Radium chloride radium chloride is weakly paramagnetic with a magnetic susceptibility of 1.05. It also differs from barium chloride by the flame color, which is red as opposed to green for barium chloride. Radium chloride is still used for the initial stages of the separation of radium from barium during the extraction of radium from pitchblende. The large quantities of material involved (tonnes of ore for milligrams of radium) favour this less costly (but less efficient) method over those based on radium bromide or radium chromate (used for the later stages of the separation). It was also used in medicine to produce
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