The radioactive poison, Polonium 210, used to murder spy Alexander Litvinenko, is a lethal but hugely expensive substance to manufacture
It’s a byproduct of certain reactors. So manufacturing it is in fact free.
The polonium used to kill Mr Litvinenko would have cost “tens of millions of dollars” if bought on the open commercial market.
Because almost no one bothers to process it out of the wastes. it’s one of those things that, if you actually wanted any quantity of it, you’d have a chat with the people who do nuclear waste reprocessing and you’d get as much of it as you wanted for peanuts. Once you’d set up the extraction system that is. The current cost is imply because almost no bugger wants any.
My understanding is that it’s manufactured as required by neutron bombardment of bismuth.
Good point, it’s like saying ash is very expensive because you have to build and fuel a coal power station to produce it
Around the time when Litvinenko died, Amazon in the US would happily sell you small quantities of Polonium 210, along with Americium 241 and various other radioactives, all relatively cheap. Strangely they seem to have stopped doing that these days.
I would have thought a quiet word with Homer Simpson is all that’s required.
It does, though, narrow down who’d have the stuff in that kind of quantity to “someone with access to nuclear reactors and the outputs thereof”.
You used to be able to buy all sorts of, ahem, “interesting” stuff from the specialist materials suppliers (in the early 1990s it was Sigma and Johnson Matthey we used when we were sourcing a few hundred grams of strontium chromate) though it seems to have been cracked down on since: I don’t remember if they had polonium-210 in their catalogue but if they did it would probably be expensive per-gram because they’re charging for the hassle of acquiring it, shipping it, and watching unsold stock (if any) decay.
Same issue with depleted uranium, back when you were allowed to shoot it at people: it was a popular replacement for tungsten if you had a nuclear power programme simply because you had it left over from your fuel production, and even with the hassle of machining it DU was cheaper than tungsten for Phalanx ammunition, aileron counterweights, and the like. If you didn’t have a uranium enrichment programme, though, DU cost “whatever the seller charged”.
Social Justice Warrior – “My understanding is that it’s manufactured as required by neutron bombardment of bismuth.”
Hmmm. You’re not Richard Gott are you?
This process can cause problems in lead-bismuth based liquid metal cooled nuclear reactors such as those used in the Soviet Navy’s K-27. Measures must be taken in these reactors to deal with the unwanted possibility of 210Po being released from the coolant
The only people who have experience using reasonable amounts of PO 210 are the Soviets. Errr, Russians.
Same issue with depleted uranium, back when you were allowed to shoot it at people:
Ooh, has DU been banned now?
The only people who have experience using reasonable amounts of PO 210 are the Soviets. Errr, Russians.
Wasn’t that the whole point, though? Litvinenko’s killers wanted to be known, if not caught. Had he been pushed under a bus, it could have been anyone. But being poisoned this way pointed directly to the Russians, and served as a warning to others.
Where is the polonium coming from in a fission waste stream? Fission essentially doesn’t get that asymmetric, there’s not much lead or bismuth sitting around in fuel rods to absorb neutrons, and I don’t see a recipe to get from uranium to something that decays to polonium in less than star-lifetimes absorbing only the kind of neutron flux you get in a reactor.
Heavier actinides, obviously, all there in the waste stream for reprocessing. Tc-99, Ru-101, I-135, Cs-137, Pm-147, fill your (appropriately covered) boots. But I don’t see where polonium would be coming from.
For polonium I was fairly sure you needed to be irradiating bismuth on a schedule (and a tight schedule, given the 138-day half life).
Tim Newman – “Wasn’t that the whole point, though? Litvinenko’s killers wanted to be known, if not caught.”
They use a radioactive material with a short half life that the doctors do not initially recognise as radiation poisoning? I think they thought they had a good chance of getting away with it and no one being the wiser. It is not as if British doctors have a lot of experience of this or that anyone would routinely test for it.
Snodgrass – “Where is the polonium coming from in a fission waste stream?”
The Soviet November-class submarine K-27 and all seven Alfa-class submarines used reactors cooled by a lead-bismuth alloy (VT-1 reactors in K-27; BM-40A and OK-550 reactors in others).
You have to remove it from your coolant or in the end you may have problems with the crew if not the reactor.
Al-Beebzera is reporting that the report has named Putin.
I guess we have to call him Vlad the Poloner now.
We should cut diplomatic ties and expel them all.
Tim N,
It’s not formally banned, but the negative PR – and the fact that in the really edgy applications, like tank APFSDS, you can do more with the metallurgy of tungsten than DU – means it’s firmly out of favour in the West.
Phalanx switched back to tungsten some time ago because of concern about “radioactive bullets” (DU flashed with a film of aluminium emits less ionising radiation than you do, but who cares about facts?) and the US and Germany have gone to tungsten for their tank APFSDS.
The other headline user was the A-10’s GAU-8 cannon, but that mostly fires HEI shells at infantry these days when it fires at all – not sure if they changed the API rounds (that used to use a DU core) or they just don’t load it.
The UK’s one of the last holdouts, but only because we’ve let our tank gun go obsolete with no supporting industry, so we’re stuck with the 1990s-vintage CHARM3 ammunition.
Ir192 is used in industrial radiography. Half life 72 days IIRC. We got it from Harwell, in a DU case about the size of a shoebox, but unlike shoes it would pull your bloody arm off if you had to lug it across a whole site.
Thanks, Jason Lynch. Informative stuff!
So who’s right here, Snodgrass or Worstall?
SFMS: Why would Po210 be a problem for the crew, more than any other fission products from a Soviet reactor? It’s an alpha emitter so well shielded in reactor pipework. Unless there’s a metallurgical reason for purging it regularly, it could just be left to decay to Pb206 and become more lead in the coolant.
Are there any Pb/Bi reactors still running? And it would be unlikely if the Po210 were removed – it would decay quickly enough.
Po210 used to be used as part of the initiator in early fission devices – the energetic alpha particles it emitted would knock neutrons from a beryllium nucleus. It was manufactured in the Windscale reactors by irradiation of bismuth.
So who’s right here, Snodgrass or Worstall?
Snodgrass is right.
I doubt that anyone has ever done anything with used lead-bismuth coolant other than let it freeze and dump the reactor.
The book SMFS copied from notes that “Polonium is now obtained by irradiating bismuth with high-energy neutrons or protons.”
I can’t see the “tens of millions” of dollars..
Given that the ole’ CCCP and current Russia produce the stuff pretty routinely , if in small amounts, for quite prozaic purposes like checking welds and stuff, it would be at best tricky to get hold of, but not insanely expensive.
Unless, of course, each of those units would cost tens of millions of dollars as well.
Even then.. if you really want to go the Cheap Route, and risk your own health/try interesting and slow ways of suicide, you could start with a couple of smoke detectors and other bits and bobs you can find on the average scrapyard, and work from there.
They keep going on about polonium being radioactive. Yes it is, but Litvinenko was *poisoned* by the polonium faster than he was killed by its radiation.
Says who? The pathologist reported ““I am entirely satisfied that on the basis of both the calculated exposure of the
internal organs to radiation and the deceased’s downhill clinical course a cause of death of acute radiation syndrome may be recorded”
as i’ve said before, i remain astonished that it took two weeks for the doctors to realise that he had internal radiation poisoning, especially as the patient (first rule, what does the patient say) was saying that he’d been whacked by Russian spies.
He was in UCH, I was at UCL, and so I know that that lovely little corner of the world is full of very clever doctors, a real centre of world expertise.
Social Justice Warrior – “The book SMFS copied from notes that “Polonium is now obtained by irradiating bismuth with high-energy neutrons or protons.””
Quoted. Not copied. The sentence before that one from the Wikipedia page I cut and paste, says:
So the largest batch known to Wikipedia (that is, produced by the West as they are likely to be poorly informed about the Soviet Naval reactor programmes) was 9 mg. That is a lot of waste to be processing in order to obtain what you would need to kill someone.
It also goes on to say “Only about 100 grams are produced each year, practically all of it in Russia, making polonium exceedingly rare.”
Tractor Gent – “Why would Po210 be a problem for the crew, more than any other fission products from a Soviet reactor? It’s an alpha emitter so well shielded in reactor pipework.”
Will it stay in the reactor pipework? I have no idea what the inside of a Soviet Naval reactor looked like, but I would hope the other fission products were contained by the fuel cladding and so did not get into the coolant. The polonium would be floating around the cooling pipes and the steam generator. If all the Soviet-era welds were 100% up to spec, that might not be a problem. But do you think they were?
In Boiling Water Reactors and Sodium-Cooled Fast Breeders, the coolant gets radiated enough that it is a mild problem for the workers in the plant. They have to insert another cooling loop for the FBR and monitor the workers in the BWR a little carefully.
johnny bonk – “as i’ve said before, i remain astonished that it took two weeks for the doctors to realise that he had internal radiation poisoning, especially as the patient (first rule, what does the patient say) was saying that he’d been whacked by Russian spies.”
It is an alpha emitter. Which can be blocked by a piece of paper. What external test could you do to see if he had been poisoned by a radioactive material? If a doctor thought the symptoms were radiation-related, he would run a counter outside the body. What would he detect? The first thought would be what? I guess an X-ray or Gamma Ray machine accident. Ask him if he has been using one. Has he been near a reactor? Way down on the list would be “Have the Russians poisoned him with a very rare isotope of a rare element that only emits alpha particles?”
As I read it, the toxic impact of Polonium is primarily through the intense alpha radiation it emits.
Note that Po 210 is the commonest isotope, but not the most long-lived. Po 209 has a half life of 125 years, and Po 208 2.5 years.
@ES Yes, that is correct. If polonium were stable, it probably wouldn’t be particularly toxic. It certainly would be very unlikely to be lethal in the microgram quantities with which Litvinenko was killed.
²¹⁰Po is awful stuff. In its elemental form it wafts around all over the place.
@smfs : First rule of diagnostics is to ask the patient what they think is the matter. This particular patient would be the very rare case of saying ‘I’ve been whacked by Russian spies’.
I just can’t help but think that internal alpha poisoning presents a very distinctive set of symptons and that the professors etc that abound in Bloomsbury should have realised in much less than two weeks.
Perhaps they spent too long waiting for results of tests ordered by junior doctors …
So the largest batch known to Wikipedia…
No, it doesn’t say that. It’s telling you about the largest batch extracted from natural sources.
One more time: Po-210 can be manufactured in reactors by exposing Bi-209 to neutron flux. The market price is the lowest sum the operator of a reactor is willing to charge for that, plus separation costs.
I doubt the Po-210 used to kill Litvinenko came from a lead-bismuth cooled reactor. Is there any reason to think the Russians had such a reactor running at the time?
Social Justice Warrior – “No, it doesn’t say that. It’s telling you about the largest batch extracted from natural sources.”
That is not what it said. It said “the largest batch”.
You are, as usual, seeing what you want to see in what you should read. The amounts being made are tiny:
So the West makes virtually none. The Russians produce about 100 grams per year.
“One more time: Po-210 can be manufactured in reactors by exposing Bi-209 to neutron flux. The market price is the lowest sum the operator of a reactor is willing to charge for that, plus separation costs.”
Sure. Such as ,…. hmmm, let’s think …. a nuclear reactor core. When it is being used as a coolant.
You have a strange way of reading things, SMFS. It’s almost as if you ignore what’s actually written and that you add words that you make up.
Unsurprisingly enough, the Litvinenko enquiry took expert advice on where the Polonium came from. The conclusion was unambiguous:
Professor Dombey adds:
[I messed up the html, I’ll try again]
Unsurprisingly enough, the Litvinenko enquiry took expert advice on where the Polonium came from. The conclusion was unambiguous:
Professor Dombey adds:
And here‘s a Norwegian report from 2006 with details of the reactors at Mayak:
Ir192 is an amusing case; it’s made by irradiating little rods of iridium in the reactor at Harwell. The reactor used to be fairly inefficient, so you irradiated quite large rods, and once you were done with them you sent them back to be re-irradiated.
The reactor now has a higher neutron flux; you use smaller rods, and you get enough conversion of the iridium to other elements that you throw away the rods afterwards rather than re-irradiating them.
I imagine our host smiling wryly at the one industrial situation in which you throw away objects because of their excessive platinum content.
If polonium wasn’t radioactive, I wouldn’t want to eat it – toxicity tends to go up as you go down the Periodic Table, and tellurium, the element above polonium, is about a fifth as nasty as arsenic LD50-wise, and has the spectacular health effect of giving you garlic-breath of a strength that can clear train carriages. But I’d be very surprised if the lethal dose from chemical consequences of non-radioactive polonium in humans was as small as 1mg/kg, which is a hundred thousand times what poor Litvinenko was fed.