Slashdot Mirror
Polonium-210 Available Through Mail Order
Knutsi writes "InformationWeek is reporting that Polonium 210, the radioactive material used to poison former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko is not as hard to get your hands on as some have previously stated. American family business United Nuclear is actually selling the stuff, and other equally exotic materials, on their company website. Could come in handy for the xmas shopping season."
Now that guy with the wiggling eyebrows has to be one of the funniest banner ads ever.
I wonder how XBOX LIVE will dectect this?
UberL337: hey thanx 4 sendin over teh drinks!
TehD00d: NP mang.
[...]
UberL337: ug feel sick oh fukkk call ambulsafeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
TehD00d: Polonipnwed!!!
Trolling is a art,
When a lump of coal just won't do...
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
I stopped in a few weeks back to buy some and some Russian dude in line ahead of me bought the last of it.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
great to see the man who runs this place is certifiable
Thanks slashdot, but if I wanted baseless scare mongering about the threat of nuclear material falling into the wrong hands, I'd join the Republican Party.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm
..... not for long
"Only Legal Source"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think Bolonium is a much more appropriate holiday gift. After all, its atomic weight is deliciously snacktacular.
Developers: We can use your help.
You'd be surprised about shops like this. Feds will obviously track the payments and shipments of these things. Even medical devices which contain less damaging isotopes have strict tracking. Don't believe the friendly face isn't watching you.
Indeed...American Citizens cannot be trusted with nuclear materials...shit they can't even be trusted with a goddamn telephone it seems, judging by the evesdropping our government does.
Really getting disillusioned by the land that claims to be "Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave".
Blar.
Read the page, see the bait:
They even say "beware" elswhere. It must be good.
Can you even resist?
Luckily therse things cost money, or noone would care about the Flying Spaghetti Monster anymore. The Flying Magnetatorus would rule supreme.
Have you read my journal today?
.... But *WHY* is this stuff freely available? Shouldn't it be a controlled substance of some sort? It almost seems that there are drugs and booze that have tighter restrictions.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Credit where due: Not over the counter, but how about on the internet [unitednuclear.com]? Only $69!
The amount they sell, 0.1 microcuries, is... well, a tiny amount. Seriously, if you ordered 100 vials and gave the full 10 microcuries of it to someone, the radiation from it isn't going to come close to killing them.
On the other hand, I'm not sure of the biochemical effects of Polonium on the system. Often times these heavy elements have worse biological properties from their chemical interactions than from the radiation they emit. It might well be that it will be chemically toxic to you long before radiation becomes a worry.
Sold online by one company for $69 (US). Valid industrial purposes exist. Company is fairly sketchy and the owner claimed 20 years ago that he once worked on alien spaceships on a secret military base in Nevada - presumably a US military base, but the article was not specific so I suppose that it could have also been an alien base.
Regardless, expect Uncle Sam to land on him like a ton of bricks fairly soon. I hope that his forcefield dome is active.
"Brace for impact!"
Will work on moose and squirrel, yes?
IAALS.
I found it a bit amusing when they stated that Polonium was hard to obtain. It is actually drawn from the soil into Tobacco plants and is one of the Really Bad Things implicated in smoking and cancer (along with
the also-radioactive Lead-210, which emits gamma rays and decays into Polonium eventually.)
Polonium-210 is an alpha emitter - something you really don't want to ingest.
I'd have to look up dose-equivalents, etc, but if I remember correctly, it was estimated a two-pack-a-day smoker gets the radioactive equivalent of something like 300 chest X-rays a year. And remember that these are heavy metals that stay in the body for a long time!
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
... polonium-210 find you!!
Why UNIX?
Theorore Gray (of wooden periodic table fame) also says that Polonium 210 is used in antistatic brushes for film negatives
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
According to here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium
"The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram. Weight for weight, polonium is approximately 2.5 × 1011 (250 billion) times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. The maximum permissible concentration for airborne soluble polonium compounds is about 7,500 Bq/m3 (2 × 10-11 Ci/cm3). The biological halflife of polonium in humans is 30 to 50 days.[18]"
The toxic dose is 0.03 micro-curies
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm
Lists their polonium source as 0.1 micro-curie. Now Polonium is only REALLY toxic when inhaled, where alpha particles do the most damage.
