Polonium-210, the isotope of practical and notorious interest, costs roughly $49 million per gram based on production estimates, making it one of the most expensive substances on Earth by weight. That figure is not a retail price tag you will find in a catalog; it reflects the extraordinary difficulty and cost of manufacturing a material that decays by half every 138 days and can only be produced in specialized nuclear facilities. The real story behind that number involves reactor physics, Cold War history, and a substance so toxic that a speck invisible to the naked eye can kill.
Why the Price Is So High
Polonium-210 does not exist in useful quantities in nature. The entire Earth’s crust contains only trace amounts, far too diffuse to mine. Every usable gram must be manufactured in a nuclear reactor, and the process is remarkably inefficient. Bismuth-209, the starting material, is bombarded with neutrons inside a reactor core. When a bismuth atom captures a neutron, it becomes bismuth-210, which then undergoes radioactive decay to become polonium-210. The catch is that bismuth has a very small neutron capture cross section, meaning it is stubbornly resistant to absorbing neutrons in the first place.1arXiv. Neutronic Chain Reactions for Polonium-210 Production You can irradiate a significant quantity of bismuth for months and extract only a tiny yield of polonium.
On top of the reactor time, the extraction process itself requires specialized pyrochemical or wet-chemistry techniques performed inside heavily shielded hot cells, because the product is intensely radioactive. Every step adds cost. Then there is the decay clock: polonium-210’s half-life of about 138 days means your inventory is literally disappearing as you make it, ship it, and store it. Roughly half of whatever you produced four and a half months ago is already gone, converted into stable lead-206. That relentless decay makes stockpiling impractical and keeps the effective cost of maintaining a usable supply extremely high.
Global production is estimated at only about 100 grams per year, with Russia historically being the dominant producer. That limited output, combined with the production difficulty and rapid decay, is what drives the per-gram figure into the tens of millions of dollars. Compare that to gold at roughly $70 per gram or even platinum at about $30 per gram, and you can see that polonium occupies an entirely different economic category. It is less a commodity and more a bespoke product manufactured for a handful of specific applications.
How Polonium-210 Is Manufactured
The standard production route starts with metallic bismuth, which is placed inside a nuclear reactor and exposed to a sustained neutron flux. Bismuth-209 is the only stable isotope of bismuth, and when it absorbs a neutron it becomes bismuth-210. That intermediate isotope is unstable and decays with a half-life of about five days into polonium-210. After the irradiation period, the bismuth targets are removed from the reactor and the polonium is chemically separated from the remaining bismuth. The separation is delicate work because polonium is an intense alpha emitter and every handling step poses a contamination risk.
There is an alternative path that uses particle accelerators rather than reactors. Proton or deuteron beams can be fired at lead or bismuth targets to produce polonium isotopes, including Po-208, Po-209, and Po-210.2Applied Physics A. Production of Polonium-208, 209 and 210 for use in nuclear battery via particle accelerator Accelerator production has been explored for applications like nuclear batteries and radioisotope thermoelectric generators, where specific isotope purity matters. However, accelerators generally produce even smaller quantities than reactors and are not the primary source for the world’s Po-210 supply. Reactor-based production remains the workhorse method, limited as it is.
What Polonium-210 Is Actually Used For
Given the jaw-dropping cost and lethal hazard, polonium-210 has a surprisingly short list of applications. Its value comes from a single physical property: it emits a huge amount of energy for its size, entirely as alpha particles with almost no penetrating gamma radiation. That combination makes it useful in a few niche roles.
The best-known civilian application is in static eliminators. Tiny sealed sources of Po-210 ionize the air around them, neutralizing static charges on surfaces. These devices show up in industries like photographic film production, textile manufacturing, and semiconductor fabrication, where even a small static discharge can ruin a product. The amount of polonium involved is extremely small, measured in microcuries, and the sources are replaced regularly because the material decays so quickly.
The more exotic use is as a heat source. Polonium-210 generates about 140 watts of thermal energy per gram, which is enormous for such a small mass. That heat can be converted to electricity using thermoelectric elements, making it attractive for compact power supplies. Soviet-era lunar rovers, for instance, used polonium-210 heaters to keep their electronics warm during the frigid lunar night. The rapid decay, however, limits the useful life of any polonium-powered device to a matter of months.
