Po-210 as a Poison 
Norman Dombey
- Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB by Alex Goldfarb, with Marina Litvinenko Buy this book
The word ‘radioactive’ was first used in public on 18 July 1898, when Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, reported to the French Academy of Sciences on the progress of their work on becquerel rays – what we would now call ionising radiation. The Curies had subjected pitchblende, a black mineral composed largely of uranium dioxide, to repeated heating, then dissolved the residue in acid. The process yielded a substance four hundred times more radioactive than uranium; they named it polonium, after Marie Curie’s country of origin. Later that year, they isolated radium.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Norman Dombey is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex.
Other articles by this contributor:
What has he got? · Saddam’s Nuclear Incapability
Iran and the Bomb · Don’t Do It
print layout
tell a friend