Yup, Polonium is not an isotope of Uranium. But the isotope Polonium 210 is an isotope in the decay series of Uranium 238/Uranium 234.

SUPER POWER USA? or

Another trip to the Moon, the Space Station or on to PLUTO?

sub sole sub umbra virens

Salon,

Like other previously loyal readers, I've seen a disturbing decline in the quality of your articles in recent months.

This article should never have gotten past fact-checkers!

Or do you even have fact-checkers?

I never thought I'd say this, but if your quality doesn't improve, I won't be renewing my (is it 4 or 5 years now!) subscription.

The train of thought in several previous letters seems to be:

1. Polonium-210 is readily available as an ingredient in anti-static brushes;

2. Therefore it would be a simple matter to poison someone with polonium-210, in such a way that the death would be very rapid (in the order of weeks rather than many years).

Let me be the first to admit I know nothing about the specific radiological properties of polonium, other than what I've read in these articles and letters. However, none of your letter-writers, who have so quickly concluded that Salon's article was a crock, have dealt with a couple of key issues cited by John Large:

1. The isotope suspected in the Litvinenko case has a very short half-life (making it far from obvious, to my untutored mind, how these ubiquitous anti-static brushes could be the source of a quick-acting radiological poison);

2. When such a metal contaminant is ingested, most of it is normally screened out in the gut, and very little will actually pass into the bloodstream. (Therefore, just because polonium can be acquired simply as part of an anti-static brush, it does not follow that it is at all simple to get that polonium into the human body and make it stay there to do its harm.)

If anyone can address these issues more convincingly and logically than Mr. Large did in the interview, I'd be quite interested.

Pure conjecture:

It would be interesting to know if the poor fellow was a smoker. Po210 could have been placed in a cigarette, or pack, or a cigar as it readily vaporizes. The latter would provide excuse for a box that would provide adequate shielding for the assassin, although people don't inhale cigars.

Perhaps a fancy cigarette holder, which would narrow the list of suspects as such items are relatively rare nowadays.

Another reason to kick the habit.

...but I'm highly doubtful that any number of photographic brushes could kill a person. Hairs get loose from brushes and people do ingest them. If some number of brushes could kill a person from radioactive polonium, than an ingested hair ought to almost certainly cause cancer very shortly down the road. I doubt anything like this would be allowed.

They interviewed Nicholas Priest, a radiologist from Middlesex University, and he said that the anti-static brushes people are talking about here would be too hard to extract a usable quantity from.

This is what he said:

A third way of getting polonium would be to try and extract it from anti-static brushes, which are used in the photographic industry, and you would have about the right amount of polonium there, but it would be very difficult to extract. And these brushes are made so they're difficult to tamper with, and so they're safe.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/july-dec06/poison_11-30.html

Since he was a professional radiologist USING HIS OWN NAME, I believe hm over people posting on the Internet under completely made up names.

If some clever party has found a way to get the Po210 OUT of the anti-static brushes, then this would mean the security they designed to prevent this had been breached by whoever killed Litvinenko.

If these safegiards can be easily breached by one party then they can be easily breached by another.

And so that would mean governments would have to ban the sale of these brushes IMMEDIATELY, because now they're a major risk to public safety.

It is regrettable to mention that Russia has the rights, but any agent want to be part of the system has to get the oath. American goverment under C.I.A guidance have done more harm to Africa and most part of our world than Russia. Any country has the rights to make their own law, Russia law is not our law. Leave Russia alone and look at what is happening to the poor nations by powerful nations. No justice here. Other countries do harm so many times, but Russia does it, everyone all over the world about to complain. Why Russia?

He was laregly unknown before he was killed.

And if they wanted to silence him, I think they would have done it in a quiet normal manner while he was in custody in a Russian prison. He could have easily been killed in a prison fight, for example. Or food poisoning could have gotten him.

Why would they wait until he had asylum in Britain and had already published a book laying out all of the scandalous information he learned in the FSB for the public?

His book is now shooting up in the ranks at Amazon.com.

That doesn't sound very "silenced" to me.

If the murder was meant to silence him, then the people who ordered it must be the Keystone Cops.

This material has been used in very specialised antistatic charge devices, used on film in very special cameras, probably for exotic, i.e., military uses, as a source of positive ions. So you analysis that these is a big hole in this interview is simply wrong.

The half life of polonium 210 is about 138 days -- it is made from iradiating Bi 209 with neutrons to create Bi 210 which (beta) decays to Po 210. Po 210 then (alpha) decays to Pb 206. What this means is that it is exceptionally easy to determine when a sample of Po 210 was made, by determining isotopic abundances using spectral analysis -- since the ratio Bi 210, Po 210 and Pb 206 (or indeed just Po 210 to Pb 206) will tell you how long the Polonium has existed for.

What everyone finds much more curious is how so many British Airways 767s came to be contaminated? How the hell were these guys carrying it, in a salt-shaker, a paper twist. How could they have spilled it in 4 aircraft? WTF?