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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."
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.
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.
I think Bolonium is a much more appropriate holiday gift. After all, its atomic weight is deliciously snacktacular.
Developers: We can use your help.
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?
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.
...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.
Eh, why not? It's not like you need polonium 210 to kill someone. A big stick can be used for the same purpose, and rat-poison can also be bought over the counter. And unlike e.g. guns, polonium 210 has other uses than to kill people. Most of those reasons advance science.
Apart from that, why should everything you don't have a need for, need to become "a controlled substance"? I don't know about you, but I have no wish to live in a society where everything is regulated, over-regulated, and then regulated again. I'm for gun control, because guns are a big problem in todays society. I'm not convinced that polonium 210 is a big problem in todays society.
Those things are addictive. Polonium 210 isn't.
Because there is nothing special about radiation.
Too many people think of radiation as this magical, unstoppable death ray; I call this the OMG RADIATION!!1! attitude.
Fact is, there's a whole whackload of far more dangerous things you can get your hands on legally and easily, not least of which is any number of guns, which are also very dangerous when handled carelessly or by an unskilled/untrained operator.
Cigarettes and alcohol are pretty dangerous too, and I couldn't even begin to list the deadly poisons we can stroll into any store and buy completely legally. You can start with the pest control isle, then add the majority of the cleaning isle, and then maybe a lot of the automotive liquids (antifreeze in particular is a dangerous thing if you've got pets or children around), then tack on much of the agricultural isle. Note that I'm not listing products, I'm listing store sections, because that's how readily available these things are.
Honestly, the only reason to prefer radioactive substances to poison someone is because it plays right into the OMG RADIATION!!1! attitude, which even here on "enlightened" slashdot is in ample supply. It's just another deadly poison; no less, but no more.
(To break yourself of the OMG RADIATION!!1! attitude, I recommend the following: Learn about background radiation levels. (If you think that "normal radiation" levels are "zero", you are firmly in the grip of OMG RADIATION!!1!.) Learn how X-Rays work and how they compare to background. Learn about how smoke detectors work; odds are very good that you are within a few tens of meters of an OMG RADIOACTIVE! substance. This will either break you of panicking, or give you a heart attack; either way you'll be free of OMG RADIATION!!1!.)
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.
Eh, why not? It's not like you need polonium 210 to kill someone. A big stick can be used for the same purpose, and rat-poison can also be bought over the counter. And unlike e.g. guns, polonium 210 has other uses than to kill people. Most of those reasons advance science.
Polonium 210 doesn't kill people. People do.If you want my Polonium 210 you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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
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
Uh, right. And we should just give nukes to every country in the world, because then we wouldn't need to worry about Iran and North Korea having them.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
And unlike e.g. guns, polonium 210 has other uses than to kill people.
Ugh. The vast majority of guns in the US have never, nor will they ever, be used for killing people. Seeing as how we have so few natural predators left, hunting is an absolutely vital element of the wildlife conservation effort in many countries. Hunting provides healthy, lean meat, untreated by growth hormones and antibiotics, it controls populations, reducing disease and famine, it provides funding for programs that preserve wildlife habitats....
Guns can be used for a lot more than shooting people.
"Honestly, it's kind of odd that someone would have poisoned the guy with polonium. I mean, there are so many other types of poisons ..."
Ok, Name me one.
Name me one which doesn't cause any effects for several days after ingestion, so I have time to get out of the country and clear all my tracks. And after that, causes unusual symptoms so that doctors will be confused. And, after ingestion, though it causes no immediate symptoms, is 100% fatal no matter what medical support is provided. As well as being tasteless, odourless, colourless and only requiring a minute dose to kill. While not being a great danger to the administrator....
Seems to me you're pretty much stuck with a radioactive substance. And of all radioactive substances, an alpha-particle only emitter is the easiest to conceal from radiological detection.
Unless, of course, you know different?
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!
I avoid radiation at all costs. Most of the time I sit safely in front of this CRT screen here reading Slashdot.
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?
Mercury Poisoning
A lot less sophisticated, but just as effective. And you can even administer it externally.
As for confusing the doctors, it's obvious that a radiological material failed to do that. In fact, most hospitals have rather extensive radiological areas and procedures. So the chances of the symptoms eventually being recognized are fairly high.
If that still doesn't fit the bill, there are dozens of slow acting poisons from medieval times that would confuse the heck out of modern doctors.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
In most cases it's a combination of the two...the chemical properties will ferry the isotope to a sensitive location where the radiation can wreak havoc.
For example, a weak alpha emitter can be held in the palm of your hand without any effects. An element that acts as a drop-in calcium replacement in the body can benignly sit in your bones. Combine both properties, and you'll have irradiated bone marrow and a world of hurt.
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.
As the article says, these guys are selling quantities of 0.1 microcurie. The maximum allowable dose for ingested Polonium-210 is 0.03 microcurie according to Wikipedia. (Quote: 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. )
Note that "Maximum allowable body burden" is far from lethal. That is the amount where your employer has some explaining to do if you work at some place using polonium and that amount is found inside you; on the other hand, 0.02 microcurie would be considered fine. So eating one of those 0.1 microcurie things will be unhealthy, but I don't think it would do you permanent harm.
