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 bromide those two chemicals are chosen for the fractional crystallization. Once the radium is separated, radium bromide can be formed by dehydrating the dihydrate with a dry air stream at 200°C. Another method is to heat radium chloride to red heat with a dry hydrogen bromine gas stream. Radium and radium salts were commonly used for treating cancer. However, many treatments that were used in the early 1900s are not used anymore because of the harmful effects radium bromide exposure caused. Some examples are anaemia, cancer, and genetic mutations. Health effects from harmful amounts of radium exposure are tricky to diagnose