Polonium Russias Favorite Element For Silencing Enemies

TITLE: Polonium: Russia’s Favorite Element for Silencing Enemies☢️ CHANNEL: Cube Chemistry DATE: 2026-04-08 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Imagine an element so intense that it glows blue, heats itself up, and can silently wreck havoc inside the human body. Meet palonium. You might recall it from the spy thriller headlines. In 2006, a former Russian agent in London was mysteriously poisoned with this very element, leaving a radioactive trail across the city. Palonium is not a household name like oxygen or gold, but it holds a special place in the science history and in the periodic table of notorious substances. It’s the element that’s so radioactive, it quite literally became a poison. Yet, Palonium’s story isn’t just about intrigue and danger. It’s also a tale of scientific curiosity, patriotism, and peculiar chemistry. Discovered over a century ago by one of the most famous scientists in history, Pelonium was named out of love for a country. Welcome to Cube Chemistry, where we’ll discuss all the elements of the periodic system and also do experiments. So, if you like this video and want to see more, make sure to hype like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so you will never have to miss another episode. Also, make sure to fill in the poll in the post section of the channel for next week as we will be discussing another element again. Now, since Palonia was discovered by Madame Kuri, it seems more than fair to let the first part of this episode be voiced over by Mrs. Cube Chemistry.

So, what we’ve got in this cube does not seem to be a pure element, but rather some kind of device. And we will explain later what it exactly is, but we can tell you already it’s a spark plug. And in this spark plug, we have the radioactive element palonium. Now if there would be still some palonium left in this spark plug we would not detect it with the geer ter shown here as the radiation would not would be blocked by the acrylic of the cube. Also very likely the palonium has decayed away to other elements. Now since this spark plug also looks a bit like a popsicle we are very curious can you lick it? Now technically you could lick palonium once but it’s a really really bad idea. Possibly a fatal one. Now, even though palonium doesn’t burn your tongue or have taste, it emits intense alpha radiation, which can’t get through your skin, but is extremely damaging inside your body. If you ingest even a tiny amount less than a speck of dust, it can cause massive internal damage, especially to your liver, kidneys, and bone marrow. It doesn’t need to be corrosive in the traditional sense. Once it’s inside your body, its radioactive particles start tearing cells apart from the inside. That’s how it was used to assassinate Alexander Lee Fineenko in

2006. So no, don’t please lick palonium, not even as a joke. It’s one of the most dangerous things you could possibly put in your mouth. Now to understand pelonium, we have to go back to the late 19th century, an era of big scientific discoveries. In 1898, a pioneering scientist named Marikuri and her husband Pierre Kuri were investigating mysterious rays given off by uranium minerals. Now, Marie Salomos Claudeovska, originally from Poland, was fascinated by the recent discovery of radioactivity, a term she would coin. Pitchplant, a dark, heavy uranium ore, was known to be especially radioactive. Marie suspected that something else in that ore was amplifying the effect, possibly a new element hidden in the mix. Now, the curies obtained heaps of pitch blend residue left over from mining in central Europe and got to work in a makeshift shed in Paris. It was backbreaking labor. Marikuri stirred and boiled down gigantic cauldrons of crushed rock by hand. Day after day, imagine trying to isolate a new substance from tons of rock using only 1890s chemistry tools. They had to perform endless chemical separations, removing one element after another. Pierre measured the faint radioactivity of each fraction while Mari did the wet chemistry. It was like searching for a needle in a hay stack, except the needle was invisible and could only be seen by its radioactive glow on photographic plates or by electrifying the air. After weeks of effort, their hunch paid off. They found a fraction of the or concentrated with the element bismouth that was hundreds of times more radioactive than pure uranium. Now, this was a clue that the new element was present because no known element in that residue could account for such powerful rays. Now by the end of June 1898, Mari and Pierre had separated a tiny bit of material so active that it defied explanation. It had to be a new element. And