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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Po210 is readily available to the general public in quantities greatly exceeding what is needed to kill a man. Nobody uses it as a nuclear bomb trigger any longer. With a 138 day half-life, one would have to swap out the initiators at least once a year, which would involve disassembling the entire weapon. It was used in the first atomic bombs, but it is not practical for weapons that must be stored for long periods. Nor is it very useful for thermoelectric generators on satellites, the half-life is too short and it is too expensive. Plutonium is usually used these days, as in the Cassini spacecraft. Instead, the most common use by far is in anti-static devices, such as Staticmaster brand brushes, which contain 500 microcuries of Po210. Here is a product that contains a whopping 31 millicuries of the stuff for $225.00:
http://www.ricelake.com/docs/viewProduct.php?productID=91906
That is about ten times what it would take to kill a person. Litvinenko is thought to have been poisoned with five millicuries. Ordinarily these devices are very safe, the polonium is plated onto a strip of gold foil, which is then overplated with more gold, sealing the polonium source inside. One could probably swallow this strip without causing significant injury. However, if one were to dissolve this strip (it is a tiny amount of gold) in a bit of an acid solution called aqua regia, that would transform the metal polonium (along with the gold) into a water soluble salt, readily absorbed from the gut. This would obviously be hazardous to whomever was preparing the poison, but the risks could be obviated by a few simple precautions; a makeshift glove box would probably be adequate if one was careful. The question of whether anyone but a KGB assassin would have thought of this before it happened is open to debate, but the means to do it is available to anyone with $225.00 and a minimum of technical knowledge.
Again, this doesn't mean these devices are dangerous, used properly they are positively benign and very useful. Lots of things can be deadly if misused. A pack of cigarettes contains enough nicotine to kill five men if administered properly.
Too often when someone says something is hard to do, what they mean is that they wouldn't know how to do it, and that is what is going on with a lot of the reporting about this incident. Here is a fact sheet on Po210 toxicity from the Health Physics Society:
http://hps.org/documents/po210_information_sheet.pdf
You can see from this fact sheet that the amounts of Po210 available in a just few anti-static brushes would easily do in your average Russian spy.
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