I know they probably track source sales like mad, but yeah, that seems a bit too convenient. I don't know what the disks are made off. If they are, say, ceramic based, it's probably resistant to most methods of extraction. Anything else, well...
I don't know how much longer then that this will be a 'legal' alpha source.
You need in excess of 1000 vials of it to kill *1* person (and that's ingested, not external exposure on a gift card!)....
So no, he can't mail order enough to kill all of Chicago by embedding them in gift certificates.
I'd do it myself if I had points.
When it comes to pastry theft, I take the cake.
...and is sometimes produced under dubious standards in Central America or India.
It does not meet the stringent FDA requirements that approved CIA spy poisons must and is therefore illegal to posses without a prescription from your local block captain.
dangerous!
Because only people from the midwest laugh at eyebrows...
Duh.
I would know. I'm from Cincinnati, OH. And I love eyebrows.
How?
.1uCi amount, and according to our beloved Wikipedia, the lethal dose for INGESTED is .03uCi (assuming that 3 people in Chicago mistake Osama's gift cards for deep dish pizza and he has a very very fine razor blade to cut the sample into three parts). More people would probably die from the aforementioned deep dish pizza.
UN sells in
Boy, this guy's annual "Desert Blast" looks safe and fun. Yikes. http://www.unitednuclear.com/mag.htm
That's sooo Osama bin Laden.
-b.
Since then, I've found a place that will send me Polonium *209*. It costs more, but so far it doesn't seem have the self-destruct feature that the Polonium 210 shysters build into their product.
Huh -- we now have front page news that a certain commodity item can be bought on the internet. I'm sorry, but anybody whos ever even just googled "Po210" already knows this. Where is the "news" aspect of this? Are we going to see headline news now that tells us that books can be bought online at Amazon.com?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
So is rat poison.
Check this out: http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.htm l
OK, Christmas cookies. Or maybe free beer, probably even more popular in Chicago (like anywhere else).
At $69:0.1uCi, for a lethal dose of 0.03uCi, that's $66M to poison every Chicagoan. Before the volume rate discount.
I can split hairs with you all day long. It still doesn't get my toothpaste on a plane.
--
make install -not war
I remember finding my dad's old 50's-era chemistry set at my grandma's when I was little, and seeing a little button cylinder with a viewport on the top, so you could see the lump of uranium or whatever glow. Unfortunately, no matter how close I stuck it up to my eyeballs, I didn't see any glow. When I told my dad, he promptly confiscated the cylinder. Interestingly, he left me the dangerous chemicals, organic solvents, etc.
you had me at #!
But *WHY* is this stuff freely available?
It isn't. It's only available in very tiny quantities.
Shouldn't it be a controlled substance of some sort?
It is. Maybe you should read the article, or at least think a bit more critically that perhaps both Slashdot and Information Week are just trying to sell eyeballs here and are willing to overlook the fact that the amount available in incredibly tiny.
It almost seems that there are drugs and booze that have tighter restrictions.
Funny, I don't recall being able to buy arbitrary quantities of Polonium down the street from my local drug dealer (liquor stores included).
I'm curious. Are you always so reactionary to news stories, assume the worst, and don't bother thinking critically, or only when the word "nuclear" or "radiation" is in the article?
AccountKiller
http://www.unitednuclear.com/traser.htm Now this is usefull! With a half-life of over 12 years! You won't need to buy any batteries for a flashlight anymore. It's a darn shame they're out of stock. :-(
i hope the seller is sensible enough to cease sales during the current time of popularity. there must be lots of people out there wanting to pin things on the KGB.
Why UNIX?
The fear of all things nuclear is the Democrat or even better the Greens stance. "Why should we worry about terrorists explosives in their shoes when you can by deadly Po210 by mail order".
Get your fear mongering right.
Remember if you outlaw child pornography, only criminals will have child pornography.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You realize that .1uCi is 3.3 times larger than .03uCi, right?
http://outcampaign.org/
Why am I reminded of the episode of Family Matters where Urkel builds a nuclear bomb?
No, I will not work for your startup
That there are many over the counter chemicals that if ingested would have the same result.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
AWESOME!!! Thank you capitalism.
