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4 comments

• nc

  The cause of the poisoning is Po-210, see:

  http://glasstone.blogspot.com

  Incompetent medics failed to diagnose acute radiation poisoning from internal exposure to the heavy element polonium-210, the most deadly radioactive material on earth due to its short half-life of 140 days (plutonium-239 has a 24,400 years half life so each atom of that emits only one alpha particle per 35,100 years, which is a comparatively low dose rate – the average life is always 1.44 times the half-life with simply one-stage decay chain exponentially decaying radionuclides). …

  Notice Po-210 has a half-life of 140 days, and is a high-energy alpha emitter. Plutonium-239 for contrast has a half-life of 24,400 years so the specific activity of Po-210 (decays per second or Becquerels, per gram) is way higher. The shorter the half life, the more decays per second!Po-210 was used with beryllium as the neutron source (initiator) in the early 1945 nuclear weapons. Alpha particles hitting beryllium fission it, releasing neutrons. This was responsible for most of the deaths after the Windscale nuclear reactor fire in England in 1957. The pile was producing Po-210 for British nuclear bomb tests in Maralinga, but the government kept that secret, claiming that only iodine-131 had been released. (They didn’t want the Americans to know Britain was still using obsolete 1945 nuclear initiator technology!)

  # 24 November 2006, 14:44 pm

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• Dave Malham

  One of the other use for Polonium is as the radioisotope in thermoelectric generators – it has a very high energy output, around 150 watts per gram, so you need very little even given the relatively low efficiency of thermoelectric generators. So, put this together with the reports of xrays showing up three small round objects, one of which looked ruptured and are we actually looking at some kind of tracker whose power supply ruptured, rather than deliberate murder, or is that just toooo James Bond?

  # 24 November 2006, 17:28 pm

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• Irene

  Like the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya and the poisoning of Yushchenko, this is obviously a political murder, ordered at the very top. It certainly adds credibility to Mr. Litvinenko’s allegations that the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999 were carried out by FSB in order to whip up public support for Putin’s barbaric war in Chechnya — he was considered dangerous enough to be taken seriously. It seems that Russia still lives by the golden rule of Uncle Joe — “remove the man, remove the problem”…

  # 26 November 2006, 9:18 am

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• Elias

  Hello: Does somebody has the birth date of Alexander Litvinenko?
  Thanks
  Elias

  # 30 November 2006, 11:43 am

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