in July 1898, they announced the discovery of this element and proposed its name palonium. It was a scientific bombshell. Palonium became the first element ever to discover it purely by its radioactivity rather than by seeing it or reacting it in a flask. Now this was cutting edge stuff. At the time atoms were still mysterious and the idea that elements could emit invisible energy was brand new. Now this discovery was a huge achievement for the curies. It actually preceded their even more famous discovery of radium which they found a few months later in the same pitchblend ore. Marikari would go on to become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and indeed she won two physics and chemistry with pelonium being a key part of why. Now it’s worth noting that while the curies identified palonium’s existent in 1898, they never actually saw it in pure form back then. The amount present was minuscule and palonium has a nasty habit of disappearing, decays away. It took until the 1940s for chemists to isolate a visible amount of palonium metal. But Maricur’s bold detective work had already secured palonium’s place in history. Now the name palonium essentially means the one from Poland. As mentioned, it comes from Ponia, the Latin word for Poland. Marikari, born Marius Claudovska, was Polish and at the time of Palonium’s discovery, Poland was not an independent country. It was divided among Russia, Prouia, now Germany, and Austria. Now, by christening element 84 as palonium, Marie was honoring her roots and quietly protesting Poland’s political situation. It was a heartfelt tribute. Imagine being a scientist farmed from home and immortalizing your homeland in the periodic table. Now, this was quite unusual. Most elements by then were named after properties, mythological figures, or scientists. Polonium was one of the first, if not the first, named after a country for patriotic reasons. Interestingly, Poland did eventually regain its independence in 1918, about 20 years later. So, the name Palonium also stands as the celebration of a nation that would soon reappear on the map. So, what is palonium actually like? Well, if we could see or hold a piece of palonium, recommended by the way, what would we observe? Well, palonium is a metal and a very rare one. Freshly prepared, it’s said to have a silvery shiny appearance. It sits in period six of the periodic table among heavy metals like tholium, lead and bismouth. Now, in fact, pelonium is in group 16, the same family as oxygen, silver, selenium, and tudium. But unlike its higher cousins, which are non-metals or metaloids, palonium behaves like a metal. It’s sometimes called a post transition metal or even a metaloid in older references, but essentially it’s a soft metal. Now, palonium is quite dense, about 9.3 9.5 g per cubic cm. To give a sense of that, it’s roughly 40% heavier than iron and a bit lighter than lead. Now, if you had a lump of palonium the size of a dye, it would weigh noticeably more than a similar piece of iron or zinc. It also has a relatively low melting point for a metal, about 254° C or 489° F. That’s a bit above the boiling point of water, but low compared to say gold or copper. Now, its boiling point is around 962° C or 1764° F. Now, these figures tell us that palonium isn’t extremely refractory. It wouldn’t require a blast furnace to melt, more like a good lab hot plate. Again, we don’t recommend doing that. One really cool or rather hot thing about palonium’s solid form is that it has a unique crystal structure. Palonium is the only element that crystallizes in a simple cube structure at room temperature. Palonium’s crystal is simple cubic, which is a quirky rarity in crystalallography. It actually has two forms elotropes. The alpha form simple cubic and beta form rbohedral at higher temperature. But enough about the solid state physics. The main takeaway is uh palonium is structurally unusual among metals. Now we can’t talk about palonium’s physical nature without talking about its radioactivity which is pretty much dominating everything about it. All of pelonium’s isotopes are radioactive. There is no stable form of pelonium. The most famous isotope is palonium 210 and it has a halflife of about 138 days. That means any chunk of pelonium 210 will lose half of its atoms to radioactive decay in roughly 4 and a half months. So pelonium literally disappears on you, turning into other elements. It decays into lead. This short half-life also means palonium is incredibly radioactive per gram. In fact, by weight, palonium 210 is about 250,000 times more toxic than cyanide. A better comparison, gram for gram, palonium emits about 5,000 times more radiation than radium, which itself terrified early 20th century folks with its glow-in-the-dark deadly reputation. If you had just 1 mg of pelonium 210, it would be emitting as many alpha particles per second as 5 g of radium
