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Where is the reactor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where is the reactor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Russia could just come out and say they killed the guy, but with the power they pushed on the Ukraine on energy supplies, the Russians have much more leverage.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would the US want anything to do with it? This is an issue between the UK and Russia.
US is for strong sanctions against Iran over their nuclear program. Russia is against such sanctions. EU is somewhat-maybe-possibly... On top of that, US is against the sale of air defense weapons to Iran, because it would obviously make it harder to invade. So what do we have? A big scare is started in Europe that involves "Russia" and "nuclear". Given that an average person won't care for the difference between palladium and uranium -- they both sound scary, the timing of the whole thing is really we
It doesn't much matter.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think any higher up (in organized government) would be dumb enough to order a hit this sloppy. The FSB, underfunded and undermanned as they are, is still very professional. They (the FSB) would have known that the radioactive elements would be traced. Personally, I'd bet this was done by some elements of government that are mafia (very common and they can afford to be sloppy since they are much harder to track). The dead guy had a long history of making enemies...
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Re:It doesn't much matter.... (Score:4, Interesting)
You know what, about 95% of people in Russia do NOT care about Politovskaya and Litvinenko. Most of reactions in Russian forums and blogs were 'Oh? What?'. Politkovskaya had almost ZERO influence on Russian politics because she supported Chechen militants back in 90s and she is _always_ against the government (she's a nutcase). Few more years and she would slide into oblivion.
Actually, you might say that Politovskaya became popular after her death.
BTW, nobody believes that FSB has killed Litvinenko. They are not that sloppy.
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The Putin Bride (Score:5, Funny)
[TMB]
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UK lab declines to name specific nuclear plant. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Deadly polonium traced to Russian nuclear plant [thisislondon.co.uk]
2. Plot Thickens as Spy Poison is Traced to a Nuke Plant in Putin's Russia [nypost.com]
The second source suggests that the isotope composition is the signature that identifies a specific power plant. However, the Atomic Weapons Establishment declined to give the location of the plant.
I am sticking to my original guess of the culprit: a renegade group in Russia. Various reports have indicated that numerous factions, answering to no one, operate within the Russian government. One of these factions likely committed the crime.
Putin is just too smart to kill someone in such a blatant way. He would have known that such a gruesome murder would have serious negative consequences.
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Re:UK lab declines to name specific nuclear plant. (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, Litvinenko, Politkovskaya (and his friend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Berezovsky [wikipedia.org]) are not real threats to Putin. They are considered 'political corpses' since about 2002. Most people under no circumstances will support either of them.
But these guys are token 'democracy fighters' for most Westerns who do not know intricacies of Russian politics. Now ask yourself: why would Putin kill them?
So it's much more complex than you think.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Could the guy have been smuggling radioisotopes using the same method as drug mules (condoms full of product) and had an "accident"? Polonium is an alpha emitter, and is thus not dangerous unless absorbed. And a condom would block the alpha particles quite nicely. I'm not sure how bioavailable pure polonium is, but if it were in the form
Re:Where is the reactor? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Where is the reactor? (Score:5, Insightful)
We still don't know just how much of this polonium is around our normal lives to be worried about the scaremongering.
Good lord.
When was the last time you heard of an accidental death traced to ingested Polonium?
When was the last time you heard of any death caused by radioactive poisoning that couldn't be immediately traced to an industrial accident or something of that sort?
It's pure coincidence of course when Russian made Polonium kills a Russian dissident living in exile in Britain.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, half of it. oops. Guess that point doesn't hold up in physics. Damned science. A small amount still would have been present for an indefinite period. Still, damned lucky someone grabbed a counter. I assume the hair falling out and the leukemia was a screaming pair of clues.
Re:Where is the reactor? (Score:5, Informative)
1. Its half life is a convenient 120 days or something (not microseconds or decades).
2. It decays to lead 208 which is stable.
3. It is a pure alpha emitter (no beta or gamma) which makes it relatively safe to handle as long as you do not ingest it.
Polonium-218 has none of these properties.
They sell small amounts of polonium-210 in those little plastic red disks you find in high school chem labs. United Nuclear [unitednuclear.com] was selling them for like $69. You'd need to buy a lot of disks to kill a Russian spy.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is a small gamma component to Po-210 decays, but only something like
The United Nuclear sources are 0.1 uCi. Antistatic brushes are available with up to 500 uCi, and industrial ionizers can contain up to 40 mCi.
Re:Where is the reactor? (Score:4, Informative)
Po-210 is a daughter product of Bi-210, by beta decay. Halflife for this is only about 5 days, so if you start with Bismuth-210, you will very rapidly get a material that is mostly polonium-210, and then the 138 day half-life for that is a choke point that will give you an increasing percentage of both Po-210 and Lead-206. Whoever is testing the Po-210 technically had to check for Bi-20, and Pb-210 to see if the original source was something higher up the chain. The didn't really need to test for Po-214, Bi-214 and other very short lived intermediates (and probably couldn't), but probably had to test for Radon-222, as that has a half-life of just less than 4 days, long enough for traces to remain if that's where the reaction started.
