Who had the means and motive to use Polonium-210 as a weapon?

Bq is app. 10^-8 g. If I remember right, Scaramella received 1 MBq. So if my calculations are right, he would have received app. 10^-12 g, ie. 1 picogramm, which is an amount that can be measured without problems. (But I may have miscalculated, and Scaramella's statement may be accurate.)In summary, experts have expressed shock and surprise at the recent use of polonium as a poison, as it is a rare and obscure material. It has only been used as a deliberate poison once before, in a 1994 case in Russia. Polonium is extremely rare in nature and is typically only found in trace
  • #1
Rach3
(A parallel discussion, on the politics and diplomacy, is going on here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=145129)

“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 K.G.B. would have in some secret facility or something.”

In a quick search of medical journals, he could find only one article describing the deliberate use of a radioactive poison to kill. It was from 1994, he said, published 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 had eaten 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 metallic element bismuth with neutrons.

“To most chemists, this is astonishing,” said Dr. Andrea Sella, a lecturer in inorganic chemistry at London’s University College. “This is not available commercially. It is present in food, but only in the kind of trace quantities that can be detected by ultrasensitive analytical techniques. It is one of the rarest elements on the earth’s crust and also one of the most exotic.”
"A Rare Material and a Surprising Weapon" (NYT)


So then - who had the means to do this? Is there any possibility of rogue organizations having stolen large quantities of this radioisotope, to "discredit" Putin's administration (as he claims)? (last paragraph in article) Or are the nuclear superpowers the only possible assassins here? Are the quantities used in ionization sources (LANL periodic table, under "uses") of the order of magnitude to be usable? What about radioisotope thermal generators - are there any recent ones with Po-210, and could it have been stolen from there?

And any speculation as to why such a crazy, exotic assassination, one that's so obvious and incriminating?
 
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Engineering news on Phys.org
  • #2
nuclear reactor that could bombard the metallic element bismuth with neutrons.
Not too many places have this capability, but certainly the Russians have such capability. They Russian nuclear establishment has looked at Pb and Pb-Bi cooled nuclear reactor concepts for quieter submarine reactors.

According to CIRIA, an education organization, polonium is found in the waste stream of nuclear weapons production.
http://www.safegrounds.com/pdf/c_best_practice_guidance_for_site_characterisation.pdf

Po-210 (like Pu or Ra) has been used with Be for neutron sources. The energetic alpha particles collide with the Be-9 nuclei producing neutrons and alpha particles.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/polonium.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_source


It would be difficult to pin this on Putin. Perhaps one of his supporters took the initiative, and maybe Putin knows about it. Dealing the Russian government is somewhat like dealing with the Mafia. There are good people in the government, but the corruption is so rampant it takes time to differentiate between good and bad.
 
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  • #3
Rach3 said:
So then - who had the means to do this?
Rach3,

Basically anyone with access to a research reactor.

The irradiation could have been done at many universities
or industrial firms.

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist
 
  • #4
I was wondering how much one would need for a lethal dose. From a link that I found on Wikipedia: "Rats injected intravenously with a lethal amount of 210-Po (1.45 MBq/kg body mass) died within 14-44 days." http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095530097143338

I would guess that this is of the same order of magnitude for many alpha-emitters.

Let us suppose that Litvinenko's dose was at least of the order of 10^8 Bq. That would be 2500 americium smoke detectors.
 
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  • #5
Professor Nick Priest says a giga-becquerel ("no more than a few micrograms").
http://www.newscientisttech.com/art...lonium-poisoning-suggests-sophistication.html

"A lethal dose for ingestion or inhalation by a human being would be between 500 and 5,000 microcuries, according to calculations done by Dr Regan and his colleagues."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/30/upoison130.xml

Conversion: 1 milli-curie = 37 MBq.

These amounts of material are not difficult to obtain:
Government regulation said:
(a) Static Elimination Devices. Devices designed for use as static eliminators which contain, as a sealed source or sources, radioactive material consisting of a total of not more than 18.5 megabecquerel (500 uCi) of polonium-210 per device.
http://www.rules.utah.gov/publicat/code/r313/r313-021.htm
 
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  • #7
From a good article in the New York Times:
Manufacturers of antistatic devices take great pains to make the polonium hard to remove. Even so, Dr. Zimmerman of King’s College said it could be done with “careful lab work,” which he declined to describe.

