Regardign radioactivity and the time delay to detect.. well you basically must look for it.. it doe snot come out ina nomral test. You need to know that first, you ahve a poisoned patient.. and then guess that radioactivity can be the case...
SO.. unles yu have the brilliant idea .. you do not do the test.
Regarding Polonium 210..the main problem for transport and use I think is heat or porobably light. Being alpha and not neutrons makes it very easy to shield...
Still... I woud not put a gram of substance because of the brilance..
Thanks a lot for the comment.. great
A pleasure I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude
mmhh a cubic milimeter takes too much effort to control...I prefer soemthing alittle bit larger... around 3 mm on one direction if it is a salt grain type..10 cubic milimeter for me with rughly 0.1 g... 1.4 watts...
yeah I see... I thougt it was less than 1.4 watts for my killing dosis...
It is amazing how mcuh detaisl you can get if you google it.. you really can make until the last detail... 1.4 watts-- yeah maybe alittle bit toomuch.
I will put it on 50mg with the precise data yu bring to the table....
But in any case.. I would have get an A+ in the order of magnitudes funny exam in first year of udnergraduate...my teacher will be proud..
How many "afinadores de pianos" are there in Chicago..and how much mass of Po210 would you use if you want to poison someone .. I now know both answers... :)
By the way, looking at wikipedia's Radiation poisoning page, we can guess the dose he received. It was no more than 6 Sievert (based on the time it took for him to feel indisposed)
6-10 Sv (600-1,000 REM) Acute radiation poisoning, near 100% fatality after 14 days (LD 100/14). Survival depends on intense medical care. Bone marrow is nearly or completely destroyed, so a bone marrow transplant is required. Gastric and intestinal tissue are severely damaged. Symptoms start 15 to 30 minutes after irradiation and last for up to 2 days. Subsequently, there is a 5 to 10 day latent phase, after which the person dies of infection or internal bleeding. Recovery would take several years and probably would never be complete.
2-3 Sv (200-300 REM) Severe radiation poisoning, 35% fatality after 30 days (LD 35/30). Nausea is common (100% at 3 Sv), with 50% risk of vomiting at 2.8 Sv. Symptoms onset at 1 to 6 hours after irradiation and last for 1 to 2 days. After that, there is a 7 to 14 day latent phase, after which the following symptoms appear: loss of hair all over the body (50% probability at 3 Sv), fatigue and general illness. There is a massive loss of leukocytes (white blood cells), greatly increasing the risk of infection. Permanent female sterility is possible. Convalescence takes one to several months.
More than 80 Sv (>8,000 REM) U.S. military forces expect immediate death. A worker receiving 100 Sv (10,000 REM) in an accident at Wood River, Rhode Island, USA on 24 July 1964 survived for 49 hours after exposure, and an operator receiving 120 Sv (12,000 REM) to his upper body in an accident at Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA on 30 December 1958 survived for 36 hours; details of this accident can be found on page 16 (page 30 in the PDF version) of Los Alamos' 2000 Review of Criticality Accidents.
my god.. never imagine that search!!
But we have a problem here with the does and the days in hospital.
I mean. If he really took only 6 Sv, 1 mg is also way too much.
there is soemthing wrong in these figures. It does not match what I thought I had read. I will be back.
One miligram emits the same amoung of radioactivity than 5 gram of Radium. The radioactivity of 1 gram of Ra.. which is basically 1 Curie
So we are dealing with 150 GBq.. roughly
But the realtion between the decay and the energy is not straigthforward. I do nto know how many Bq produce 1 Sievert. It actually depends onthe enrgy carrier. Int his case alpha particles. Bq is just the time per second that an alpha particle hits ana rea..how many energy carries 150G alpha particles?
From this you get the enrgy accumulated.. this msut be divided by one or two other of magnitudes depending onthe tissue, the distance and all that stuff.
At a committed effective dose equivalent (CEDE) of 5.14×10^−7 Sieverts per Becquerel (1.9×103 mrem/microcurie) for ingested 210Po and a specific activity of 1.66×10^14 Bq/gram (4.49×103 Curies/gram)[4] the amount of material required to produce a lethal dose of 10 Sieverts would be only 0.12 micrograms (1.17×10−7g). The biological halflife is 50 to 30 days in humans.
One order could be explained by effective dose and another rounding problem, tissue staff, effective values and so on. But three orders of magnitude is too much.
Problem is micrograms are very difficult to transport..
I quite do not believe I can be so off the park. and that micrograms and not miligrams is the appropriate order of magnitude.
I will check it again.
Although miligrams would make the mixture extremelly easy...while micrograms.. well you need certain basic infraestructure.. first to trasnport the Po 210 probably mixed among other powder and then transported.. homogonize the mixture adn then mix it with the liquid.
It tkaes a ini-lab... something anybody can get ( i can do it in my house I know ehre to buy the stuff).. but it needs some tiem indeed.
It says that the specific activity is 1.66 10^14 Bq/grt when actually Po 210 is like 5 gr of Ra. 1 Ra generates just 1 Curie or 3.7*10^10
So we are talking about roughly 1.6 *10^11 and not 1.6 *10^14... Here there are three orders of magnitude.
Am I wrong?
So if this ratio is correct I guess there is some problem with the way the energy reaches to the tissue or I had a missmatch of three orders of magnitude.
I would bet that the ratio between Bq and actual energy in the tissue is not the given in the wiki article.
I will need some proof about this ratio.
Another option is to mix the amount of polonium in another substance so that alltogether is easy to handle.. but this would require some studd that you can not have at home..
IN our case knowing that 1mg of Po210 is as radioactive as 5 gr of Ra..
:)
"Radioactivity", but not Polonium - radioactive thallium - was mentioned much earlier than this weekend. How much time does one need to check out urine for a pretty strong alpha radiation?
