robley D. Evans, Director Emeritus of the Radioactivity Center at MIT. A count of radioactivity lingering in his bones proved that Bailey wasn’t lying when he claimed to have ingested more Radithor than anyone else. Yet, he had never complained of a toothache, much less died from it. Decades of study suggested that the effects of large radiation loads vary from individual to individual.
Can some people tolerate chronic high radiation better than others? Are certain people better at producing protective hormones such as granulocyte colony-stimulating factor and the interleukins, stimulating the growth of blood cells under radioactive stress?
Hundreds of women are thought to have died or been injured by radium ingestion, but thousands worked at the painting desks. Why didn’t they all die? In 1993, when the Argonne National Lab study of radium workers was shut down, there were 1,000 Radium Girls still alive and complaining about the working conditions back in ’25. Could we eventually evolve into a race that can withstand high levels of radiation?
Madame Marie Curie, discoverer of radium, died on July 4, 1934, in a sanatorium in Geneva, Switzerland, of a blood disorder for which there was no cure. After many years of sickness, the disease was finally diagnosed as aplastic pernicious anemia. Her bone marrow, contaminated with radium, was unable to produce red blood cells, and the extensive exposure to x-rays during her medical volunteer work in World War I had contributed to the condition.
Her daughter, Iréne Joliot-Curie, had taken up her mother’s profession and became a Nobel Prize-winning radiation scientist, working beside her in the Radium Institute. Joliot-Curie was working at her bench in the laboratory in 1946 when a sealed capsule of radioactive polonium exploded in her face. She contracted leukemia caused by her long-term exposure to radiation and the unfortunate large dose she received in the accident at the bench. She died on March 17, 1956, at the age of 58 in the Curie Hospital in Paris.
Chapter 2:
World War II, and Danger Beyond Comprehension
“It’s just like a mule. A mule is a docile, patient beast, and he will give you power to pull a plow for decades, but he wants to kill you. He waits for years and years for that rare, opportune moment when he can turn your lights out with a simple kick to the head.”
By the start of World War II, which in Europe was 1939, the radium scandals had left the public with a strong and somewhat twisted concept of the dangers of radiation. They saw it as deadly in the worst way. It could originate in invisibly small particles of matter, and by the time you realized that you had been dosed with it, it was too late to do anything about it. Swallowing radium was about as bad as radiation sickness could get, but mankind had not seen anything yet. The intense radiation that could be released by a newly discovered phenomenon, nuclear fission, would put radium contamination in perspective. A couple of accidents with fission made it clear that with the discovery of this new way to release energy came novel ways to bring life to an end.
23
Tritium, the heaviest isotope of hydrogen, is still a radioactive substance, but it is not nearly as dangerous as radium. It has a half-life of 12.33 years and it emits a pathetically weak beta ray of only 0.0186 MeV. After 123 years, a tritium sample is effectively all gone. It leaves the body as easily as it comes in, so the burden is slight.
24
Eventually, all the soluble uranium oxide will leach out of the ground by moving water and be washed to the sea, just like sodium chloride, or salt. There is presently an estimated 4,290 million metric tons of uranium in the salty oceans, enough to power the world with nuclear fission beyond the expected lifetime of mankind.