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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.
No it isn't. That's the standard set by OSHA which is several orders of magnitude below the toxic dose in order to prevent health effects in people working with the stuff.
-b.
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.
Check this out: http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.htm l
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
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.
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?
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.
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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if 69 ninjas suddenly attack them
Hmm... how would I provoke such an attack by this particular type of ninja?