CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Murder By Nuclide

Only a few of you failed out of counter-terrorism theater club: when you are handed select choices to investigate, the money wants you to investigate those. The money does not appreciate when you question their premises/choices or study things they didn’t pay you to consider.

Your employer clearly has reasons that they’ve judged these radionuclides to be of concern for use as a murder weapon and they would like to give you money about it. The first thing here is to stop and consider their question: they’re asking about murder, not terrorist attack. This isn’t quibbling over semantics, it’s a question of intent. Yes, an act of terrorism may kill someone but that person’s death, generally speaking, isn’t the goal. The goal of terrorism is to inspire fear. You don’t have to kill anyone to do that. 

The goal of murder is to make someone(s) dead. If person(s) are considered socially/hierarchically important, we use a different term. To quote Booth in the Sondheim musical Assassins: “Murder is a tawdry little crime…shopkeepers get murdered, but a president is assassinated.” This changes how we view these nuclides. Classic mystery elements start attaching themselves when you consider them as murder weapons. Things like opportunity, methodology, and traceability. Committing murder is one thing. Getting away with it is an entire literary genre.

Which brings us to the killing nuclide of choice by popular acclaim, Po-210. You all know it works. You know it works because you watched a man die, more or less in real time on the news, by acute radiation sickness from an absolutely massive uptake. RIP Alexander Litvinenko. While this was most definitely an act of murder, even having enough Po-210 to kill with in the first place means it was incredibly difficult to pull off. Like, Bond supervillain caper-grade levels of difficult. Unless, of course, it is state sanctioned.

You’ve got a couple of ways to make Po-210. As a radon daughter, you can harvest it from the environment but that’s tough. With a ~4 month half life, by the time you have enough you’ve denuded the countryside and a good chunk of it has already decayed away. Or you can do it by activation with a nuclear reactor or accelerator. Then you need to do some chemistry to extract it, which is much easier than rendering an entire countryside. But we keep SCRUPULOUS accounting of Po-210 production. One of the weirdest part of Litvinenko’s death is that all the Po-210 was accounted for. This means there was an unknown production facility that made undocumented Po-210, which should be absolutely terrifying to you. I am inclined to refer to his death as a terrorist act.  For anyone short of state-sanctioned killer, you are hard pressed to put together Po-210 to kill with. You’d need to steal every static eliminator in North America to even approach the dose administered to Litvinenko.

It isn’t credible as it’s just short of an act of war. If a doctor hadn’t been observant, remembered their training, and grabbed a meter from Oncology, Litvinenko might have died. And, within a few years, the Po-210 in his corpse would have decayed to a trace quantity of lead so small you wouldn’t notice it among all the rest.

This is similar to the doctor who twigged to what was going on in Goiânia with Cs-137, really. Cs-137 is a popular irradiator & calibration source, but less than it used to be. With a 30yr half life, anything made in the last century is still out there, still radioactive enough worry about, and we made a lot of sources with it. No, I won’t be sharing lethal dose numbers. Cs-137 is also damn annoying because of it’s chemical behavior and how we normally work with it, cesium chloride. As far as your body is concerned, cesium is just as good as sodium or potassium. Having it as a salt makes it very bioavailable in the body. Most of the Po-210 administered to Litvinenko was purged from his body by pooping because your body has no chemical use for it, but there was still plenty left to kill. But cesium? Anywhere your blood goes, Cs-137 goes. As a salt, CsCl would be very easy to administer to food. The drawback is that it, apparently, tastes awful. Let us give thanks and pity to Tom from Explosions & Fire and friends for doing this taste test so we don’t have to.

Because of the strong 662keV gamma emission, rather than trying to get you victim to eat it the Cs-137 you could instead try to irradiate them to death from a distance. That’s going to take a respectably large source however which somehow no one noticed is missing. This would be the preferred way to go because, hooboy, cracking open that irradiator to get at the juicy CsCl center to then try to cause an uptake by your victim is very likely to kill you and others as well. As mentioned earlier, SEE ALSO: Goiânia. If you’ve never encountered the non-proliferation definition of “intrinsically safe” before, this means that theft/misuse of materials is likely to kill the perpetrator before they can get up to shenanigans. Cs-137 sources aren’t quite this bad but close. While plenty of Cs-137 has been lost and ended up places it shouldn’t have over the decades, WE CALIBRATE OUR INSTRUMENTS TO 662keV. There are few things we are better at finding than this particular radionuclide. If there’s any contamination from your bullshit, we’re gonna find it and you.

But as I said, Cs-137 is falling out of favor because of it’s long half life relative to human attention span/civilization and radiological dispersal device potential, rather than as a murder weapon. Where it had previously been used in industrial radiography applications, Cs-137 has been mostly replaced by Ir-192. Because Cs-137 (~30yr half life) & Co-60 (~5yrs) gamma cameras regularly got lost by radiographers, there was an interest in replacing them all with a suitable industrial radiography source with a much shorter half life so there’d be less long term consequences from losing them. Ir-192 is much more friendly with its 74 day half life. If you lose it, not much of a problem anymore within two years. Also, when you crack it open, there isn’t a highly dispersible salt in there, just a small piece of metal. That would be very rude to put in someone’s pillow. But much like Cs-137, Ir-192 is just as much hazard to the would be murderer as their victim. Also, that source is very easy to find and a lethal one will be relatively new, which means it is also well documented and licensed. Stealing them is hard because, even when lost, they tend to still be locked up in shielded housings that are hard to crack open. So, you’re looking for something that’s widely available and easy to control as the would be murderer.

Enter, P-32. 

With a 14 day half-life, ridiculously energetic beta decay, and phosphorus being a nutrient your body craves almost as much as electrolytes, like CsCl, P-32 is definitely a decent murder weapon…if you have enough.

Good news, would be murderer! It’s one of the most commonly used radionuclides. 

The CHIPS (C-14, tritium, the radioiodines, P-32, and S-35) are used in such quantity and regularity that they’re usually regarded as consumables, their tracking and security somewhat lax compared to radiography sources. Accumulating enough will still take a bit of work though. A death by an easily detected isotope like P-32, is likely to get attention. P-32 is also the kind of thing that you can literally follow contaminated footsteps with. As someone who has followed That One Left Shoe through multiple floors of a building before, trust me on this one. The murderer will need to work VERY CLEANLY or they will directly lead investigators to themselves. 

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GOOD NEWS EVERYONE! There are very few inspiring incidents to reference for this.

Sadly, not zero.

As identified by many of you, murder by radionuclide is very difficult to pull off without the methodology and murderer being quickly identified. There are WAY easier ways to kill. To try to do this means you are either incredibly arrogant and assume no one can figure this out (wrong every goddamn time). Or you don’t care about discovery and the painful death, or even the nuclide itself, has meaning to you as the murderer. 

The sad commonality to all the attempted murders by radionuclide is that they not only did they fail but they almost always unintentionally exposed innocent bystanders. Often family members.

Even if mass casualty wasn’t the goal, it still happens. :(

~fin~