I was told that there are about 300 million guns around in the USA, and each one is capable of doing a lot more damage than 0.1 microcurie of polonium.
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.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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.
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.
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Uhm, the vast majority of guns in the US have never, nor will they ever, be used for hunting. And a typical hand-gun is also completely useless for hunting. However, I have nothing against people who are gun-nuts either. If they want to spend their time down at the shooting range, firing at cardboard silhuettes of arabs, it's their choice. What I want to do, is to limit the number of people who choose to keep a loaded gun somewhere in their house, where it waits to be stolen, played with by their children, etc... just because they believe it will somehow "protect" them if 69 ninjas suddenly attack them.
And I didn't say anywhere that I was against guns. I said I was for gun control! Which is a completely different thing than being against guns in general.
Gun control would imply such things as
It's amazing that we have this for cars, but not for guns.
If you want my Polonium 210 you'll have to pry it from my hot dead hands.
There, fixed it for you.
-- Alastair
Not to mention sleeping together with someone increases your dose from the Evil Potassium. (Still about 0.1 millirem per year extra :) By contrast normal background is about 50-100 mrem/yr, and smoking a pack a day gives you about 1000 mrem/yr.
-b.
if 69 ninjas suddenly attack them
Hmm... how would I provoke such an attack by this particular type of ninja?
whatsoever effect ill no felt and
Oh yes. It's astonishing how much higher the levels of dangerous nuclide being belched out of coal plants are than are detectable around nuclear plants, for example.
Radon, as a heavier-than-air gas, obviously sinks. A person living in a basement apartment might have 1000% greater yearly environmental radiation exposure than someone living in a high-rise.
And I'm sure flight attendants who routinely work the long trans-Atlantic routes get hit with a lot from space. Etc.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Tau-neutrino.
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.
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.
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!
You have not thought this through.
The car analogy. Oh Gods! Cars are driven at high speed on public roads. People operating them had better know how to avoid running into other people, which means understanding traffic laws.
You need no license, no vehicle registration, and no insurance to drive on private property.
Guns cannot be used in public except in exigent circumstances involving prompt commission of a violent crime by someone else. You may also note that it is legal to drive vehicles without a license, without registration, in the event of an emergency.
Guns are not evil. They do not have consciousness or souls. They create no problems by themselves. They are not chemically unstable, radioactive, or biotoxic. (Lead is moderately toxic, but if you want to do something about that, push to unban less-toxic and non-toxic "armor-piercing" ammunition. That term is one of the worst frauds about the entire gun regulation system: the notion that some solid ammunition is "armor piercing" and some is not. It is all a matter of degree. Chunks of metal hurled at high velocity are dangerous. Period. They will go through some stuff, and not go through other stuff. BTW, the worst fraud is that "silencers" are treated identically to guns. Thanks to that bit of genius legislation, significant hearing loss is an ever-present concern for shooters.)
Guns are pretty much undetectable when carried in public, and the means of production (machine tools) are not regulated. There is a large market for guns, like drugs. Reasonably accurate firearms like AK-47s can be made in machine shops; they were made in villages in the Soviet Union during the cold war.
More accurate firearms, and specially treated barrels, require CNC machines and cryo facilities, but those are also unregulated.
The only way to get rid of guns is to fight them like drugs: pick people semi-randomly, and use any excuse you can to invalidate their 4th amendment rights so you can search them, their car, their home.
You worry about known criminals with guns? Keep them locked up, or support the death penalty for more violent crimes. You don't want them walking around with guns? I'd rather they weren't walking around at all. The nature of our society is such that it can't defend against evil if we knowingly allow evil to walk among us.
Even if it were true that a world without guns would be a better place, that world is unattainable. Guns are here to stay until more effective weapons arrive.
The best we can do is:
As for background checks, WHY?! Guns are not the only means of murder. If you're worried that some John Doe buying a gun is a murderer, you should be worried about John Doe whether or not he has a gun. If he's a murderer, he will kill people. If he can't get a gun legally, he'll get one illegally. In the unlikely event he needs to kill someone right now and can't find a gun on short notice, he'll use a brick, a kitchen knife, a chainsaw (GOOD HEAVENS, THEY SELL CHAINSAWS WITHOUT BACKGROUND CHECKS? OHMY SWEET JESUS!), or the Americium from a bunch of smoke detectors.
sorry for the semi stream-of-consciousness nature of this reply, but I don't feel like reorganizing it.
We don't have these rules for cars. You don't need a driver's license to own a car, or even, strictly speaking, to operate one (on private roads, with the owner's permission). You only need the license and registration to use the vehicle on public, State-owned roads. The equivalent for guns would be something like a concealed-carry license requirement (i.e. a license to carry the gun in public areas), which already exists in most places and typically follows the guidelines you've specified.
Private owners can reasonably refuse to allow you to carry a gun onto their properties, and the government (presuming for the moment that their claim to ownership of "public" property is legitimate) can reasonably restrict possession and/or use of guns on public property, but nothing gives either of them a legitimate right to restrict possession or (non-aggressive) use of any sort of weapon on one's own property.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat