Po-210

You know, when I read this it really didn't make much sense. Why in the hell would you use an extremely rare radioactive element to poison someone? Talk about leaving a signature. I know it's used with beryllium to make neutron sources and as part of nuclear bomb triggers. That tells you some thing about the rarity and usually the level of control on the material.

If substantial amounts of polonium 210 were used to poison Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who died Thursday, whoever did it presumably had access to a high-level nuclear laboratory and put himself at some risk carrying out the assassination, experts said today.

Polonium 210 is highly radioactive and very toxic. By weight, it is about 250 million times as toxic as cyanide, so a particle smaller than a dust mote could be fatal. It would also, presumably, be too small to taste.

British health authorities said it was found in Mr. Litvinenko’s body.

There is no antidote, and handling it in a laboratory requires special equipment. But to be fatal, it must be swallowed, breathed in or injected; the alpha particles it produces cannot penetrate the skin. So it could theoretically be carried safely in a glass vial or paper envelope and sprinkled into food or drink by a killer willing to take the chance that he did not accidentally breathe it in or swallow it.

Between the poison and radioactivity, this is really nasty stuff. I'm surprised that he lasted as long as he did.

“This is wild,” said Dr. F. Lee Cantrell, a toxicologist and director of the San Diego division of the California Poison Control System. “To my knowledge, it’s never been employed as a poison before. And it’s such an obscure thing. It’s not easy to get. That’s going to be something like the KGB would have it in some secret facility or something.”

In a quick search of medical journals, he could only find one article describing the deliberate use of a radioactive poison to kill. It was from 1994, he said, published but he couldn’t read the details because it was in Russian.

Polonium is extremely rare in nature. Named by its discoverer, Marie Curie, after her native Poland, it occurs in trace amounts in uranium ore and has been found in minute quantities in plants like tobacco, as well as in humans who ate caribou that ate lichens growing near a uranium mine.

But making the “significant quantities” described in Mr. Litvinenko’s body by the British Health Protection Agency would require a nuclear reactor that could bombard the element bismuth with neutrons.

I still want to know what they mean by "significant quantities." I'm betting it's far smaller than you'd think.

Then there is a question on what they do with the cadaver. Can't cremate it for obvious reasons, then burying it would require rather extensive controls, at least for about four years until the majority of the polonium-210 has decayed away.

Really strange event.