The Health Physics Society, a professional group in McLean, Va., that distributes information on radiation safety, estimates that a lethal dose of polonium 210 is 3,000 microcuries (a radiation measure named after Marie and Pierre Curie). Other experts put the figure slightly higher.

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=...2/03/weekinreview/03broad.html&cid=1111251378
(requires registration)
 
  • #8
Finally I found a number about the dose - a massive overdose:
Litvinenko received, according to sources at the HPA, enough to to give him “several gigabecquerels” of radiation. This was 100 times or more the amount needed to kill him.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2484295_1,00.htmlEdit: And Scaramella is now reported saying:
In an interview with Italy's RAI TG1 television news, Scaramella said doctors told him that his body contains five times the dose of polonium-210 considered deadly. "So my mood isn't the best," he told the channel.
At first his radioaktivity was not detectable...
Maybe doctors told him that he has five times the maximum allowable burdy burden of 1100 Bq?
 
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  • #9
How can we detect it to prevent it?

As there are alpha,n reactions that can come from Po-210 being near low Z materials, could we detect this pure alpha emitter through its neutron production? Neutron production is low but has anyone done the calculation?
 
  • #10
Rick-Nucsafe said:
As there are alpha,n reactions that can come from Po-210 being near low Z materials, could we detect this pure alpha emitter through its neutron production? Neutron production is low but has anyone done the calculation?
Rick,

If you want to detect Po-210; you look for the alpha itself, provided you are within
range of the alpha. Detecting alphas is EASY because they are charged, compared
to detecting neutral neutrons - which are detected by detecting their reaction products.

If what you had in mind was detecting Po-210 at a longer range by detecting a long
range daughter particle, namely a neutron; that won't work either.

You are not going to get any (alpha,n) reactions at the relatively low temperatures here
on Earth for most materials. You find (alpha,n) reactions in STARS!

Beryllium-9 is the one exception. However, the reaction cross-section for the
Po-210 alpha is only a few hundredths of a barn.

No - alphas of the energy consider here are just going to scatter off other nuclei.

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist
 
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  • #11
Dr. Greenman,

alpha,n reactions occur with many SNMs and alpha sources. Po210/Be, Am/Be and Pu/Be are examples. The alpha detection with any reasonable standoff distance is not possible. Of course from a forensic perspective one can do urinalysis or blood work and count with liquid scintillation but to detect it for counter terrorism purposes one needs a method involving nuetrons or gamma rays. There are no gamma rays but neutron production from low Z materials is possible. For a lethal dose say 5-15mCi the production with O or N is too low but halide forms may be detectable. If we talk about several orders of magnitude higher activities (that are likely from terrorist activity) then oxides or aqueous solutions might provide enough production of neutrons. I am not sure of the volume distribution in the body and the practicality of doing such a measurement but this incident does represent a challenge to those involved in nuclear security applications.
 
  • #12
Some new numbers on Scaramella's dose from http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=ae13ie5Ij2oY&refer=uk :
Scaramella was hospitalized on Dec. 1 after the U.K. Health Protection Agency said he had a ``significant quantity'' of polonium 210 in his body, the same terminology it used to describe Litvinenko's intake of the substance.

Tests carried out last week indicated Scaramella had about a 20th of the dose of polonium 210 that was found in Litvinenko's body, the Italian said. The amount in Litvinenko was about 100 times the lethal dose. That would make Scaramella's intake about five times a fatal dose.

There isn't a definitive cutoff point at which a dose of polonium-210 becomes fatal, according to the Health Protection Agency. About 40 to 50 becquerels of the substance are found naturally in a typical 70-kilogram person, a spokesman for the agency said yesterday in a telephone interview. A dose of a billion becquerels would typically be fatal in more than half of people, he said.
So they were asking good questions, but the answers do not really add upp - as the reporter seems to be very well aware of.
 
