Polonium 210 Poisoning

My *guess* is given the resources need to produce it and the limited number of places to obtain it. I would say it would be traceable on some level.

We're talking about an element here, right? and a very small amount it too. I'm not sure how traceable it could be based on its chemical properties, but then again maybe I'm totally wrong because its an isotope.

Yes and I'm no expert on chemical property tracing - But we are talking about an element which is very hard to produce and available in limited quantities at that. So I'd assume that certainly helps to narrow down where it could have come from. Perhaps technique used to produce it leave characteristics which are traceable to a source?

it is available on the open market for $3200 per micro curie but I have no idea how much you would need to kill someone

I seem to recall that someone NPR interviewed said that a milligram ("smaller than a grain of sand") was all that was needed to get the effect that was seen, but I could be mis-remembering what I heard.

From Wiki....

" Toxicity

Polonium is a highly radioactive and toxic element and is very difficult to handle. Even in milligram or microgram amounts, handling ²¹⁰Po is extremely dangerous, requiring specialized equipment and strict handling procedures. Alpha particles emitted by polonium will damage organic tissue easily if polonium is ingested, inhaled, or absorbed (though they do not penetrate the epidermis and hence are not hazardous if the polonium is outside the body).

To produce a potentially lethal radiation dose of 10 sieverts, if ingested, requires just 0.12 micrograms (millionths of a gram) of ²¹⁰Po (about 525 microcuries of radioactivity). A cube of pure ²¹⁰Po about the size of a written period (0.35 mm wide, or 400 micrograms) would still be 3400 times the lethal dose. These calculations are based on a committed effective dose equivalent (CEDE) of 5.14×10⁻⁷ sieverts per becquerel (1.9×10³ mrem/microcurie) for ingested ²¹⁰Po and a specific activity of 1.66×10¹⁴ Bq/gram (4.49×10³ curies/gram).^[10] If the polonium is inhaled, the CEDE is even higher, 2.54×10^-6 Sv/Bq or 9.43×10³ mrem/microcurie, making the lethal dose just 106 microcuries or 0.026 micrograms.

The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10^-12 gram. Weight for weight, polonium is approximately 2.5 × 10¹¹ (250 billion) times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. The maximum permissible concentration for airborne soluble polonium compounds is about 7,500 Bq/m³ (2 × 10^-11 µCi/cm³). The biological halflife of polonium in humans is 30 to 50 days.^{[11] "}

With something like 100 micro curies at least being required it seems unlikely that it would have been purchased in the open market with sample quantities of 1 micro curie costing $3200 it seem to point to goverment or sercurity forces involvment.

Looks like the guys at United Nuclear have Polonium²¹⁰ for sale on their site. If you don't know them they also sell magnets so strong that if you get between them they will kill you, if you are looking for something for the geek on your list this is the place to go.

Specs on Polonium²¹⁰are nasty too. This stuff is fairly nasty.

ISOTOPE: Polonium²¹⁰

ACTIVITY: 0.1uCi

HALF-LIFE: 138 days

ENERGIES (KeV): 5304.5

It is cheap though the above sample only costs about $70 USD.

I'm amazed that a member of the public can buy any amount of radioactive material in the USA! The amounts are insignificant, however, and as for the other industrial sources, I imagine any company using the quantities required for a specific process would be licensed and have very stringent control measures in place. Besides, the reactor people will have records for the destination of such stuff, and the window of opportunity is limited by the half life. Therefore, we should be able to eliminate reactors in the 'west'. The question remains however, even if a sample was obtained, would it have a distinct 'signature'?

"I'm amazed that a member of the public can buy any amount of radioactive material in the USA!"

But have you actually tried to buy it? I bet you get a visit from the DHS and a white van starts parking in front of your house. No thanks!

I'm in Kings Lynn mate! Any van parked for any length of time wont have any wheels left!

Same 'problem' here in Dunstable Plbmak!!

John.

Regards Po210 cost - sorry to disagree, but it is available fairly cheaply. Have a look at www.nrdinc.com They make Po210 based alpha ionisers used in many industries to eliminate static electricity. 50mCi ionisers are common and not expensive compared to the problems they solve. They are used in industries that deal with paper, plastic film, analytical labs use them in microbalances, and car (auto) body repair shops in the US use them in line with compressed air used to blow dust off bodies before spray painting - they are common. The Po210 is an electrodeposited layer on a metal sheet with gold deposited over the top to prevent direct contact but permit the release of alphas. It would be simple to extract quite a lot from a few stolen ionisers. Po210 has a half life of 138 days (I think?) so it is active long enough for storage and use in this rather rotten application. On a practical side, the alpha ionisers work extremely well, and are a great safety aid to industrial paper and plastic film manufacturers. The construction method that NRD use is proven and safe. Without static control, paper makers, dusty processes and printing presses would have far more static triggered fires and explosions. So in practical use, they are quite harmless and very efficient at saving cost, loss and lives. Po210 is very low risk to handle with usual radiation precautions because it is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles are stopped by the epidermis. They cannot penetrate a body without ingestion. Another common industrial risk is Po210 condensate and dust coating in natural gas pipelines. It is a common decay product of the radium chain which is a common enough element in the earth. It is one of the less major hazards dealt with in the oil and gas industry. I don't know anything about it's chemical properties - that would probably be every bit as bad or worse than the radiological hazards. I imagine the spy's logic goes like this - give major chemical poison and top it off with a big internal alpha dose. You get someone very sick and ensure they have a very compromised immune system. If the poison didn't get them, some ordinary infection might finish the job a week or two later. Nasty business. I wish that the human race would use science for our general betterment and not destruction, but that is never gonna happen. Colin

Interestingly, Po210 is used attached to a bar in the web transport mechanisms that are used to make coated photographic film products. The alpha particles emitted from the bar jangle the surface chemistry of the film base passing it and thereby make the photogloop stick to it better.