..where Polonium 210 is used as the ionizer in "StaticMaster" brushes, used to clean dust off of negatives.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
I read another article on this company the other day, and it said the amount they sell you is so small that it isn't visible to the naked eye. Um... Anyone wanna buy some? I'll sell you a vial of the same size for 75% of the price charged by United Nuclear.
I haven't seen a website like that since the mid 90's.
Is it just me, or do you hate it when people say "Is it just me..."?
The dose makes the poison. Most people working in buildings with granite sheathing are getting higher gamma doses than nuclear plant workers are allowed by law to be exposed to.
United Nuclear sells 0.1 microcuries. Polonium 210 emits 4500 curies per gram [1], so that is about .0002 grams per curie. So they are selling 0.00002 micrograms, 0.02 picograms, or if you want to make it look really big, 22 femtograms [2]. How toxic is that? Well, I would suspect there is several times more cyanide in a single apple seed [3].
And wouldn't it be cheaper to get the Polonium from a photography shop,
and not a monitored source of radio isotopes?
[1]According to http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/polonium.pdf
[2]2's are repeating.
[3]Strangely, I could not find anything on the internet about how much toxin there really is in apple seeds. Polonium that needs a breader reactor to create, sure, but the poisonous apples at the farmers market, no one is talking about them!
As several others have pointed out, what United Nuclear is selling isn't dangerous. Please don't make it harder for scientists that may need this element. It's already a PITA to get Sudafed that works instead of the PE version. For those who don't know, Sudafed and others who use pseudoephedrine as a active ingredient have a odd thing...you get a CARD off the shelf and the pharmacy has to be open. You may only buy 1 box PER day AND you must show ID to buy that box! The reason is because you can make Meth Amphetamine out of Sudafed apparantly. SO you have to SHOW YOUR PAPERS just cause you want the stuff that will actually WORK!
Gorkman
You cannot get enough from such a source to conduct a poisoning such as what happened in London. This is a TINY sample. Nothing like the right amount.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Annually, whenever I seal my Hemoccult card in the self-addressed stamped envelope my personal physician provides and drop it into a mailbox, I wonder whether I'm going to get a visit from Homeland Security for illegally mailing biohazard waste.
So far, I've yet to have the doctor "The lab doesn't understand what's happened. They couldn't run the test. They say it's almost as if the sample got electron-beam sterilized somehow."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar :)
Did this paragraph strike anyone else as nothing more than sensationalism in the article? Did someone along the line actually say "hey, this doesn't have all that much pizzazz, so let's make the owner seem like a real nut job." I mean, come on! How does what the owner claimed he did 20 years ago, have bearing on the current story?
Shane
(These comments brought to you by a guy that claimed some 10 years ago, that he worked in the sweat shop owned by pre-historic midget squirrels. "My past employment with IBM doesn't have any bearing on this story," he's repeatedly stated.)
Yeah, that's why I said "3 people". I dropped the fraction.
That website looks cheap enough to be a fake but extensive enough to be real.
Modern magnets are so powerful there are real hazards. When magnets were iron or, at the high end, AlNiCo, they couldn't retain a strong enough field to make much trouble, so people thought of magnets as safe. Neodymium magnets, though, can be made strong enough to be dangerous. The Magnetix building set killed several kids when magnets came loose from the plastic parts and were ingested. The CPSC had to order a recall.
Surely not someone advocating "Security through Obscurity" on Slashdot of all places?
Great! Now I'll have to add a geiger counter to my mailbox. I'll have to figure out a way to make my anthrax detector smaller.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The radiation children get from the sun, just from playing outside can kill too.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You can't even use it to generate the 1.21 jigawatts necessary to fuel the flux capacitor. Thats why its available at the corner drug store.
Not to mention that this will draw unwanted government attention to United Nuclear which is already under investigation. So that people with a legitimate need for alpha sources (and, yes, I consider the needs of amateur scientists legit) will find them harder to obtain. If you want to murder someone with poison, there are far easier ways to do it than with polonium-210.
-b.
... no more looking for giant thunderstorms to power your time machine or trick terrorists into stealing stuff for you, nowadays you can just buy nuclear material via mail order.
They're selling 0.1uCi for $69, which is 3x the 0.03uCi lethal dose.
Umm, NO. 0.03uCi is not a lethal dose. Perhaps you are misreading that crap on wikipedia?
