----- Original Message -----
From: boddi satva
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 2:32 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: How easy is it to get polonium 210?
Your numbers are wrong and you are forgetting that the brushes contain Polonium IN A METAL MATRIX. You would have to purify the Polonium or atomize it and that is extraordinarily difficult to do without poisoning yourself first.
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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