Or at least it did 20 years ago. Things might have moved on since then...

Regards Po210 cost - sorry to disagree, but it is available fairly cheaply. Have a look at www.nrdinc.com They make Po210 based alpha ionisers used in many industries to eliminate static electricity. 50mCi ionisers are common and not expensive compared to the problems they solve. They are used in industries that deal with paper, plastic film, analytical labs use them in microbalances, and car (auto) body repair shops in the US use them in line with compressed air used to blow dust off bodies before spray painting - they are common. The Po210 is an electrodeposited layer on a metal sheet with gold deposited over the top to prevent direct contact but permit the release of alphas. It would be simple to extract quite a lot from a few stolen ionisers. Po210 has a half life of 138 days (I think?) so it is active long enough for storage and use in this rather rotten application. On a practical side, the alpha ionisers work extremely well, and are a great safety aid to industrial paper and plastic film manufacturers. The construction method that NRD use is proven and safe. Without static control, paper makers, dusty processes and printing presses would have far more static triggered fires and explosions. So in practical use, they are quite harmless and very efficient at saving cost, loss and lives. Po210 is very low risk to handle with usual radiation precautions because it is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles are stopped by the epidermis. They cannot penetrate a body without ingestion. Another common industrial risk is Po210 condensate and dust coating in natural gas pipelines. It is a common decay product of the radium chain which is a common enough element in the earth. It is one of the less major hazards dealt with in the oil and gas industry. I don't know anything about it's chemical properties - that would probably be every bit as bad or worse than the radiological hazards. I imagine the spy's logic goes like this - give major chemical poison and top it off with a big internal alpha dose. You get someone very sick and ensure they have a very compromised immune system. If the poison didn't get them, some ordinary infection might finish the job a week or two later. Nasty business. I wish that the human race would use science for our general betterment and not destruction, but that is never gonna happen. Colin

First, in response to: "I'm amazed that a member of the public can buy any amount of radioactive material in the USA!""...ever bought a smoke detector? I'm disappointed to see this kind of radiophobic nonsense in an ostensibly technical forum.

To your remarks: thanks for clarifying for people. I don't know the details, but i strongly suspect the renal toxicity did in the poor bastard, not the radiotoxicity.

I do have to take issue, though, with your concluding point: "I wish that the human race would use science for our general betterment and not destruction, but that is never gonna happen." I'm as cynical as the next guy, but on balance, I think it's fair to say, on balance, that technology has been more useful than not. Sure, there are plenty of destructive uses of most technologies, but Po-210 has helped more people than it has hurt. And I'd rather be in my warm house eating safe food than living in a cave eating raw bugs...

Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov (under the name Ken Alibek) wrote a book (Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran it) about the Russian bio-weapons programs. In his book he describes some of the things that the "security apparatus" is capable of - it sounds to me like this Polonium 210 poisoning is right up their alley.

Wiki has is a great (short) article on him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Kanatjan_Alibekov, but you really have to read the book to do the matter any justice.

Guess he won't be making any more books, now will he.

Someone helped him to right it, someone published it, think of all the money involved and you have a lead.

Thanks for passing this information along, Sleddriver. I'm going to add this book to my reading list.

Moose

I hate to burst your bubble, but it would cost a fair amount to get the required amount of radiation in a person. First off those tins that you see aren't just radioactive 210-Po, it's .01 mCuries in about 100 grams of gel. Extracting that is tedious and not worth doing. Also, the US does not ship these things outside of the borders, making it impossible for it to be sent out. Also, backround checks and that sort of thing happens before they send these out. All radioactive shipments are tracked by the government, despite how ridiculous it is for them to track these minute amounts.

Next, he died with roughly a microgram of radiation in his system, not much honestly, but alpha emitters are rather nasty internally. Honestly you could balance an entire jar of 210-Po on your face with little consequences. It takes ingestion to suck, and even then what eventually gets you is multi-system failure normally once it hits the kidneys. Making Polonium radioactive takes a bit of work and is a common by-product of fission in a nuclear reactor. What happened most likely is it was stolen out of a reactor and used to kill him. It could be bought off the black market, but that would be at such a ridiculous price it would be counter-productive.

LamyH

The idea that anything could be stolen from a nuclear reactor is quite alarming don't you think? This is why suspicion is falling onto Russion agencies.

The Polonium by-product is generally shipped out as radioactive waste. I guess you could go into those and filter out what you wanted to. But, you never know.

-LamyH

http://cgi.ebay.de/Domain-polonium-210-net-interactive-script-portal_W0QQitemZ320061995148QQihZ011QQcategoryZ3767QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://www.polonium-210.net