On 12/1/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- 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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