2007. Now, knowing that radium is no loser either, it was the standard for dangerous radioactivity back then. Pelonium’s radiation is primarily in the form of alpha particles. Helium nuclei. Alpha radiation is interesting. It’s very high energy but short range. Those particles can’t even penetrate a sheet of paper or a few centimeters of air. If you held a bit of pelonium in a sealed container, the alpha particles wouldn’t get through the container walls or even the dead layer of your skin. Now, I think there is no palonium left in this spark plug in this cube. So, I assume it decayed already years ago, but even if it didn’t, it wouldn’t get through the acrylic cube itself. However, palonium’s alpha emissions do something spectacular. They ionize the air around the sample. Now, this means they knock electrons off air molecules, exciting them. The result, a visible blue glow in the air close to a strong palonium source. Kind of like a eerie blue haze. It’s like a tiny neon sign glowing blue except the thing making the light is radioactive decay. This phenomenon is similar to the glow seen in some nuclear reactors, cherenkov radiation, but it’s a bit of a different mechanism, but the blue color is a common theme when radiation interacts with its surroundings. So, palonium can literally light up its own little aura of ionized air. Spooky and beautiful. Now, another wild physical effect. Pelonium’s intense radioactivity means it selfheats. As its atoms decay, they release energy. Alpha particles carry a lot of punch. If you had enough palonium together, the energy would turn into heat in the material. In fact, a 1 g sample of palonium 210 will generate on the order of 140 watts of power just from radioactive decay. Now, that is similar to a bright incandescent light bulb worth of heat from a gram. On the flip side, it means handling anything but a microgram of palonium is extremely difficult. It will be very hot thermally and radioactively and can easily melt or damage its container if you’re not careful. So, let’s talk chemistry. Pelonium sits under sulfur and tudium in the periodic table. So, one might expect it to behave a bit like a very heavy metallic version of those. And indeed, it does form compounds in similar oxidation states. The common oxidation states for palonium are plus two and plus4 and under certain conditions plus six like in palonium hexafflloride or minus2 in polonides. Now as you may guess the chemistry of palonium is tricky to study for obvious reasons. You usually only have a tiny tiny amount before it decays or before you irradiate yourself. Chemically palonium is not a particularly aggressive element. It’s not like a strong acid that will eat through metal, nor like sodium metal that will catch fire in water. In fact, palonium metal is reasonably stable in dry air at room temperature. It doesn’t burst into flames or explode or contact with air or water. So, in that sense, yes, palonium is non-corrosive. It won’t corrode other metals quickly, and it won’t corrode you in the way a vial of strong acid might. If you put a piece of palonium on a steel surface, it’s not going to burn a hole through it or cause rapid rust. Now, just because palonium is called non-corrosive, it doesn’t mean it’s totally safe or inactive. The label just means that it won’t burn through surfaces like strong acids do. But don’t be fooled. Palonium can still react with other elements, especially oxygen. If you leave it out in the open and heat it up even a little, say just above 55 degrees C or 130 degrees Fahrenheit, it starts to react with oxygen in the air and turns into a type of gas called palonium oxide. Now, and here’s the weird part. Palonium is pretty jumpy for metal, even without heating it all the way to melting. It can slowly turn into vapor and vanish into the air. Now, this partly happens because its radioactivity causes what you might think of as atomic mini explosions, knocking pelonium atoms off the surface like tiny firecrackers. That means pelonium can disappear, not just because it’s radioactive, but because it literally floats away if you’re not careful. Leave it out and it might coat the nearby area in radioactive dust. That’s not ideal. Now, when it comes to chemical reactions, palonium easily dissolves in acids. Just drop it and it breaks down into particles that float in the liquid. It doesn’t dissolve well in strong bases, which are the opposite of acids, but it still reacts a bit. It also forms compounds with other elements. Now, for example, it reacts with elements like chlorine or iodine