So I was reading some of the lesser Oz books and came across the following passage in The Road to Oz.
but before they left the great Throne-Room King Evardo added to Ozma’s birthday presents a diadem of diamonds set in radium.
Now reading up, on it radium was discovered about 10 years before the book was written, and it was known to be rare, glow, and thought to have health effects so it makes not too surprising that Baum would put a crown made of this most valuable substance as one of the opulent treasures of OZ. But I am wondering what would the actual effect of making a diadem out of it.
Physically, it’s a soft silvery metal, so it would be a bit like a crown made of sodium or of lithium. It reacts with nitrogen in the air quite rapidly so it wouldn’t stay shiny for long, acquiring a tarnish of radium nitride. If you get it wet, it will react vigorously to form radium hydroxide, which is strongly alkaline, so quite apart from the radioactivity, it’s rather an unsuitable material for jewellery.
Depends a lot on the source of that radium. All isotopes are pretty radioactive, but natural sources are going to be almost all Ra226, which has a half-life of 1600 years and decays to radon via alpha particle. Modern sources, extracted from used nuclear fuel, will have more of the short-lived and nastier isotopes.
Assuming we’re talking about a kilogram or two, it’s probably going to feel warm but not hot (unlike, say, Pu238, which has a much higher decay rate). It won’t be too dangerous just to touch or wear, but it’s going to emit fairly prodigious amounts of Ra222, which you really don’t want to breathe. Might be ok if you only wore it outside, or in very well-ventilated areas… radon is mostly only a problem where it self-concentrates, like in a basement. But if you store the thing in a box or something, you’re going to get a big whiff of radon every time you open it.
It is, in a sense, a good material for this kind of thing, specifically because of its utter impracticality and sheer scarcity. No one else will have one. But set up a ventilation fan at the least.
I believe that there was a reference somewhere in the OZ books to it being mined, and as part of a diadem, its probably significantly less than a 1 kg. So not as dangerous as I thought it might have been.
Certainly the less material the better. And the danger will depend on the design. You really want a high surface area, fine filigree and the like, so that the radon can be easily emitted and blown away. Otherwise the decay products will remain trapped and some of those are nastier than others.
Radium of course has a bad reputation due to the horror of the “Radium Girls,” but that was because they were literally ingesting radium via licking their paintbrushes. Keep it outside the body and it’s much less harmful.
Radium jewelry might be interesting, since it is a bright silvery metal, but upon exposure to air it turns black – that might make a startling contrast to embedded diamonds.
Also, radium is an alkaline metal, so exposure to water (like human sweat) creates a caustic chemical that can burn skin – not the kind of jewelry you would want to wear for long!
For one thing, the diamond might change color; a know effect of gemstone irradiation.
Diamonds are mainly irradiated to become blue-green or green, although other colors are possible.[29] When light-to-medium-yellow diamonds are treated with gamma rays they may become green; with a high-energy electron beam, blue.[23] The difference in results may be caused by local heating of the stones, which occurs when the latter method is used.
As an aside, I know of this because I read a news story years ago about gemstones that were being illegally irradiated to make them more valuable in a nuclear reactor. Resulting in an entirely different sort of “hot gemstone”.
Let’s not forget that we are in Oz. The rules of earth don’t apply. The radium is not going to kill you, because you are immortal in Oz. It probably wouldn’t even make a neat circle of baldness where it ouched you head, because thing like that don’t tend to happen in Oz, and when they do, can often be fixed with magic spells.
At any rate, this could be enchanted radium that doesn’t tarnish, become caustic when wet, or emit dangerous radiation.
It’s Oz. Animals talk, monkeys fly, witches melt, living creatures get turned into tchotchkes, robots are self-aware, a spell can change your biological sex, they had Zoom technology before WWI, and a princess can have a collection of heads, and wear the one she feels suits her on a particular day.
Writers from the first quarter of the 20th century who mention radium fascinate me. It was before the toxicity was known, and it was known to cause things to glow, so all sorts of wonderworks were attributed ro it. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers tossed off mentions of “radium bullets” and radium light bulbs set into walls that glowed if you rubbed them. But it was likely the rarity of radium that lead to that radium crown. Just like, in the 19th century, aluminum was a rare and exotic material, so tableware sets of aluminum were costly and extravagant gifts, and it was a sign of ostentation to put an aluminum capstone on the Washington monument. Then along came Hall and Heroult with their processes of dissolving bauxite in eutectic and producing it by electrolysis and suddenly aluminum was cheap.
The thing about radioactivity causing colors in diamonds is a fascinating topic – i purposely used x-rays, gamma rays, and a slew of other processes to create “color centers” in crystals that I grew to make lasers. Radioactive particles in salt crystals created “Pleichroic haloes” centered on the particle.
Wikipedia cites an estimate that by the mid-'50s, there were only about 5 pounds of purified radium worldwide; and production since then has been roughly 100 g per year, so that might bring the total up to 20 lbs total — in terms of volume, less than a half-gallon.
The tarnishing and alkali issues would be easily-enough addressed, I would think, by coating it in a thin layer of some clear resin.
By the way, the biggest problem with this:
isn’t the radium hydroxide; it’s the “react vigorously”. You can find plenty of videos online of pure alkali metals being reacted with water. Those videos all stop not one, but two, rows before radium, because the reactions get too “vigorous” even for click-seeking idiots.
Of course, you might be able to address both the reactivity issues and the softness by alloying it in reasonable proportions with some more common metal, like silver. Probably also want something in there to phosphoresce to enhance the glow.
So, what physical changes are occurring in radiated diamonds, to result in the different color? Changes in the crystalline structure? Are the colors from diffractive effects? It can’t be from changes in composition, since beta or gamma rays (at less than ludicrous energies) can’t cause transmutation.
Sure, if you drop it in water, it’s going to go boom, but if you just wear it on your head, your sweat is going to combine with it to make Radium Lye, which will make your skin blister and then the moisture released from that process will make the whole thing worse. It may not actually go boom until it boils through your scalp.
Years ago I read of a socialite who proudly wore a Trinitite necklace, but if I could only remember her name, I’d look her up on findagrave.com to see how that all ended up
Yes – Color CEnters are point defects whose structure causes absorption of visible wavelengths of light, giving rise to colors. In Salt crystals, the color center acts an awful lot like a Square Well potential – probably the closet thing in nature to that undergraduate physics exercise. In fact, the energy level in an F-center in an alkali halide crystal scale as an inverse power law of the lattice parameter, and the power is pretty close to the second power of a square well. This is called the Mollwo-Ivey law.
The colors of alkali halide crystals can be quite beautiful. In potassium chloride it’s a deep purple. If you create the centers by electrolysis, rathen than by irradiation, you can watch the colored region slowly expand. It looks like purple ink being poured into water.
Diamonds have a much more complex structure, and it’s arder to visualize the structure of the centers. But it’s notable that two types of color center in diamond have been made to lase.