--- Daniel Davies <d_squared_2002 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Chris, the half-life of polonium is like 130 days.
> If you want it to be
> radioactive enough to do what it did to Litvinenko,
> then you need it to be
> fresh out the reactor.
>
> (also, you would need to buy like half a million
> quid's worth of these brushes,
> which would probably show up somewhere).
>
I'm no physicist, but this is what a friend of a
friend said on the subject:
/Most interestingly, from the article you sent, "Polonium -210 is present in the "element" at a level of 250 microcuries."
According to the radiation experts cited in the New Scientist article, "a gigabecquerel of polonium-210 would have been enough to kill Litvinenko." The Becquerel is a measure of a quantity of radioactivity equal to a rate of decay releasing 1 neutron per second (the Curie is the older measure, less accurate because it referred to the neutron emission level of one gram of Radium 226). This changes over time as the radioactive material decays and becquerels are therefore usually used as a measure of "total dose over time". This is why such a small amount of highly radioactive material is needed to kill; even if substance has a short half-life and decays quickly, if the initial neutron emission rate is very high and the total exposure time is long (e.g., days or weeks), an extremely small amount of material (e.g., micrograms) can give you enough of a dose-over-time to be lethal.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10668-exspys-polonium-poisoning...
Fiddling with the conversion factors (1 curie = 37,000,000,000 becquerels) we find that each of those static brushes contains 9,250,000,000 becquerels of radioactivity, or c. 9.25 gigabecquerels, e.g. more than nine times the amount necessary to kill if it were rendered into dust and inhaled, ingested or injected.
All for $19.14 + shipping and handling.
Pretty lethal consumer product. No wonder they included a MSDS and a lot of warning information./
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