Historically, polonium’s most consequential application was military. During the Manhattan Project, polonium-210 was produced by neutron bombardment of bismuth in nuclear reactors specifically for use in neutron-generating triggers called “initiators.”3American Journal of Physics. Rousing the dragon: Polonium production for neutron generators in the Manhattan Project These small devices, which combined polonium with beryllium, provided the burst of neutrons needed to kick-start the fission chain reactions in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That application drove the first large-scale production of polonium and established the reactor-irradiation pipeline that, in modified form, still exists today.
How Little It Takes to Kill
The reason polonium-210 makes headlines is not its industrial uses but its extraordinary toxicity. It is often described as one of the most toxic substances known, and that description is not hyperbole. Ingesting or inhaling just a few tenths of a milligram is expected to be fatal to virtually all exposed individuals.4PubMed Central. Health risk evaluations for ingestion exposure of humans to polonium-210 To put that in perspective, a milligram is about the weight of a grain of sand. A lethal dose of polonium is a fraction of that, an amount invisible to the unaided eye.
The killing mechanism is internal irradiation. Alpha particles, the type of radiation polonium emits, cannot penetrate skin. A sealed polonium source sitting on a table is not particularly dangerous externally. But once polonium enters the body through ingestion, inhalation, or a wound, those alpha particles tear through cells at close range. The primary lethal damage targets the bone marrow, which produces blood cells. Once the marrow is destroyed, the immune system collapses and blood production fails. Death from bone marrow failure typically occurs within about three weeks of a lethal intake.5PubMed. Polonium-210 as a poison Even if the bone marrow could somehow be rescued, the radiation dose to other organs, particularly the kidneys and liver, is typically high enough to prove fatal on its own.
The estimated lethal dose absorbed to the bloodstream of an adult male is on the order of 0.1 to 0.3 gigabecquerels, assuming roughly ten percent absorption from the gut into the blood.5PubMed. Polonium-210 as a poison In mass terms, that corresponds to ingesting somewhere in the low microgram range. The amount that killed Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 was reportedly on that scale, a quantity so small it was undetectable by ordinary means and initially baffled investigators who were looking for chemical poisons rather than a radioactive one.
Can You Actually Buy Polonium?
In theory, yes, though the amounts legally available are vanishingly small and nothing close to a gram. In the United States, certain licensed suppliers sell sealed polonium-210 sources for use in static eliminators. These are commercially available devices that contain roughly 500 microcuries or less of activity, which translates to a few billionths of a gram. You could order one legally without a specific radioactive materials license because the activity falls below regulatory thresholds. Some anti-static devices used in laboratories and clean rooms work this way.
Purchasing milligram or gram quantities is another matter entirely. That requires a specific license from a national nuclear regulatory authority, a demonstrated legitimate need, and a supplier willing and able to fill the order. In practice, the only entities buying polonium in measurable quantities are government agencies, research institutions with specialized licenses, and a small number of industrial users. The supply chain is tightly controlled by the handful of countries that operate the production reactors, which effectively limits who can get it and how much they can get.
The Litvinenko assassination in London highlighted how that supply chain can be circumvented. Investigators traced the polonium used in the poisoning back to a Russian nuclear facility. The case demonstrated that while the material is astronomically expensive and tightly regulated, a state actor with access to production reactors can divert small quantities for purposes well outside the official supply chain. For an individual without state backing, acquiring a lethal amount of polonium would be extraordinarily difficult.
Polonium That You Do Not Buy at All
One of the less widely appreciated facts about polonium-210 is that it exists naturally in the environment, and every person on Earth carries trace amounts of it in their body. Polonium-210 is a decay product of radon-222, which is itself part of the uranium-238 decay chain found in rocks and soil everywhere. It enters the food chain through soil uptake by plants, and it washes into the ocean where marine organisms concentrate it.