"maximum allowable body burden" is NOT the same thing as "Lethal dose".
The government regulates the maximum allowable yearly exposure of workers who handle radiation (I'm one), and the maximum allowable exposure is far far below the lethal dose.
0.03uCi is NOT a lethal dose of Polonium-210
Are we really discussing the operational details of poisoning 10-100% of Chicago?
I don't know what you are talking about, but I'm talking about how the poisoning of one spy is being overyhyped by people like you into 'terrorists can buy enough radioactive material from illegitimate companies on the internet to poison everyone in Chicago!'.
No. They can't. Simple enough.
'' UN sells in .1uCi amount, and according to our beloved Wikipedia, the lethal dose for INGESTED is .03uCi (assuming that 3 people in Chicago mistake Osama's gift cards for deep dish pizza and he has a very very fine razor blade to cut the sample into three parts). ''
No, 0.03 microcurie is _not_ the lethal dosis. 0.03 microcuries is the maximum that you are _allowed_ to swallow without the company you work at getting into trouble if it is found inside you.
Let's say you work at a company manufacturing rat poison. Obviously, some amount of rat poisin could enter your body. Tiny amounts _will_ enter your body. Health and safety authorities will have set a limit of how much rat poison is allowed to be in the body of the workers, without negative consequences to the company. That amount will be far, far, far away from a lethal dosis. It will be the maximum amount that doesn't affect you, not the smallest amount that kills you.
The luminescent phosphour wore out. Get some luminescent paint and paint it on then look at it under a stong lens and you can see the scintiliations.
Or get an old watch off ebay with a radium dial and in a very dark place look at it under a strong lens. You can see little nuclear fireworks there.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Maybe I'm wrong, and it takes more than 0.03uCi to kill someone.
So we're talking about killing 10% of Chicago? Is that OK with you?
In fact, what I'm talking about is the fake security like prohibiting liquids on airplanes that is total nonsense to anyone not totally insane.
Care to downplay that, while you're working so hard?
--
make install -not war
right, and North Korea can order polonium but not ipods
She must be a TIGER in the bathroom... I mean bedroom... ~Ryan
Not stupid, just "wikipedia smart".
Damn! Why didn't they publish this before the trick-or-treaters came knocking?
United Nuclear Scientific Supplies - looking for some URANIUM? CLICK HERE.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
you don't have to look hard to find radioactive material... Would you like a dose of potassium 40? Let me throw a banana at you...
Far easier to use rat poison. And the government doesn't track sales of rat poison. Better yet, you can use nicotine, which is fairly easily extractable from cigarettes or nicotine patches. Cyanide maybe? Or if you really want to be sneaky, get some botulism toxin from improperly canned meat. That might even give you some extra time to get away because it would be mistaken for food poisoning!
Good sire,
This company is pretty much the best mail order company for science products that exists. In a number of items, they have their entire stock bought out by homeland security for their own uses. Like their UV flashlights that are useful for searching for explosives.
They also have a great page up about the Po. It would take 15,000 times the dosage of that $69 vial to get into the lethal range. Which ends up at over $1 million. And then you'd have to combine all the 15,000 needles they come in, which is not gonna happen. You get 10x more in a single smoke detector for far cheaper.
The guy might be slightly batty, I don't know, but I do know he's got the best chemistry kits you can still buy, and taking this guy outta the market is a blow to future scientists.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
You are wrong, in fact the lethal does is around 500uCi's, so you'll need to revist your calcs and calm yourself a bit
I agree - depressing. Thanks for the 'mod up', btw.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm Here's their explanation.
Not enough to poison someone, almost impossible to extract, etc. Poor United Nuclear will probably be run out of business just like everyone else who helps amateur scientists.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Maybe I'm wrong, and it takes more than 0.03uCi to kill someone.
Yes, you are.
So we're talking about killing 10% of Chicago? Is that OK with you?
You are, I'm not, and No.
According to one of the references in that Wiki article, and I've seen others where it is less lethal, 'In rats a dose of 1.45 MBq/kg of 210Po tends to cause death in about 30 days.'
1.45 MBq/kg
If you have a 50 kg human (someone small), that's:
1.45 x 50 = 72.5 MBq needed to kill in 30 days (assuming Kg equivalents between human and rat. It's not strictly, but for some reason they won't let us do the real test...)
72.5×10^6 Becquerels are needed
(1 Ci = 3.7×10^10 Becquerels )
So that makes 1.959 uCi as the amount needed to kill in 30 days. (It's effective biological half-life is 37 days, so the 30 days to kill isn't a bad starting point)
That's 65x more than you are talking about.
Chicago's population is 2.8 million. 10% of that is 280,000.
280,000 x 20 vials at 0.1 uCi/vial = 5,600,000 vials needed.
Do you really think someone ordering 5 and a half MILLION vials of that isn't going to raise a few flags?
Oh, and that's ingested. If you talk about putting them on gift certificates or whatever the hell your original idea for external exposure was, we are talking about many *BILLIONS* of vials.
Please stop over hyping this crap. There are lots of ways the boogie man can get us. This is one of the least likely.
Po210 is an alpha emitter, so the radiation from it won't penetrate the walls of a Geiger tube to register a reading. Geiger counters are only useful for Beta and Gamma sources.
What you need to detect an Alpha source is a scintillation detector.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Did you know that cyanide can be extracted from apple seeds, and that from four pounds of apples, one can produce enough to kill 10% of Chicago?
We're only talking about killing 10% of Chicago with polonium in the same sense that we're now talking about killing them with apples.
It is quite ironic that you complain about restrictions carrying toothpaste on planes, when you express in the same post the sort of irrational fear that leads to such pointless security measures.
I built a cloud chamber (dry-ice cooled chamber to better view tracks of elementary particles) last year as an independant study project, and decided to get some radioactive material in order to better isolate tracks made from beta sources, alpha sources, etc. One of the sources we got was Polonium 210, all we needed was the permission of our physics teacher.
Now the project is done, but I still have a radioactive source sitting beside me on my desk.
So yes, this radioactive source is very easy to come by, and if anyone needs a source with just about one half life gone, look me up..
according to our beloved Wikipedia, the lethal dose for INGESTED is .03uCi
Umm, No.
I'll pass on commenting on how 'accurate' Wikipedia is as a reference, and even refrain from bashing the original poster for citing it incorrectly, but on top of all that.... you are reading it wrong.
It's hard to say what you originally read because the original poster cited it wrong, but I believe you are referring to this:
"The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie),"
'Maximum allowable body burden (dose)' is NOT the same as 'Lethal dose'.
The government regulates what the allowable yearly exposure dosage is for workers handling radiation. These are way way below the lethal dosage.
Why wouldn't they just kill him outright?
I haven't been involved in extra-national assassinations (but I did stay in a Holiday Inn recently...), shouldn't it have been easier to get to him on the street or in his home and then either garrot him with piano wire or shove an icepick into the base of his skull?
It could have been made to look like a robbery or some other type of crime. Poisoning him with some weird, hard-to-get chemical nobody has heard of only makes it look like some weird, KGB plot to begin with, with all the attendent bad publicity (unless of course they wanted it as an initimidation factor.
Of course, all of this is assuming it WAS a KGB plot, and not a plot to make the KGB look bad.
(Yes, I know its not the KGB anymore, at least in name...)
And don't let your kids swallow beryllium coated capsules of Polonium 210 either!
you had me at #!
This is posted directly from their website in response to the incident of polonium being used as a poison. Apparently, there ARE regulations on purchasing polonium. Being a terrorist and buying $1 million worth of polonium from that website will most likely set off a tick on the radar of either the company or the government.
I'm pretty sure that people who are in need of Alpha emitters will be able to safely obtain it from this website without worry of the site being shut down due to assistance of terrorists. If you want to be able to obtain a larger amount from them, a license is required.
The matter now is... how much polonium was used in the poisoning?
clips that went onto the headshell of a tonearm.
now you have to take smoke detectors apart to get it.
surprised nobody posted a statement about a nice book, The Radioactive Boy Scout, which will give the !! OMG !! crowd heart attacks by the pound.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
alphas will kick neutrons out of the aluminum foil, and some occasional betas and gammas should come out due to interference which are detectable. alphas are much more destructive to biological tissue due to the mass they have, but the glass wall of a geiger tube will block them from carrying a charge across the gas and causing a click.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Most terrorists, politicians, and journalists are woefully ignorant. Supermarkets, Home Depots, and many other common storefronts are rich sources of dangerous materials for those who are alert and do their homework.
...are we scared yet?
whatsoever effect ill no felt and
Dr. Emmett Brown: "I'm sure in 1985 plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by." Only 20 years late.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
Tau-neutrino.
I have sometimes the funny impression that the media attention for wrongdoers seems to encourage stupid acts of rebellion. Few days ago, a campione del mondo of stupidity put online a video of (probably) himself running in motorcycle at twice the speed limit. Video footage was broadcast in italian national newscasts for one day an a half. Why? Nobody gets hurt, while other events killed dozens and didn't get so much exposure. And, Why this guy, other than being denounced (well in Italy he won't do a day in prison, i bet), was offered a free track day ticket by a motorcycle association? Get him to witness how his less lucky pals end up against trees, instead.
So, back to topic, maybe we should stop assuming that mass media want to educate us . Too often this is not the case.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
So, back to topic, maybe we should stop assuming that mass media want to educate us .
I think you're the first person I've ever seen say that they thought that mass media do want to educate us. Any given person (writer, camera operator, director, etc) might want to educate people; the media companies want to make money. If putting out educational shows does that, that's what they'll do. If regurgitating sensationalist clap-trap makes more, they'll do that instead.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
So I need to calm down about my toothpaste being prohibited, when poisons can be mailordered and secreted in a ballpoint pen?
What is wrong with people reading this thread who think that just because Polonium isn't quite as deadly as advertised, that it's sensible to prohibit millions of air travelers from taking shampoo on vacation?
--
make install -not war
Do you know that all those examples of easily carrying lethal chemicals on planes is just more support for my point that prohibiting little fluid bottles on planes is stupid?
That's not "ironic". That's my point. Did I make any point about Polonium, except that its availablility makes the toothpaste restrictions look stupid? Didn't I mention that these stupid restrictions should be discarded?
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make install -not war
Yes, but Polonium-210 will kill you if inhaled in quantities as small as a single dust mote, and there's no antidote. Crushing it into a fine powder and dispersing it in a crowded area would probably be more devastating than even bombing the area, and far more horrifying. It would take days to recognize the pattern and probably further days to diagnose, all the while the cloud lingers and kills more and more people. So I don't think it's entirely fair to say "there are far easier ways to [poison people] than with polonium-210," since I'm not aware of any poison this deadly or easily dispersed.
Are there any cases where loose lips actually sank a ship? Or was the phrase just propaganda?
I wrote parts of this stuff
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
So even the simplest criticism of the fake security that makes us unsafe is "Flamebait". No wonder we're stuck with it.
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make install -not war
The stuff sold by United Nuclear is encapsulated in ceramic, thus difficult to extract. Secondly, you'll need to buy a *lot* of it to approach a lethal dose for a number of people, which will raise red flags with United Nuclear and the Feds. Also, keep in mind that the majority of the particles dispersed won't actually be inhaled. Probably the worst you'll do is give some people an increased risk of lung cancer in 30 years. If you wanted to cause mass hysteria, you'd be better off doing certain chemical reactions involving chlorine bleach (NaClO + H2O) that release chlorine gas which *rots* the lungs - it was used as a war gas in WW I. Or even manufacturing a nerve gas like Sarin. All of which would have a larger terror effect than *maybe* causing some lung cancer a few decades down the line.
b-.
Everyone now already knows that this is FUD and what UN sells is just a tiny fraction of the toxic amount which is already just a tiny amount.
What I still do not understand is why anyone would want to use Polonium210 to kill somebody in the first place? There are dozens of substances available to everyone and probably thousands available to a secret service and all of these substances would be as efficient, cheaper, and less problematic for the one who applies them.
So why on earth use Polonium210?
My only explanation so far is that it is an extremely sadistic way to kill somebody: no antidote, it takes days and is extremely painful.
I certainly hope whoever modded this "insightful" was doing it out of some misguided idea that I needed more karma. The idea of some slashdot moderator sitting down and thinking, "You know, he's right! I probably SHOULDN'T suck the juice out of thermometers," while not actually outlandish given my perception of the IQ of the average /. mod, certainly gives me a moment's pause.
Well, with that said, here's some more insightful advice:
You probably shouldn't eat broken glass.
Fire is hot! Best not touch it...
Attempting to breath underwater without the aid of SCUBA gear can be dangerous.
If a woman asks you if something makes her look fat, say no.
And of course:
Do not taunt happy fun ball!
There, if my last comment is any guide, that should get me A +5 insightful.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
AFAIK, they're not the same. Chlorine gas is Cl2. Mustard gas is an oily organic liquid of some type. Not sure what ammonia and bleach gets you, but I've heard not to try it at home :D
-b.
Actually, that gets you Hydrazine- details on the process here.
This is mustard gas. Not the same. Mod parent down.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Ammonia (NH3) and bleach (NaOCl) yields chloramines (NH2Cl) and water. Chloramines, which are a nasty lung irritant by themselves, will in certain pH conditions decompose into (among other things) free chlorine.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Oh, goddamnit, folks, keep up on these things.
When you buy $70 worth of 210Po, you get one one-trillionth of a gramme more or less. About 1/5250th of a fatal dose, and more like 1/20,000th or less of what was used in London.
So to buy a fatal dose it's only going to cost about a third of a million dollars.
You can buy lens brushes with 210Po sources, too.
Jesus.
What they do to themselves as a consequence of their own stupidity is their own problem and sanitises the gene pool.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
... if a fray boy attempts to cross a room without planning his route carefully. I don't see what the magnet has to do with it.
(Actually, one of my best friends in college was a frat guy, and really bright. So my comment is exclusive of him. Now, the frat boy who in a drunken stupor stepped on my head when I was a visiting high school senior, yep, thats the guy who needs the warning label tatooed on his keister.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Surely not someone advocating "Security through Obscurity" on Slashdot of all places?
You can frame it that way if you want to, but another way of looking at it is that we shouldn't be doing their brainwork for them.
Now these possibilities need to be considered by the intelligence community, but not all of them need to be communicated to the terrorists.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Your point is that fear mongering idiots want to stop you from taking toothpaste onto an airplane.
So to prove your point, you are a fear mongering idiot about something (polonium) that's 1000x less dangerous than you are claiming.
Right...
Being both an idiot a hypocrite at the same time isn't going to persuade many folks to your side.
Because it's such a sophisticated and exotic way to kill someone that it "has" to be Putin/KGB that did it... and this is so obvious that it almost certainly wasn NOT Putin. Putin is no dummy - he'd have the guy killed and made to look like an accident if he wanted to kill him (which I sincerly doubt he did). It was presumably done by someone who wanted to people to think it was ("obviously") Putin to discredit him.
All those ideas are common sense among military. And you can be pretty sure that every bunch of idiots would come with those ideas for themselves in a brainstorm session.
The whole idea of living in a democracy can be summarized like that:
NEWS: Our water supply is vulnerable to a terrorist attack!
BAD GUY [bored....]: Humm... ok, now tell me something that I don't know
WE, THE PEOPLE: Hey, you government clowns! you'd better take care of that, or we will kick your asses in the next elections.
You can be pretty sure, that for a terrorist group with money and brains, figuring out things like this is not that difficult. But if you keep things hidden, how can our politicians be held accountable if something happens? I, for one, prefer to have free press informing me if I am safe, instead of relying on politician that keep talking that everything is allright until it's too late for you to run.
Just as an example, did you know that people in Kiev heard about the Chernobyl accident before on foreign radios? Thing about all those people happilly marching on Kiev on a First of May parade while heavy radioative fallout was raining on them, and this just because they didn't have free press...
Your ad could be here!
Hi Ivan, I thought that in our last meeting it was very clear that you're not supposed to discuss our work in slashdot! Now, stop reading those silly comments. I think that your someone must be ringing your bell in 3, 2, 1.....
Your ad could be here!
Man, their prices on aero gel are expensive. $$0 for a little fragment that came off of a larger piece they accidentally broke apart? Rip off. Aero gel is pretty nifty, it looks like a solid gas, but it feels like styrofoam.
