Polonium was another element discovered by
Madamé Curie. Madamé
Curie was Polish though she did most of her
research, if not all of it, in
Paris. And so polonium is named after Poland,
and polonium is an
element which has been not very important
until the invention of atomic
bombs, and then polonium became an absolutely
crucial material
because it is used, or was used, as a trigger
in the centre of the original
atomic bombs. One of the difficulties is that
it has got a very short half-
life. If you have a lump of polonium, half
of it decays away in 138 days,
so if you keep it too long it’s gone, or
most of it’s gone. And therefore in
the early days of producing atomic bombs,
that is with Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, and so on, the limiting factor in
producing the bombs was
actually a production of polonium for the
trigger rather than the enriched
uranium or the plutonium that was being used
for the bombs themselves.
Quite recently polonium has had a new lease
of notoriety because it was
used in this tragic poisoning case where a
large dose of polonium was
given to an unfortunate Russian citizen visiting
the UK and it’s still unclear
where the polonium came from. But it is a
very unusual material and
difficult for ordinary individuals to find.
But if it’s ingested, because it’s
decaying so fast, the radioactivity can cause
all sorts of very unpleasant
effects and, again, it’s probably poisonous
as well.
