Polonium for Sale? Thursday, Nov 30 2006
risks 8:57 am
Only eight results, is Google censoring, or are there really only eight pages that have this phrase? The front page story in the Chronicle yesterday was that polonium was available cheaply online, yet this CNN article calls it “one of the world’s rarest elements”, with only 100 grams being produced each year. Wikipedia says that even tiny amounts are dangerous, so maybe only a microgram is enough to kill?
“How to make polonium” also appears to be censored on Google, though it could just be that polonium was almost entirely disregarded up until now, or that most of the literature concerning it is holed up in scientific journals or classified documents.
The whole Polonium/Russian thing is a huge news story here, having dominated the headlines for a week. One possibility which seems to have been overlooked is that it might be nothing to do with Russia and could instead be a more general attempt to contaminate the food chain by some terrorist group.
Whilst this alpha particle emitting radioactive material is normally fairly harmless, not being able to penetrate a piece of paper (and I remember that from school physics lessons), if ingested through food or water, or inhaled from a contaminated air conditioner it would be cause for concern.
Whatever the cause and reasons for the current scare turn out to be, this case does highlight just how easy it would be for terrorists or “rogue states” to cause widespread fear and economic dissription, if not much actual damage.
Yes, you guessed correctly. An expert on NPR mentioned that 1 ug of Po can kill a person. So 100 g, if apportioned correctly, could kill 100 million people.
Also, doing a single search, especially with quotes, doesn’t tell you much about the availability of certain things on the Internet. Many things are “available” on the Internet, but you have to dig a little deeper and know where and how to look. Some things are listed on international trade sites like tradekey.com. Some trade sites are not indexed by search engines so you have to search them directly.
Some things are listed under code words. Craigslist is notorious for having ads for prostitution under code, and I’ve heard that occasionally even illegal drugs are sold on there, although I don’t know about the accuracy of that claim (I wouldn’t be surprised, though).
The moral of the story is that people in the criminal trade (black market) are somewhat savvy and you have to learn to be savvy like that too. *Obviously* if anybody could just type “I want polonium” and find it, that operation would get shut down in a heartbeat.
Polonium is a decay product of uranium-238; twelve kilos of uranium would be sufficient to produce a microgram of Po-210. The tricky part is extracting it; microgram quantites are very hard to handle with amateur equipment.
“Erbium for sale” gets even fewer results, even though erbium is a legal, available, not-very-deadly element. People who do have erbium for sale simply don’t put that exact phrase up (see http://www.unitednuclear.com/elements.htm).
Oh, and polonium-210 sources are available at http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm, with a full explanation of how they’re legally for sale to the general public. Polonium is also available (in tiny quantities) on anti-static brushes and sparkplugs less than a year old.
Martin,
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm
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