My wife is really pissing me off tonight.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Printing it in a newspaper will show just how stupid people are thinking that these things are hard to do and that their government
can somehow protect them.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
chlorine bleach (NaClO + H2O) that release chlorine gas which *rots* the lungs
There was a raccoon family under our shed, and I used exactly this. Very effective.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
From the United Nuclear Polonium-210 webpage:
In addition, there are dozens of other far more toxic materials, like Ricin and Abrin, which can easily be made using common plant material, and are also undetectable as a poison and untraceable.
Even though they were just making a point, it is still funny... "Our stuff isn't good as a poison, but here's some stuff that is!"
1 voice in a sea of voices
Agh, that's just mean! Shooting them would have been kinder, dude.
-b.
"You're not safe!" - The Press
"Safety has been an illusion since the beginning of life" - Any biologist
"Life...don't talk to me about life" - Marvin, the Paranoid Android
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
That was =precisely= what I though of when I read the article :-) Glad I had the patience to search all the way here to page five before posting.
Didn't kill them, they got away. But that way I was sure they wouldn't come back. These animals are very arrogant and aggressive. I had tried to scare them off several times before, and they always came back.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
My national broadcaster doesn't make money.
"Nation shall speak unto nation." is it's motto.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Great, so now we can all expect spam asking us if we want Pol0n!um.
The Dread Pirate [R]oberts & [V]izzini have a battle of wits to decide whoh shall win the Princess, based on the old posioned goblet trick...
R: All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right...and who is dead.
V: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
R:You've made your decision then?
V: Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
R:Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
V: Yes, Australia. And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
R: You're just stalling now.
V: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You've beaten my giant, which means you're exceptionally strong, so you could've put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you've also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
R: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work.
V: IT HAS WORKED! YOU'VE GIVEN EVERYTHING AWAY! I KNOW WHERE THE POISON IS!
R: Then make your choice.
V: I will, and I choose-- What in the world can that be?
[Vizzini gestures up and away from the table. Roberts looks. Vizzini swaps the goblets]
R: What? Where? I don't see anything.
V: Well, I- I could have sworn I saw something. No matter.First, let's drink. Me from my glass, and you from yours.
R: You guessed wrong.
V: You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Ha ha ha--
[Vizzini stops suddenly, and falls dead to the right]
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
A thousand ways to do it (even a fake robbery resulting in death would've been less suspicious), but Polonium poisoning was chosen. It's like someone rents a Bentley for a hit&run: it has flair.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
is that everybody is perfectly willing to assume that the President of Russia personally ordered a critic poisoned in another major country - thus threatening Russia's diplomatic relations with said country if it ever is proven - just to silence a guy who basically was a raving nutcase that nobody paid any attention to. All the while ignoring the billionaire oligarch who was BEHIND said raving lunatic and who is KNOWN to be a criminal and whose associates are KNOWN to be criminals wanted in Russia for crimes against the government and the people,
Meanwhile, the same morons vehemently deny the possibility that Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq in order to secure oil for his family's oil company cronies, or that Cheney has ANY connections with the amount of money Halliburton has made out of Iraq, or that Israel, KNOWN to commit assassinations practically anywhere on the planet regardless of legality, could have anything to do with the assassinations in Lebanon, despite being the only known beneficiary of such assassinations.
Double standard, anyone?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A friend in Moscow tells me that the Russian media - such as every "investigative" programme - are carefully putting forward the sychronised line that Putin has nothing to do with the killing. I speculate that the proposition to media outlets could have been:
"Of course Putin had nothing to do with Litvinenko's murder! Publish this, or you'll end up like Litvinenko."
(One counter-theory put about very quickly was that Litvinenko committed suicide in order to "raise awkward questions" as Putin attended the EU summit. This of course echoes the line put forward immediately after Anna Politkovskaya's murder, that she arranged it herself to discredit Putin. Yes, this was seriously suggested! I was in Moscow at the time.)
you had me at #!
>> If you want my Polonium 210 you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
Sorry, Dude -
If you want my Nyodium MAGNETS, you'll have to
pry them from my cold dead intestines.
- Deja VU!
.
- aqk
F U
lock stock and smokin beryllium
.
- aqk
F U
Why am I not impressed by the level of knowledge in geography from our fellow US citizens?
Yes... but-Ireland is in the
choke) (gasp)
British.... ISLES!
.
- aqk
F U
Good point. If I still had it, I would try that. Thanks.