18 July: Polonium

On this date in 1898 Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of a new element and proposed to call it polonium. 10 things you might not know about the element polonium.

1. Its chemical symbol is Po and its atomic number 84. Polonium has 42 known isotopes, all of which are radioactive. At room temperature, it’s a silvery metal. It melts at 527 K (254 °C, 489 °F) and boils at 1235 K (962 °C, 1764 °F).
2. Polonium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, while they were investigating why pitchblende was still radioactive after the radioactive elements Uranium and thorium had been removed from it. They surmised there must be another radioactive element in there and set about finding it.
3. Its name came about for political reasons. Initially, they named it "radium F", but when the time came to give it an official name, Marie Curie decided on polonium, after Poland, where she was born. Polonia is the Latin word for Poland. At the time, Poland was under Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian partition, and did not exist as an independent country. Curie hoped that naming the newly discovered element after Poland would raise awareness of her country’s plight.
4. It’s extremely poisonous. Ingest it, and you die. End of. In fact, it has been referred to as the 'perfect poison' because it is 100% effective and hard to detect in the human body unless doctors are specifically looking for it, and they’re usually not. The early symptoms are similar to those caused by other poisons. It’s also easy to to transport. It can pass through airport security because the alpha particles it emits don’t penetrate anything – not even skin or a piece of paper. It’s only dangerous if it gets inside a person. And you don’t need very much of it. A speck of polonium the size of the dot at the end of this sentence contains about 3,400 times the lethal dose for humans. Luckily, though, it’s not something the average murderer can easily get hold of. They’d need access to a highly sophisticated lab with a nuclear reactor. And if it is detected, it leaves a radioactive trail that can easily be followed to trace its origins. Not to mention the danger that the killers might accidentally ingest the stuff themselves.
5. In 2006 polonium was used to assassinate Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian who’d defected to the UK and spoken out against the Russian regime. It is believed an ex-KGB agent put polonium-210 in Litveninko's tea when they met at a hotel.
6. Polonium is a prime suspect in the premature deaths of both Marie Curie and her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie. However, since they both worked with numerous radioactive elements, scientists cannot know for sure.
7. Putting it in someone’s tea isn’t the only way to use polonium to kill people. It was also used by the Manhattan project in the 1940s to trigger early nuclear bombs. Mixing polonium with beryllium at the very last moment was what triggered the explosion.
8. Polonium does exist in nature, but it’s extremely rare. A ton of uranium ore contains just 0.0001 grams of polonium. It can be made in a nuclear reactor by bombarding the isotope bismuth-209 with neutrons. About 100 grams of polonium are produced each year, mostly in Russia.
9. Polonium-210 is present in very small amounts in the soil and in the atmosphere but it does not naturally occur in lethal concentrations. That said, the fertilizers used by tobacco growers which react with lead-210 settle on the leaves from the atmosphere and the result is trace amounts of polonium. Hence it is found in low levels in tobacco products and contributes to the deaths of smokers from lung cancer.
10. From 1940 to 1953, it was used in the manufacture of Firestone spark plugs. Radiation, evidently, improved engine performance. It was used in such tiny amounts that it was no danger to drivers (unless they ate their spark plugs, presumably) and the benefits didn’t last long because polonium has such a short half life.

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