In the marine environment, polonium-210 bioaccumulates to a striking degree. Studies spanning nearly five decades have found that concentration factors in marine organisms range from roughly a thousand to over a million, depending on the species and the tissue examined.6PubMed. 210Po in the marine environment with emphasis on its behaviour within the biosphere Organisms preferentially take up polonium-210 compared to its parent isotope lead-210, and the ratio between the two tends to increase as you move up the food chain. That pattern is primarily driven by the high degree to which organisms absorb polonium from their food and then retain it in their tissues.
This bioaccumulation starts at the base of the food web. Marine phytoplankton accumulate polonium-210 from seawater, and that uptake introduces the isotope into food chains where it accounts for most of the natural radiation dose received by marine organisms and, downstream, by human consumers of seafood.7Limnology and Oceanography. Experimental studies on the accumulation of polonium-210 by marine phytoplankton If you eat shellfish, fish, or other marine products regularly, polonium-210 is a meaningful contributor to your background radiation exposure. The doses involved are far below lethal levels, but they are not zero, and they represent a larger share of your natural radiation burden than most people realize.
Tobacco is another notable source. Polonium-210 accumulates on tobacco leaves from atmospheric deposition of radon decay products and from phosphate fertilizers used in cultivation. When a cigarette is smoked, the polonium is inhaled and deposited in lung tissue, where it delivers a concentrated alpha-radiation dose to the surrounding cells. Some researchers have argued that this internal radiation exposure contributes meaningfully to the elevated lung cancer risk in smokers, distinct from the chemical carcinogens in tobacco smoke. The polonium content of a single cigarette is infinitesimally small, but the cumulative dose from years of smoking adds up in a tissue that is particularly vulnerable to radiation damage.
Why the Exact Price Is Hard to Pin Down
The figure of roughly $49 million per gram is widely repeated, but it deserves a few caveats. There is no open commodity market for polonium-210. You cannot check a spot price the way you would for gold or uranium. The per-gram estimate is derived from the known costs of reactor operation, target fabrication, irradiation time, chemical processing, and waste handling, divided by the tiny output yield. Different assumptions about those inputs produce different numbers. Some estimates run lower, in the range of $10 to $20 million per gram, while others run higher. The $49 million figure has persisted in large part because it was cited in widely read reference materials and news reporting after the Litvinenko case.
Another complication is that nobody actually buys or sells polonium by the gram in a straightforward transaction. The material is sold as sealed sources of specific activity levels, or it is produced internally by national nuclear programs for their own use. The per-gram cost is an abstraction that divides total production costs by total yield, rather than a price that any real buyer has ever paid in a single purchase. It is a useful way to convey how expensive the production process is, but it is not a price in the way that most people think of prices.
The rapid decay adds yet another wrinkle. If you somehow acquired a full gram today, you would have half a gram in 138 days and a quarter gram in 276 days. The economic value of your gram is decaying along with the atoms. For users of polonium sources, this means regular replacement cycles and ongoing procurement costs. For anyone trying to assign a stable per-gram value, it means the “cost” depends heavily on when you measure it relative to the production date. A freshly produced gram is worth far more than one that has been sitting in a shielded container for six months, because most of the atoms that made it expensive to produce are already gone.
How Polonium Compares to Other Expensive Isotopes
Polonium-210 is far from the only isotope with an eye-watering price tag. Californium-252, used as a neutron source in oil well logging and cancer treatment, costs in the neighborhood of $27 million per gram. Tritium, the hydrogen isotope used in self-luminous signs and in certain nuclear weapon designs, runs about $30,000 per gram. Plutonium-238, the workhorse fuel for deep-space missions like NASA’s Perseverance rover, costs several million per gram depending on the production estimate used. What sets polonium apart is the combination of extreme cost, extreme toxicity, and extremely short shelf life. Most other expensive isotopes have the courtesy of lasting years or decades; polonium-210’s 138-day half-life means you are in a constant race against physics to use it before it disappears.
That decay rate also explains why polonium-210 never became a standard fuel for radioisotope thermoelectric generators on long-duration space missions, despite its phenomenal energy density. A power source that loses half its output every four and a half months is a poor choice for a probe headed to the outer solar system on a journey measured in years. Plutonium-238, with a half-life of about 88 years, is far better suited. Polonium found its niche in short-duration applications where a compact, intense heat source was needed temporarily, like the Soviet lunar rovers that only needed to survive a handful of lunar nights.