Radium bromide the air causes this luminescence. Radium bromide is also very dangerous since the crystals occasionally explode. Helium gas evolved from alpha particles can accumulate within the crystals which cause them to weaken and rupture. Another property of radium bromide is its ability to crystallize from an aqueous solution. It forms a dihydrate, very similar to barium bromide. The chemical radium bromide is not found in nature; it is created. To extract radium from uranium or pitchblende ores, the most common practice is called the Curie method which it involves two major stages. The first stage is a chemical treatment to
Radium not work well with low grade ores. Small amounts of radium were still extracted from uranium ore by this method of mixed precipitation and ion exchange as late as the 1990s, but today they are extracted only from spent nuclear fuel. In 1954, the total worldwide supply of purified radium amounted to about and it is still in this range today, while the annual production of pure radium compounds is only about 100 g in total today. The chief radium-producing countries are Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and Russia. The amounts of radium produced were and