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• n  a radioactive metallic element that is similar to tellurium and bismuth; occurs in uranium ores but can be produced by bombarding bismuth with neutrons in a nuclear reactor

• By that night, he had become sick but doctors did not identify his polonium poisoning until his death.
• This is no garden-variety poison: polonium needs a nuclear reactor to cook it up and extremely careful handling.
• Ninety percent of the world's polonium 210 comes from a single facility in Russia.

• Po
• atomic number 84

News & Articles

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• Yasser Arafat: The Dark History of Polonium
  Little did scientists Marie and Pierre Curie suspect, when they discovered polonium in 1898, that the radioactive element would go on to have one of the darkest and most intriguing histories of any known substance.
  Oct. 16, 2013 - LiveScience.com via Yahoo! News
• Russian official rules out Arafat polonium poisoning
  MOSCOW (Reuters) - The head of a Russian forensics agency said on Tuesday that samples from the body of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had revealed no traces of radioactive polonium, a Russian news agency reported. However, the government scientific body later denied that it had made any official statement about the research, saying only that it had handed its results to the Russian Foreign ...
  Oct. 15, 2013 - Reuters via Yahoo! News
• Polonium, a highly radioactive material
  PARIS (AFP) - Polonium, the poison scientists suspect may be the cause of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death in 2004, is a highly radioactive material rarely found outside military and scientific circles.
  Oct. 14, 2013 - AFP via Yahoo! News

Quotes

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• Oleg Gordievsky in Sydney Morning Herald
  Litvinenko believed "the water from the kettle was only lukewarm and that the polonium 210 was added, which heated the drink through radiation so he had a hot cup of tea. The poison would have showed up in a cold drink", Gordievsky said.
• Mario Scaramella in Reuters.uk
  Scaramella told the Panorama programme, due to be broadcast on Monday evening: "I know they closed (the restaurant) because they found the polonium, but (it) seems it was not in the place where we (were) seated. So lots of things must be clarified....
• Boris Berezovsky in ITV.com
  Mr Berezovsky said: "I don't think that Putin gave the order to kill him by poison Polonium, but I'm sure that Putin is behind it and (there is) no chance without Putin to obtain Polonium and organise this plot."