It's really a fascinating risk issue (although I'm sure fascinating is not a word a person on the receiving end would use). If someone was originally poisoned with anything above Lead-210, then whoever handled it had to act very quickly from isolating mostly pure any one form to delivery. Lead-210 is technically doable, but if some spy had to take it from a reactor to the target, would be half decayed to Po-210 by the time he could get there. Po-210 is the first step in the chain where you have something relatively hot, but not decaying so quickly that refining a relatively pure amount is near impossible, and at the same time, for the same reasons, it's the first place in the chain where the refined substance would be optimally safe to handle for long enough to carry it to the target and deploy it.
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A cold chill in relations? (Score:5, Interesting)
An even bigger chill will occur if we get too uppity with Russia about this. As a major supplier of European natural gas, we could be sitting freezing in our homes within a week or two if Russia turned off the taps. We have been on the verge of a gas crisis [blogspot.com] here in the UK for some time now.
Diplomacy cuts both ways, and I dare say the UK government isn't going to push this too far given the energy situation.
Re:A cold chill in relations? (Score:5, Insightful)
Build more atomic power stations and invest in reprocessing technologies and you won't have to worry about the Russians. You're still using MAGNOX reactors from the 60s since the NIMBY (not in my backyard) crowd has blocked building of new ones.
-b.
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Re:A cold chill in relations? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A cold chill in relations? (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I checked, electrical resistance heaters for cooking and heating homes had been around for the best part of a century. In the British climate, which is moderate year round, you could probably even get away with using heat pumps for climate control since the winter temperatures (at least in Southern England) seldom stay below freezing for long.
-b.
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Re:A cold chill in relations? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and since my power comes from the local nuclear plant, I'm not sending clouds of greenhouse gases and radioactive carbon isotopes billowing into the atmosphere.
The depressing part is that the house and the nuke plant were put up in the 70's
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Re:A cold chill in relations? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bad for nuclear energy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a terrible event for nuclear energy. Directly connecting murder to radiation poisoning to only-in-nuclear-plants-production is devistating for public opinion. It won't matter that radiation generated by polonium can't even pentrate paper, let alone paper; that it is lethal (if ingested or inhaled) is what will stick in people's mind. Worse yet, news reports other people unrelated to the victims showing signs of minor levels; one analyst called it the 'equivalent of a dirty bomb' which is ludicrous but it'll still going to stick in the public's mind just as we really need to start developing new nuclear plants and technology.
Re:Bad for nuclear energy (Score:5, Informative)
What's worse is that coal contains traces of natural polonium. Burning coal releases more radioisotopes into the atmosphere than the equivalent energy production by a decently-run (i.e. no serious accidents) nuke power station.
-b.
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Gah! Not more on the Polonium! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gah! Not more on the Polonium! (Score:5, Insightful)
He was a British citizen, or at least was granted asylum.
I know that Bush has played into the whole Gen-X apathy towards politics and history, but you have to understand that poisoning another country's citizen is called "an act of war". Really.
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in soviet russia (Score:5, Funny)
So who's next? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think people forget the massive loss of face the Russians suffered when communism collapsed. Perhaps the Kremlin want to repair some of that damage and get back to what they believe Russia should be doing, which is running the world and dictating its energy policies. I guess the good news is that the Russians are usually too disorganized and hung-over to be much good at that.
How did they trace it out to some Russian reactor? (Score:3, Insightful)
I also have an opinion on that murder if it interrest anybody :
I have a conspiracy theory for you: foe of putin where seeing that putin position wasn't that bad right now, and they wanted a quick way to dredge dirt on him. So they procurated polonium then killed a resident in another country which was a vocal agaisnt Putin in a so SPECTACULAR way that it will be for a long time all over the media with all finger pointing at Putin. I do not see what Putin wins by making it so spectacular. True other vocal group might get afraid, but with it all over the media they might be emboldened to go forward and be more vocal, so that it will be even more difficult to elimnate them. No I think an old fashionned car "incident" and an old fashionned "push" in a train station at rush hour or an even more old fashionned slithing of throat would give as much a signal to the other vocal people without even being able to point finger at Russia. But polonium ??? Come on, they could have as well have tatooed "Putin killed me" on the forehead of the guy. This is why I think it is more convoluted and simply guys wanting to pee on putin did this to slime him all over. It looks like it was a total success from what I see in our media...
What were they thinking, anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're a major nation, and you can't pull off a simple hit? I mean, it's pure evil, but if somebody gave me the job I don't think it would take me too long to find a mobster, tap into his network, and get a decent hit-man who could pull off a plausible "robbery" where the guy got shot, or a car "accident" or even the good old standby like a bomb wired into the ignition. But NooooOOO. They had to go scattering radioactivity that would produce collataral damage, potentially ruining international relationships, and best of all... leaving a trail of radioactive breadcrumbs leading right back to the source!
