Could Polonium-204 Be Used as a Radiological Poison?
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- čas přidán 10. 07. 2024
- Professor Davis uses the Brookhaven National Labs nuclear stability database to explain why polonium-204 would be difficult if not impossible to use as a radiological poison.
Check out the database here:
www.nndc.bnl.gov/nudat2/
Learn more about professor Davis here:
www.chemsurvival.com
Just watched Kate movie now I'm so curious to know about the polonium 204
me too
That's the same movie I saw last night that brought me here. Thanks for this video.
Thanks for watching and dropping the comment. I'm hoping to do many more of this style video in the future. I hope you enjoyed it!
Even if you poison someone with radiation/ polonium 210 or 204, could it ensure death in 24 hours? My understanding of how radiation affects the body is through destroying bone marrow, which can be transplanted. Even so, radiation is not a direct killer. You die from infection or blood loss because your bone marrow makes your blood.
I just dropped here because of Kate 2021 movie
Very interesting video, thank you!
I do have one thought/question about the movie using polonium 204. Polonium-210 can take several days to kill someone. If you could get enough polonium 204, would it actually kill somebody within a day; which was the time period given in the movie? Of course, that doesn't really do much for the movie anyway since they could have made the events happen over a few days instead of just one day.
It would have also been a crazy diffficult isotope to make. Po-210 is elatively easy to prep by neutron bombardment of reasonably available materials. I still haven't been able to work out how a meaningful amount of 204 could be made. Honestly, the mafia would probably have just used a bullet.
I just saw Kate and I had to look it up
Is polonium 210 or 204 used in any research and development in the United States
It's used in industry to reduce static electricity.
I agree 100% with him, the moment I watched this Kate movie, I was like, no way that she got poisoned with Po(204), because the assassin would have to be in a HAZMAT suit to be safe around it. Which in conclusion that would be a suicidal assassin. What he proved to everyone who has watched this video is that, it's damn near impossible to even transport that element while it's in the state for a long period of time for it to be deadly. Well, it would be very deadly to the assassin before it would be for the target.
I'm curious can this be used as a fuel source to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity i need?
um.... no..... best of luck though!
That was Plutonium, not Polonium ;)
It kills from inside😭😭😭
maybe every element is radioactive but it's just too slow to measure?
A very interesting question.... possibly for another video! It is interesting to note that just two decades ago, bismuth 209 was considered to be a genuinely stable nucleus. It was only around 2003 that its miniscule radioactivity was finally detected and its true half-life determined. It is easy to see why it took so long. Bi-209's incredibly weak radioactivity gives it a half-life is roughly a billion times longer than the age of the universe!
@@ChemSurvival yes, the bismuth thing gave me that idea. it also seems to be according to the law of increasing entropy (the second thermodynamic one) but I'm not sure of that, I'm pretty illiterate about physics.
@@svein2330 does that mean that everything might become iron/nickel maybe?
@@fukpoeslaw3613 The nuclear binding energy might provide a solid enthalpic argument at least for iron-56 always accumulating and never decaying (but then there is entropy to consider as well). I think at the end of the day, even if all elements *could* decay over mind-bogglingly long periods of time (many-fold longer than the life of the universe), I doubt there would be a definitive final composition that the universe is inevitably racing towards.
The problem we would likely run up against would be the heat-death of the universe (assuming you subscribe to that concept) happening long before every atom in the cosmos could make it back to whatever collection of nuclides is deemed "most stable". If I understand heat-death correctly (and I'm a biophysical chemist, not a cosmologist), at that point there would be no available free energy, and therefore no mechanism by which matter could transmute (i.e. radiation, fusion and fission always involve energy transfer, which is not possible in a heat-death scenario). This whole discussion leads to some seriously esoteric cosmological material that is lots of fun to discuss, but leads to few concrete answers.
Getting back to the original question: even though not "spontaneous" by the physical/chemical definition, might a single atom of, say, carbon 12, somewhere in the universe have undergone radioactive decay over the last 13 billion years? If so, technically does that make carbon-12 a radioactive isotope from a practical perspective? If we could somehow determine that, say, three atoms of carbon-12 had decayed in the last 13 billion years, could we calculate or estimate a half-life for that isotope? None of this is theoretically impossible, but I agree with @Svein that it is highly unlikely that humanity will ever observe even a single such decay in many isotopes that we call 'stable'.
@@svein2330 oh man, I don't get this at all. I was under the impression that temperature and pressure got nothing to do with decay. maybe I should learn some basic physics first. But I doubt I'm really gonna do that anytime soon. I had an 8 (out of ten) for physics for my school exam, but that was because I got questions like: "if you have a balance with a weight of 20 kg on one arm 30 cm from the center, where would you put a weight of 10 kg to make the arms horizontal?" so, yeah, I never learned to put any effort in learning physics 🤷♂️