to form different types of salts. And with florine, it can make a gas called palonium hexafflloride. If you mix palonium with metals like potassium, it creates brittle rock-like substances known as pollonides. Now, all these reactions show palonium as a chemically active element that follows the expected trends of its group. However, the big catch is that doing any chemistry with pelonium is fraught with difficulty. Its solutions have a mind of their own due to the radiation. Now as an example a solution of palonium ions in acid might start off clear or light colored but as palonium decays the alpha particles can ionize the water and force palonium into different oxidation states. Now a classic observation is that palonium solutions turn yellow over time as palonium 2+ is oxidized to palonium 4+ by the very radiation it emits. Bubbles of gas appear as radiolysis splits water molecules. The solution can even start to mysteriously heat up and evaporating because the alpha energy is being absorbed by the solution and the container. Imagine doing chemistry in a beaker that glows faintly and loses its contents by the day’s end unless tightly sealed. That’s palonium for you. It’s like an element that is impatient and doesn’t want to sit in a flask quietly. Now, palonium’s alpha radiation makes it one of the deadliest substances known if it gets inside you. You could hold a seal capsule of palonium in your hand briefly with no immediate harm because the alpha particles can’t penetrate the container or your outer skin. But if palonium is ingested, inhaled or enters the body through a cut, those alpha particles are now being emitted inside your tissues, breaking absolute havoc on a cellular level. They will tear apart biological molecules with ease. So, while palonium won’t corrode your skin, it will irradiate and destroy your internal organs if even a microscopic amount gets inside of you. It’s a bit of a dark irony. Pelonium is non-corrosive in the way bleach or acid are corrosive. Yet, it is far more lethal than either when internalized. To put it in numbers, the lethal dose of pelonium 210 for an average adult if ingested is on the order of 50 nanogs. That is a 50 billionth of a gram. An amount so small that you couldn’t see it with the naked eye. For comparison, a grain of salt weighs about 60,000 nanogs. So we are talking much less than a thousand of a grain of salt. That tiny speck if spread through your body will deliver a fatal radiation doses to your vital organs. Pelonium doesn’t kill by chemical burning or reaction. It kills by literally zapping cells with radiation from within. Now pelonium is one of the rarest natural elements on earth. The reason is due to its short half-life. You will not find ancient deposit of palonium minerals or pelonium nuggets in a mine. Any palonium that was present when the earth was formed has long since decayed into other elements. Now the only palonium found in nature is constantly being created by radioactive decay of other longived elements. Think of palonium as a fleeting step in the decay chain of uranium and thorium. Pelonium has been estimated to occur about 0.1 million grams per ton of uranium or yes 1/10enth of a migram in a million gram of rock. That’s one part in the 10 to the power of 10. To put this in another way, if you had a ton,000 kg of rich uranium or sitting in front of you, you could expect only a dust size of 0.00001 g of palonium in it spread out. And even that is at equilibrium if the uranium has been sitting around producing palonium for ages. Natural pelonium is truly a vanishingly rare substance. The earth’s crust as a whole has only trace amounts of pelonium at any time and it’s consistently decaying away and being recreated by ongoing radioactive processes. Now for many years palonium was primarily obtained as a byproduct of radium extraction when chemists would process tons of uranium ore a little radium for use in the early 20th century products and research. Leftover contained the palonium which could be chemically separated. The largest batch ever extracted in the early mid 20th century was from processing 37 tons of radiium rich residue to get a mere 9 mg of pelonium. That’s how hard it was to get any appreciable pelonium from nature. You needed to start with truckloads of material. Even more surprisingly, cigarettes. Yes, palonium 210 has been found in tobacco leaves. How does it get there? Well, it turns out that phosphate fertilizers used on tobacco fields contain uranium and radium traces. Those decay to radon gas, which releases palonium that then settles on the sticky tobacco leaves. When the tobacco is harvested and made into cigarettes, the palonium is rolled right in. Smoking a cigarette can draw