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  • #13
Rick-Nucsafe said:
Dr. Greenman,

alpha,n reactions occur with many SNMs and alpha sources.
Rick,

I'm aware of that. However, if you go to your post to which I responded; the question
was whether there were Low Z (alpha, n) targets!

The cases you cite, Po210/Be, Am/Be, and Pu/Be; the alphas from the heavy nuclide
will induce (alpha, n) in the Be-9. Additionally, the neutrons produced may be augmented
by an (n, 2n) reaction on Be-9.

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist
 
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  • #14
"Litvinenko's killers used polonium worth $10m"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2509789,00.html
United Nuclear Scientific Supplies of New Mexico, one of the few companies licensed to sell polonium-210 isotopes online, said that as a single unit costed about $69, it would take at least 15,000 orders, costing more than $10 million, to kill someone.
Desinformation, of course.

Here is a company that makes antistatic devices based on polonium:
http://www.nrdstaticcontrol.com/FAQ.asp

According to the Swedish newsper 'Ny Teknik', NRD exported 244 GBq of polonium to Sweden alone (in 587 cartridges), for use at 171 different companies in Sweden.
 
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  • #15
A recent technical press release concerning dose-assessment from Po-210 measurements in excreted urine can be found here

http://www.hpa.org.uk/polonium/Dose_Assessment.pdf
 
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  • #16
Some more Po-210 stuff

Hi All

New here (a great find, I was directed here by a good client of mine).

I will do a full intro in due course, but with respect to this current subject I thought you might be interested in the following links:

A news entry

http://www.ionactive.co.uk/news_article.html?n=42

And a blog comment (scroll down to the 2nd entry on the page,7/12/2006)

http://www.ionactive.co.uk/blog.html

Some of this will be teaching you to suck eggs (I am a Radiation Protection Adviser and not a physics bod and I do not try to be!). Aspects of the site are commerical but that is not the point of putting the links here (> 50% of the site is information only).

Hope you get something out of it.

regards

Mark
 
  • #17
So it seems it was not sushi, but tea. Hot tea.

About doses:
The Health Protection Agency said that tests in Britain alone on the urine of 596 people had identified 116 people who had "probable contact" with the poison, polonium, but only 13 of these showed levels that required further monitoring.

The 13, mostly London hotel staff, were assessed to have received radiation doses above six millisieverts (mSv), but the dose that killed Litvinenko was "many thousands of times greater", HPA chief executive Prof Pat Troop said.

Around 73 received less than one mSv, and 30 between one and six mSv. Each additional one mSv of exposure poses an additional cancer risk 0.005 per cent.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/11/npoison111.xml
 
  • #18
A further technical paper by the UK Health Protection Agency has just been published in the Journal of Radiological Protection, with lots of gruesome details about the effect of alpha poisoning.

http://ej.iop.org/links/rMi7FeUVd/2i8gh2LN2xGVnqiAav5vpA/jrp7_1_001.pdf
 
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FAQ: Who had the means and motive to use Polonium-210 as a weapon?

1. What is Po-210 and how is it used in engineering the murder?

Po-210, or polonium-210, is a radioactive and highly toxic element that can be used to engineer a murder. It is commonly found in small amounts in nature and is also produced in nuclear reactors.

2. How does Po-210 cause death in a murder case?

Po-210 is an alpha-emitter, meaning it emits high-energy particles that can damage cells and tissues. When ingested or inhaled, it can cause severe damage to the body's organs and ultimately lead to death.

3. What are the challenges in engineering a murder using Po-210?

One of the main challenges is obtaining a sufficient amount of Po-210. It is highly regulated and difficult to obtain, making it challenging for someone to acquire enough for a murder. Additionally, the toxicity of the element makes it difficult to handle safely without exposing oneself.

4. How can forensic scientists detect Po-210 in a murder case?

Forensic scientists can detect Po-210 in a murder case through different methods, such as analyzing bodily fluids or tissues for traces of the element or using specialized equipment to detect its radiation.

5. Has Po-210 been used in real-life murder cases?

Yes, there have been documented cases of murders using Po-210. One notable case is the assassination of Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, where he was poisoned with Po-210. However, due to its rarity and difficulty in obtaining, it remains a less common method of murder compared to other poisons.

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