The radium century.

Last year, the UK Government agreed that a potentially dangerous legacy of radiation-contaminated land should be dealt with, after decades of ignorance and inaction on the part of the authorities. The cost of this could run to many hundreds of millions of pounds, assuming that the hundreds of sites potentially involved, which date from the birth of the nuclear industry, can actually be identified. This very practical problem cannot be tackled without an understanding of the lost history of the production and use of radium--a history that is now precisely a century in duration.