The results of the complete survey are not in yet, but the preliminary sur‐. library of old records of companies in the radium‐extraction business, investigators said. The site's potential as a radiation hazard emerged during a check in a Las Vegas, Nev. FederalĮnvironmental Protection Agency made a complete survey of the T & E Electronics Company, Gary's Auto Body Shop, the Orange Bowl Luncheonette and the C & T Exxon Station last month after preliminary surveys for gamma radiation in March found them to be slightly above normal for the area. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the. von Sochocky, who had spent his last years working with medical detectives on the effects of radium on his employees, had died as a result of the radiation‐ as Madame Curie would die five years later.īut radium has a half‐life of 1,622 years, and chunks of the material, left in the rubble when the plant was razed, have continued to emit radiation up through the floors of the new buildings, which house an electronics’ company, an auto‐body shop, a restaurant and a gas station. The ore‐processing and watch‐painting buildings at Alden and High Streets here were torn down in 1929, after dial painters who worked there developed radiuM poisoning and died of bone cancers traced to the radium paint they had ingested. Patients bought chunks of radioactive ore that vaporized dangerous radon gas in their homes. Doctors touted radium as a miracle drug for arthritis and gout and prescribed Radithor elixir or injections of the metal's salts. Women who painted the watch faces and gunsights at the United States Radium Corporation plant tipped their brushes on their tongues. Radium was a fairy‐tale substance, and it was handled, casually. Radium's discoverer, Marie Curie, was still alive women wore eye shadow laced with radium to make their lids glow in the dark dial watches flared with a faint radium green, instead of blinking digital red, and surgeons first planted radium‐impregnated needles in cancerous tissue, calculating that they would kill more cancer cells than they would create. It is one of very few in the country left over from the 1920's and 30's, when radium was enchantingly mysterious. But the site is unusual because, unlike most of the other sites now being re‐examined by worried officials, the radioactive waste here does not date from the 1950's, when the first atomic‐power plants were commissioned, or even from the 1940's, when the first atomic bomb was built. The officials say the radiation levels are not dangerous to the workers at the electronics company now on the land where the Radium Corporation stood. On the site of the old United States Radium Corporation plant here, state officials have found traces of radiation - the legacy of an earlier and more naïve era.
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