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UK Lab Traces Polonium To Russian Nuclear Plant
reporter writes "British authorities had identified polonium 210 to be the radioactive poison that killed Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who defected to Great Britain. Now, according to a disturbing report, the authorities have identified the source of the poison to be Russia. Bloomberg ominously reports, 'Scientists at the U.K.'s Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, west of London, have traced the polonium 210 found in London to a nuclear power plant in Russia, the capital's Evening Standard newspaper reported today. Officials at the establishment didn't return calls.' A cold chill just fell on relations between Russia and the West." In another twist to this developing story, the shadowy Italian security consultant who dined with Litvinenko has also fallen ill with radiation poisoning.
It looks as though the Italian contact with Litvinenko is safe and isn't suffering any radiation sickness, though he was admitted to the hospital with concerns of massive radiation poisoning. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,19 62535,00.html
The unexamined life is not worth living
Because he was publishing embarassing exposees about Russian politics. His book Blowing Up Russia blames the Russian government for the apartment bombings used as an excuse for escalating the war in Chechnya. It's easy to see why some would want to shut him up permanently.
Actually, just swallowing the source and having it pass through your system is unlikely to do serious damage. Intestinal mucus would probably block the alphas pretty nicely. The source would have to be in a bioavailable (absorbable) form - i.e. some bare metals or preferrably a soluable salt.
-b.
Not sure exactly what you meant to ask, but here goes.
Alpha radiation can't penetrate skin. So superficial contact with an alpha emitter isn't really a concern. OTOH, if you ingest/inhale an alpha emitter (like polonium 210), then your internal organs can be exposed to it. This, obviously, is a bad thing. In polonium's case, IIRC, it's soluble in bodily tissues, and has a very short half life of 138 days, so it's quite dangerous (remember that half life and radioactivity are inversely linked).
Beta, gamma and neutron radiation are somewhat different. Those can get through skin, so superficial contact is a potential concern. Beta is blocked by aluminum foil (get out your tinfoil hats!), gamma and neutron require denser materials such as lead, or thicker, less dense materials like deep soil. Neutron radiation has the added hazard of neutron activation (it can render previously safe materials radioactive).
Additionally, ionizing radiation from sources other than radioactive decay, like X-rays and UV, can generally be bad for your health; these can be seen as less serious than gamma radiation, but more serious than alpha (UV is blocked by sunblock for example). Non ionizing radiation is de facto harmless, barring intensities severe enough to cause thermal burns.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
What's worse is that coal contains traces of natural polonium. Burning coal releases more radioisotopes into the atmosphere than the equivalent energy production by a decently-run (i.e. no serious accidents) nuke power station.
-b.
Polonium 210 has a half life of only 138 days. To have enough survive from the cold war era that they'd still have lethal amounts is far fetched at best. Wikipedia link on Polonium 210
I came, I saw, She conquered.
Since polonium 210 atoms are indistinguishable, the only way to "trace" its origin would be to follow a trail of polonium 210 on the ground from source to destination, or to compare the signature impurities (other elements/isotopes) of the polonium with the signature impurities of each possible source of it.
From the editorial of this week's New Scientist:
Nobody else has this sig.
Ah, well smoke detectors use Americium:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium
Which is indeed radioactive (and a gamma emitter to boot), but has a longer half life than Polonium (hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days). Remember that decay is a finite process; the longer it takes to finish, the less radiation is emitted per second. So Americium isn't as strong as Polonium.
Plus, the quantities used in smoke detectors is small - less than a microgram. You'd need an awful lot of smoke detectors to amass a dangerous amount of Americium. That doesn't mean you couldn't kill somebody, but it's a poor choice to slip into food or drink.
What makes Polonium an attractive poison is the lethal dose. You don't need to slip much into someone's food to kill them. Other alpha emitters aren't as good candidates in this regard. Now, as to why they used a radioactive poison in the first place, I don't know; perhaps they wanted to send a message?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I don't suppose anybody could tell *when* this radioactive material was made in Russia.
I bet you actually could tell when this material was made, or at least last purified. Po 210 decays into Pb 206, which is stable. Assuming there's enough Pb 206 to outnumber the natural Pb 206 in the human body (Pb 206 is naturally in the environment making up 24.1% of all lead), you could measure the ratio of Po 210 to Pb 206 and determine how "old" the Po 210 is, since that ratio would go down as the Po 210 "ages".
There's another possibility that the natural Pb 206 in the body would so outnumber the Pb 206 from the Po 210 decay that you wouldn't get a meaningfull answer.
AccountKiller
You're thinking of polonium-218, with the radon. Its half life is 3 minutes. Polonium-210 is different. It's a popular radioisotope for 3 reasons:
1. Its half life is a convenient 120 days or something (not microseconds or decades).
2. It decays to lead 208 which is stable.
3. It is a pure alpha emitter (no beta or gamma) which makes it relatively safe to handle as long as you do not ingest it.
Polonium-218 has none of these properties.
They sell small amounts of polonium-210 in those little plastic red disks you find in high school chem labs. United Nuclear was selling them for like $69. You'd need to buy a lot of disks to kill a Russian spy.
Last time I checked, electrical resistance heaters for cooking and heating homes had been around for the best part of a century. In the British climate, which is moderate year round, you could probably even get away with using heat pumps for climate control since the winter temperatures (at least in Southern England) seldom stay below freezing for long.
