As widely reported, Polonium 210 was used to murder former russian spy Litvinenko
A pure alpha emitter, Po-210 is a curiously elegant and vicious assassination method.
It has to be handled with extreme care, but as a pure alpha emitter with short half-life (138 days) it can easily be shielded, and thus avoid detection. It is a final isotope in the decay chain, next stop is lead-206 which is stable.
The dose required is only about 0.1 micrograms.
It is soluble in acids and relatively easily volatilised. Sounds like Litvinenko ingested it.
Newspaper reports suggest it is hard to come by and traceable - not so sure, the dose might have been as small as a millicurie or two, and you could buy that for about half a million dollars - it is $690 per microcurie retail.
If the source was not well processed, then trace contaminants might identify it, but it is a commercially valuable isotope and produced and sold in significant quantities. It is also used embedded in beryllium as a compact neutron source.
Somebody really wanted Mr Litvinenko dead though, in a nasty and certain manner.
I find it hard to believe though that anyone stole 10 kg of Po-210.
For one that would be bloody hard to handle without cooking; secondly, it was in 1993, that was 40 or so half-lifes ago, not much left of that lot, well except the daughter isotopes. That would be one expensive block of lead.
wikipedia quotes its lethality as almost a trillion times higher than hydrogen cyanide per weight, which is incorrect. HCN ingested fatal dose is about 50 mg, and the wikipedia appears to be confusing the maximum permissible dose of Po-210 with the lethal dose (and even then getting the numbers wrong). It is less than a million times more lethal ingested than hydrogen cyanide if the other numbers are to be believed, and they look reasonable.
PS now Former Premier Gaidar is seriously ill from undiagnosed causes after becoming sick shortly after eating a meal in Dublin Might be coincidence.
At some point the EU counties might start to get annoyed at the realization that some thug is going around murdering visitors...
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Is Po chemically toxic as well, or is it solely the radioactivity that makes it deadly?
Thanks for the clarification. I had read the wiki, and been astounded by the claimed miniscule fatal dosage. So your sources tell you that even a small fatal dosage costs about .5M$! Of course an isotope with an even shorter half life would be better(worse), as it would decay away before anyone thought to look for it.
To Mond: Anything that radioactive would do far-far more damage by ionization, than possible through ordinary toxicity. The alpha particle has about 5MeV of energy. Energy wise that should be enough to disrupt about a million molecules!
I think that Po is chemically toxic, too.
Well, my students have been telling me all semester that physics is killing them ...
So please fix the wikipedia article already! It's easier than complaining about it.
The radiotoxicity would kill you long before the chemical toxicity. Thorium and uranium are the only radioactive isotopes that you actually have to worry about the chemical toxicity.
I would still hold some doubt on the polonium His hair falling about does not match the symptons that one would expect with inhalation or ingestion of polonium. I do not know the biokinetics but I doubt that the body would digest and transport so much of the polonium directly to the hair follicles so that the hair would be killed.
Also, the polonium would need to if a fine powder since if it a a single large particle, it would be less effective in killing cells.
superdestroyer,
The wikipedia entry says it's soluble in weak acid.
I do not feel I am authoritative enough on the issue to edit the wikipedia entry, the entry is inconsistent and I have secondary sources which suggest to me what the correct resolution is, but someone who actually knows first hand ought to edit it, not me.
If they found Po-210 in Litvinenko's urine, and that should be an easy detection, very clean monoenergetic alpha emission signature, then it really has to have entered as Po-210, I don't see a plausible entry element higher up in the decay chain.
Probably dissolved it in a mildly acidic drink, like juice. Or had a water soluble polonium salt.
It is strange enough a way of killing, that methinks some other message is being sent, be interesting to know to whom, and what.
My estimate is "To those who disagree: we're going to kill you, in a really appallingly terrible way, and there is nothing you can do about it."
Well, there are plenty of people out there who only read what came over the wire and are blabbering on about the toxicity of it.
Don't feel that an ABSOLUTE expert needs to report - get in there and report what you are seeing, give your sources, and let it be taken from there. Just bitching about WP won't help - we all have to do our share.
My contribution to the article was to remove some blabbering nonsense someone had introduced to it. Please put in what you have found - that helps us all!
if used as a chelate, perhaps of aspartic or ascorbic acid,the Po210 might enter cells very effectively.
perhaps even hair follicles.
we are probably talking about former sov spies. extremely skilled.
i have read the thread and cannot find any instance of anyone "complaining about" wikipedia, merely disputing it's accuracy in this one instance.
wp is useful if you do so, useless if you do not.
personally i feel that correcting it perpetuates wp's worst characteristics.
also bear in mind that sov weapons developers always eschewed safety, as did the military when training troops. this attitude allowed them to develop nuke, bio, and chem weapons without regard to civilian or govt deaths. that could put their r&d way ahead.
there are reported instances of human weapons tests even in the post-stalin USSR, on prisoners.
USSR and their successors may very well have worked out the details of Po210 absorbtion. and notice that UK bar employees were recklessly exposed. perhaps consistent with post-USSR operations.
wp mentions chemical similarity to bisimuth. maybe a comparison of chelates of bisimuth would be telling..
easier to find than information on a rather rare element such as Po.
i'm speculating,but the whole matter is frightening given the ease of commercial access to Po210.
if i had the details i would not post them.