palonium 210 into the lungs in microscopic amounts. Of course, over time, heavy smokers build up a lining of radioactive palonium in their lungs, which is believed to be one of the contributing factors to lung cancer. Now, in fact, some studies have claimed that the radiation from palonium in cigarettes is a major cause of smoking related lung cancers, potentially more so than the tar and chemicals. Of course, most smokers won’t get acute radiation poisoning, but the cumulative damage can increase cancer risk. So palonium is one deadly element that finds its way into places you wouldn’t expect in nature. So given how scarce palonium is in nature if you actually need a quantity of it, you can’t just dig it up. You have to create or extract it through human technology. And there are two main ways how palonium has been obtained. old fashioned extraction from nature sources which is extremely inefficient and modern artificial production in nuclear reactors which is the method of choice today. Now as we saw Maricuri and others early on tried to get palonium from uranium ores. In practice for the first half of the 20th century the tiny amounts of pelonium used in research were usually extracted from the residues of radium production. Now those residues had accumulated a bit of palonium from the decay of radon gas while the material set around. Chemists would dissolve tons of material and then performed intricate chemical separations. Ponium tends to follow bismouth chemically. So one strategy was to isolate the bismouth from the ore and the palonium would come along. The palonium could then be separated from bismouth by precipitating compounds or using electrochemical methods. In the 1910s and the 1930s, these methods yielded only micrograms amounts of palonium. It was more of a laboratory curiosity than something you could produce in mass. The first isolation of pure palonium metal was accomplished only in 1946 by researchers. We’re talking a tiny sample. Now the game changer for pelonium supply was the advent of nuclear reactors and particle accelerators. In 1934 scientists discovered that if you bombarded the element bismouth neutrons you can create palonium. And here’s how it works. Bismouth 209 the stable common isotope of bismouth will capture a neutron and become bismouth 210. Now bismouth 210 is unstable and after a few days halflife is about 5 days it beta decays into palonium 210. Voila. So essentially you can breed palonium by shooting neutrons at bismouth. During the Manhattan project in the 1940s this technique was exploited to produce pelonium 210 for the early atomic bombs. They needed palonium for the trigger mechanism. More on that soon. Now early on they used high neutron flux reactors to irradiate bismouth methyl or salts then chemically separate the palonium afterward. Nowadays the main way palonium 210 is produced is still neutron irradiation of bismouth 209 in a nuclear reactor. Typically targets of bismouth like bismouth metal disc or perhaps bismouth oxide are placed in a reactor’s neutron flux. After a period of irradiation, you end up with a mixture of bismouth and some palonium 210 created within it. Now then comes the fun chemistry part. You dissolve the target and separate palonium from the large excess of bismouth. Palonium can be distilled out or extracted because it has different chemistry. For example, palonium can be precipitated or plated onto metal surfaces selectively. Now the final result is a small amount of palonium 210 usually extracted as the compound or in a solution which can then be concentrated and stored often as palonium oxide or palonium alloy. This process yields milligram level quantities per batch typically. Now because palonium 210 decays fairly quickly have gone in 4 and 1/2 months any production has to be continuous if you need a sustained supply. Also, palonium production is not something done in many places due to the handling dangers and the specialized reactor time needed. For many years, the United States had a facility producing pelonium up until 1971. After that, the US stopped producing likely because demand dropped and safety concerns rose. Since then, Russia has been known as the primary producer of pelonium 210, specifically at a state-run plant in a closed city once code named Sarov, a hub of nuclear research. As of recent decades, it’s believed that Russia was the world’s only commercial source of palonium 210. According to estimates by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, only around 100 g of palonium 210 are produced worldwide per year. 100 gram. That’s it. Globally, it sounds tiny, but keep in mind 100 gram of pelonium 210 is an astronomically large amount in terms of potential radiation. Enough