-b.
The radon-222 decay chain contains Po-218, Po-214, and Po-210. Link (PDF).
.001%.
There is a small gamma component to Po-210 decays, but only something like
The United Nuclear sources are 0.1 uCi. Antistatic brushes are available with up to 500 uCi, and industrial ionizers can contain up to 40 mCi.
I've lived in an all-electric home for 15 years. The electric heaters keep the room pretty much exactly at the temperature you set on the thermostat. In addition, they make almost no noise (silent in operation, a little bit of popping from the housings expanding when they turn on at night) compared to the constant rushing sound of steam or water radiators. The glass-top electric stove heats up in under a minute, and in a definate win over gas can be cleaned just by wiping it down like the rest of the counter. Oh, and it can manage it's own surface temperature too, since it can turn the element on and off. Best of all: no pilot light to have go out and leave you with a smoking crater to return home to.
... not new tech we're looking at here (the stove is an early-90's replacement for the original unit)
Oh, and since my power comes from the local nuclear plant, I'm not sending clouds of greenhouse gases and radioactive carbon isotopes billowing into the atmosphere.
The depressing part is that the house and the nuke plant were put up in the 70's
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
He said that the government, Putin, deliberately bombed the apartment blocks in 1999 to create a pretext to start a war with Chechnya. He also said Putin was a secret pedophile. That should do it.
The particular distribution of isotopes. Sure it is mostly Polonium-210, but there are likely to also be small amounts of Polonium-209 and -211 (or perhaps other isotopes, I'm not sure). The ratios of those other isotopes to the total amount of Polonium could indicate where it came from. The distributions will change with time, as the polonium decays. But, if you can also find the decay products, the amounts of those would indicate the original distribution of the polonium isotopes.
The reason this could pick out one particular reactor is that each reactor is slightly different, and perhaps consistently generate particular distributions of various isotopes of various elements. However, that is just speculation on my part.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The 210Po was presumably made by neutron irradiation of 209Bi (209Bi(n,g)210Bi), where the 210Bi beta decays to 210Po. If there is a sufficient number of very high energy neutrons, some of the 210Po could undergo a 210Po(n,2n)209Po reaction and the signature would be traces of 209Po. This would imply a fast reactor used for isotope production - which are rare (IIRC, the last one in the US was that Fast Flux Test Facility which was shut down over 10 years ago).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
What I'm curious to know is how they can claim there is a "signature" that could link this material to anyone,
Using the ratio of the different isotopes of the Polonium. There is a whole range of isoptopes going from Polonium-180 to Polonium-210. The number indicates the sum of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. Since the number of protons remains constant with all atoms of the same element, only the number of neutrons can vary. In the case of Polonium, this ranges from 104 to 136. Depending upon the process used to manufacture the Polonium, these isotopes will be in different ratios. This can be measured using gamma and alpha spectroscopy.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The Health Physics Society has produced a fact sheet (PDF-format) for Po-210. The information is fairly basic, but it's a starting point if you want to explain about the nuclide to someone who isn't very familiar with nuclear science.
The reason they're playing up the radioactivity is because it's by far the most likely cause of death. A lethal radiation dose can be obtained through ingesting as little as 50 nanograms of Po210 - 50ng is a spectacularly small amount.
;)
Compare that to the batrachotoxin found in the Golden Poison Dart Frog, something which is regarded as highly toxic, which has a lethal dose of around 40 micrograms.
In other words ere talking nearly a thousand times less material required to kill someone with Po210, than a serious neurotoxin...
I agree that there's too much news coverage though, but then most news stories in the past few years have aimed to scare the population.
As for who did the deed? Unlikely to be the FSB, particularly not if the Po210 traced back to Russia
Zeros and Fours man, zeros and fours. Alpha drops the isotope number by four, and changes the element name. Beta changes the number by zero, but also changes the element name. The whole chain is alpha and beta emissions. Now do you feel nitpicked?
Po-210 is a daughter product of Bi-210, by beta decay. Halflife for this is only about 5 days, so if you start with Bismuth-210, you will very rapidly get a material that is mostly polonium-210, and then the 138 day half-life for that is a choke point that will give you an increasing percentage of both Po-210 and Lead-206. Whoever is testing the Po-210 technically had to check for Bi-20, and Pb-210 to see if the original source was something higher up the chain. The didn't really need to test for Po-214, Bi-214 and other very short lived intermediates (and probably couldn't), but probably had to test for Radon-222, as that has a half-life of just less than 4 days, long enough for traces to remain if that's where the reaction started.
It's really a fascinating risk issue (although I'm sure fascinating is not a word a person on the receiving end would use). If someone was originally poisoned with anything above Lead-210, then whoever handled it had to act very quickly from isolating mostly pure any one form to delivery. Lead-210 is technically doable, but if some spy had to take it from a reactor to the target, would be half decayed to Po-210 by the time he could get there. Po-210 is the first step in the chain where you have something relatively hot, but not decaying so quickly that refining a relatively pure amount is near impossible, and at the same time, for the same reasons, it's the first place in the chain where the refined substance would be optimally safe to handle for long enough to carry it to the target and deploy it.
Who is John Cabal?