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Nor shall the RSC be in any event liable for any damage to your computer equipment or software which may occur on account of your access to or use of the Site, or your downloading of materials, data, text, software, or images from the Site, whether caused by a virus, bug or otherwise. Jump to main content. Periodic Table. Glossary Allotropes Some elements exist in several different structural forms, called allotropes. Discovery date Discovered by Marie Curie Origin of the name Polonium is named after Poland, the native country of Marie Curie, who first isolated the element.
Glossary Group A vertical column in the periodic table. Fact box. Glossary Image explanation Murray Robertson is the artist behind the images which make up Visual Elements.
Appearance The description of the element in its natural form. Biological role The role of the element in humans, animals and plants. Natural abundance Where the element is most commonly found in nature, and how it is sourced commercially. Uses and properties. Image explanation. Polonium is an alpha-emitter, and is used as an alpha-particle source in the form of a thin film on a stainless steel disc.
These are used in antistatic devices and for research purposes. This makes it useful as a source of heat for space equipment. Biological role. Polonium has no known biological role. It is highly toxic due to its radioactivity. Natural abundance. Polonium is a very rare natural element. It is found in uranium ores but it is uneconomical to extract it.
It is obtained by bombarding bismuth with neutrons to give bismuth, which then decays to form polonium. All the commercially produced polonium in the world is made in Russia. Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. Uranium ores contain minute traces of polonium at levels of parts per billion. Despite this, in Marie Curie and husband Pierre Curie extracted some from pitchblende uranium oxide, U 3 O 8 after months of painstaking work.
The existence of this element had been forecast by the Mendeleev who could see from his periodic table that there might well be the element that followed bismuth and he predicted it would have an atomic weight of The Curies had extracted the isotope polonium and which has a half-life of years.
Before the advent of nuclear reactors, the only source of polonium was uranium ore but that did not prevent its being separated and used in anti-static devices. These relied on the alpha particles that polonium emits to neutralise electric charge. Atomic data. Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes. Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey.
Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk. Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled. Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity.
Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators.
Supply risk. Relative supply risk Unknown Crustal abundance ppm 0. Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance. Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance. Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. Pressure and temperature data — advanced. Listen to Polonium Podcast Transcript :.
You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hello, this week in Chemistry in its element the story of a substance that was named to snub Russia, power space probes keeps paper static free and has even been used as a murder weapon in London.
To reveal the secrets of Marie Curie's element, and that's polonium, here's Johnny Ball. Polonium, element 84 , was discovered in and named after Poland, the homeland of Marie Curie Ne Sklodowska who found it with her husband Pierre Curie. This loyalty was a direct affront to Russia who had dominated Poland for so long.
The only way she could become educated whilst a teenager, was by risking imprisonment by the Russians by attending secret underground schools, which had to change locations every couple of days. It was only by escaping to Paris, following her older brother and sister, that she was able to forge a career.
She was so poor in the early years in Paris, that she sometimes fainted through lack of food. Still she worked tirelessly. In she met Pierre, who had made a name for himself in discovering piezoelectricity and was one of her lecturers. They married in July She wore a black dress as it would be serviceable for her work in the laboratory. They did not exchange rings, but bought each other a bicycle, on which they honeymooned. Working with him 98 , Marie coined the phrase "radioactivity" and decided to make this here object of study, because no one else was doing it.
They realised that radiation was coming from the very atoms and that this was a sign of the atoms breaking up. The element is also used as a lightweight heat source for thermoelectric power in satellites and other spacecraft.
That's because polonium decays rapidly, and as it does, it releases a large amount of energy in the form of heat. Just a single gram of polonium will reach a temperature of degrees C degrees F as it degrades, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry.
During the middle of World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers began to organize the Manhattan Engineer District, a top-secret research and development program that would ultimately produce the world's first nuclear weapons.
Before the s, there was no reason to isolate polonium in its pure form or to produce it in any substantial quantity, because there was no known use for it and very little was known about it.
But the district's engineers began studying polonium and found the element to be an important ingredient for their nuclear weapon. A combination of polonium and beryllium, another rare element, acted as the bomb's initiator, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. After the war, the polonium research project was transferred to Mound Laboratory in Miamisburg, Ohio. Completed in , Mound Lab was the first permanent Atomic Energy Commission facility for nuclear weapons development.
In , a polonium capsule exploded on her lab bench which may have been the reason she contracted leukemia and died 10 years later, according to Smithsonian.
Polonium poisoning was also what killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who had been living in London in after claiming political asylum. Poisoning was also suspected in the death of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, as surprisingly high levels of polonium were detected on his clothes, according to The Wall Street Journal. The study's authors calculated that the radioactivity from polonium in cigarettes is responsible for up to deaths for every 1, smokers over a period of 25 years.
Other research has shown that twice as much polonium is found in the ribs of smokers as in those of nonsmokers, according to the U. Live Science.
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