for millions of lethal doses if misused. Still, by industrial material standards, 100 g a year is extremely rare and expensive. Well, you might be thinking, palonium sounds insanely dangerous and short-lived. Does it actually have any uses besides harming people? Well, in this case, it’s a typical story of the gates of heaven also unlocked the gates of hell. Surprisingly, yes. Though they are quite niche and often tied to its radioactivity. Over the years, inventors and engineers have tried some creative applications for palonium. Let’s go through the main ones in a structured way. We’ll see some that sound sensibly and some that sound frankly a bit crazy. I mean, look at this thing in this cube. A radioactive spark plug. Here are some notable uses of pelonium. Palonium’s first major use, aside from basic research, was in the early atomic bombs of the 1940s. Specifically, palonium 210, which used alloyed with burillium to make a neutron initiator. This was a component at the core of the plutonium implosion bombs like the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. When the bomb’s conventional explosives squeezed the core, a pelonium burillium capsule got smashed, mixing the elements. The alpha particles from the palonium hitting the burillium atoms produced a burst of neutrons, which helped kickstart the nuclear chain reaction at just the right moment. Palonium’s neck for generating heat has been put to use in space exploration. In the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet used pelonium 210 in thermal electric generators and heater units for short-term space missions. For example, the Luno Luna rovers, uncrrewed rovers sent to the moon in 1970 and 1973, each carried a pelonium 210 heat source. Now, one of the more downto-earth uses of pelonium, literally down to earth, has been in anti-static brushes and devices. Static electricity can be a problem in industries like textiles, paper rolling, and electronic manufacturing as well as for photographers cleaning film or records. In the mid 20th century, someone figured out that a little pelonium 210 can eliminate static. How? Now, the alpha particles from pelonium ionized the air near the surface, creating a flood of charged air molecules that neutralize static charges on surfaces. No static charge means dust doesn’t cling and materials don’t stick together. Products were developed such as a static master brush, a small brush with a replaceable palonium cartridge in it. You would gently brush your photographic film or vinyl record. The palonium in the brush would emit a steady stream of alpha induced ions, discharging any static electricity. Thus, dust could be blown off easily. These were actually sold commercially and used widely. Still, handling a product labeled contains radioactive material palonium 210 to clean your camera lens is a bit sci-fi. It’s a reminder that sometimes the benefit of a radioactive source here, static removal were seen to outweigh the small risk, especially in an era a bit more less about such things. And that brings us back to what is inside of this cube. One of the most curious historical uses of pelonium. It was in radioactive spark plugs for internal combustion engines. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the Firestone tire and rubber companies sold a line of spark plugs with palonium 210 built into the electrodes. Now the idea as advertised was that the palonium radiation would ionize the air fuel mixture in the engine cylinder just as the spark fired leading to a more complete and efficient combustion. Firestone touted benefits like smoother engine performance, faster pickup, and easier starting. These plugs were called Firestone Palonium spark plugs. It was right there on the box. They were actually less expensive and supposedly safer than earlier attempts with radium spar plugs. Yes, those existed too briefly. Each plug contained only a tiny speck of pelonium. The radiation level was very low, not hazardous to someone handling the plug or driving the car. Initially, it might have given slight performance uptake by helping ionize the gap. But you probably already guessed it. Recall that palonium’s halflife is 138 days. The radioactive boost would diminish significantly after a few months of use. Also, engines deposit carbon and gunk on spark plugs over time. That buildup would block the alpha particles anyway. So, any advantage was very short-lived, pun intended. By the early 1950s, this gimmick faded away, partly because the half-life issue and partly because engine ignition technology improved in other ways. Today, radioactive spark plugs are a historical oddity and collector’s item. Believe it or not, it’s one of those they actually did that episode of atomic age marketing. The existence of palonium spark plugs underscores how people in the mid 20th century were eager to inject atomic solutions into everyday tech, sometimes bordering on the absurd. Imagine buying a spark plug today proudly labeled containing palonium 210 radioactive element. Well, it’s unlikely in our current regulatory climate. Now, unlike some radioactive elements, palonium has no significant medical uses in radiotherapy or imaging. It’s simply too aggressive and short-lived to handle for medical purposes. So, let’s get back to the title of the video. We’ve talked about palonium’s deadly nature inside the body, but how has this played out in realworld scenarios? Well, unfortunately, palonium has gained a dark reputation as a poison largely from a notorious case uh and some suspected ones. Now the most famous incident was the poisoning of Alexander Lee Vinenko in 2006. Lee Vinenko was a former Russian intelligent officer who became a dissident in the UK. One day in November 2006, he suddenly fell ill after having tea at the London hotel. The symptoms were bizarre. Gastrointestinal distress, hair loss, organ failure reminiscent of an acute radiation syndrome. Now doctors were baffled until remarkably they tested for radioactive substances and found palonium 210 in his urine. It was an unprecedented case. Someone had slipped a tiny amount of palonium 210 into something he ingested, likely the tea, delivering a lethal dose internally. Levienko’s condition worsened over the course of three agonizing weeks and he ultimately died. This was essentially a modern assassination using a radioactive element. The case made international headlines. Investigators even traced the trail of pelonium contamination from the hotel teapot to airplane seats and hotel rooms the suspects had used. Because of the palonium left literal traces everywhere they went. Remember, it can diffuse and spread if not carefully contained. The two Russian men, one was a former KGB agent, uh, were identified as the likely perpetrators. The incident caused a diplomatic uproar and it starkly illustrated how Palonium could be weaponized that on a micro scale. Here was an element discovered by Marie Curi, now the tool of a murder plot straight out of a spy novel. A much earlier incident involved Iran Juliet Curi, the daughter of Mary Curry. Talking about a tragic irony, Iran herself was a Nobel scientist. In 1946, she was working in a lab when a sealed capsule of palonium used as a neutron source exploded accidentally, possibly due to a buildup of gas or heat. She was exposed to pelonium, though she didn’t die immediately. She developed leukemia and passed away about 10 years later in
2008. Her death is often attributed to that palonium exposure. Now, if true, she would be the first known person to die from acute palonium radiation poisoning. It’s a sobering footnote that the Curie family, which discovered palonium, also suffered from its lethality. Maricuri herself died from long-term radiation exposure, likely from handling radium and palonium without adequate protection. And here her daughter had a more direct palonium accident. And that brings us to the chemistry question of the week. A strip of magnesium is added to hydrochloric acid bubbles form. Now the question is why? A, oxygen forms. B, hydrogen gas forms. C, carbon dioxide forms, D. Nitrogen gas forms. Now, if you want to know the answer, click on the quiz on the side of the episode. And that brings us to the viewers question of the week. Now, this question was asked under the fluring video by Uni Bite. And the question was, can you explain what would happen? I wonder what would happen if we dropped a chunk of seesium into a container filled with florine. Well, let’s dive into that a little bit. If a chunk of seesium were dropped into florine gas, the reaction would be instant and extremely violent, likely explosive. Seesium is one of the most reactive metals and florine is one of the most reactive non-metals. So, they react immediately upon contact. You would see a bright flash, intense heat and rapid formation of a white solid. Now chemically, seesium loses an electron while furing gains one forming seesium fluoride. In a highly exothermic redux reaction, the huge energy release is what makes the reaction so dangerous and explosive. Now, if you want to see more about this, uh, I put a link in the description to a video from Advanced Tinkering about it. Now, we would like to thank the members that support our channel. Thanks for doing this. We really appreciate you. Now, if you think we missed anything, tell us in the comments. And if you want to know more about another radioactive element, take a look at this video about uranium next.