What are they going to do to the guy who came up with that idea? Send him to China and then explode a dirty bomb in his apartment in downtown Beijing?
they also traced the sushi he ate to the ocean... (Score:4, Interesting)
"That's typical" of exotic radioisotopes, he said. "We can't compete with their prices."
Re:Could Putin ever be so stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Could Putin ever be so stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
Because he was publishing embarassing exposees about Russian politics. His book Blowing Up Russia [amazon.com] blames the Russian government for the apartment bombings used as an excuse for escalating the war in Chechnya. It's easy to see why some would want to shut him up permanently.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't suppose anybody could tell *when* this radioactive material was made in Russia.
I bet you actually could tell when this material was made, or at least last purified. Po 210 decays into Pb 206, which is stable. Assuming there's enough Pb 206 to outnumber the natural Pb 206 in the human body (Pb 206 is naturally in the environment making up 24.1% of all lead), you could measure the ratio of Po 210 to Pb 206 and determine how "old" the Po 210 is, since that ratio would go down as the Po 210 "ages".
The
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As for who did it, nothing tells your cri
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, just swallowing the source and having it pass through your system is unlikely to do serious damage. Intestinal mucus would probably block the alphas pretty nicely. The source would have to be in a bioavailable (absorbable) form - i.e. some bare metals or preferrably a soluable salt.
-b.
Re:A question I have about the poisoning? (Score:5, Informative)
Alpha radiation can't penetrate skin. So superficial contact with an alpha emitter isn't really a concern. OTOH, if you ingest/inhale an alpha emitter (like polonium 210), then your internal organs can be exposed to it. This, obviously, is a bad thing. In polonium's case, IIRC, it's soluble in bodily tissues, and has a very short half life of 138 days, so it's quite dangerous (remember that half life and radioactivity are inversely linked).
Beta, gamma and neutron radiation are somewhat different. Those can get through skin, so superficial contact is a potential concern. Beta is blocked by aluminum foil (get out your tinfoil hats!), gamma and neutron require denser materials such as lead, or thicker, less dense materials like deep soil. Neutron radiation has the added hazard of neutron activation (it can render previously safe materials radioactive).
Additionally, ionizing radiation from sources other than radioactive decay, like X-rays and UV, can generally be bad for your health; these can be seen as less serious than gamma radiation, but more serious than alpha (UV is blocked by sunblock for example). Non ionizing radiation is de facto harmless, barring intensities severe enough to cause thermal burns.
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Re:Further clarification (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium [wikipedia.org]
Which is indeed radioactive (and a gamma emitter to boot), but has a longer half life than Polonium (hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days). Remember that decay is a finite process; the longer it takes to finish, the less radiation is emitted per second. So Americium isn't as strong as Polonium.
Plus, the quantities used in smoke detectors is small - less than a microgram. You'd need an awful lot of smoke detectors to amass a dangerous amount of Americium. That doesn't mean you couldn't kill somebody, but it's a poor choice to slip into food or drink.
What makes Polonium an attractive poison is the lethal dose. You don't need to slip much into someone's food to kill them. Other alpha emitters aren't as good candidates in this regard. Now, as to why they used a radioactive poison in the first place, I don't know; perhaps they wanted to send a message?
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Re:Further clarification (Score:5, Interesting)
This does denote a very sophisticated organization though. Polonium is not easy to obtain, and most people don't think polonium when they want to off someone. As a matter of fact, the method of death often points to the group - everyone's got their favorite methods.
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Re:More like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, the Cold War "victory" was of the same type as the "victory" over Germany after WW 1. The Allies beat the Germans, but they left an impoverished, dispirited people who were educated and in possession of fairly advanced technology. The time was ripe for a charismatic leader to come in with promises of wealth and victory and rebuild their war machine. Same goes for Russia ca. 2006.
-b.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More like... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not convinced that Putin did it. In fact, we're unlikely to know for certain *who* did it. Ever. The guy made a lot of enemies, and there are also a lot of people who'd be glad to sacrifice one ex-spy to make Putin look like a villain.
-b.
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Re:More like... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not convinced that Putin did it. In fact, we're unlikely to know for certain *who* did it. Ever. The guy made a lot of enemies, and there are also a lot of people who'd be glad to sacrifice one ex-spy to make Putin look like a villain.
-b.
Hell, the state-corrupted media has even gone as far as suggesting that the former spy killed himself, perhaps with the polonium 210 pack all spies carry.
The fact is that killing dissidents is old Soviet SOP, the fact that it is making a come back with an old KGB guy at the helm is no real surprise. In my mind the only real question is 'does Putin know or is it being done without his knowledge by those who benefit from his coattails?'. Frankly, I suspect the latter, but only because I don't really want to piss him off, because every one knows what happens to his critics.
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Re:More like... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some who say that Bush (or the Jews) plotted 9/11, but there are also some who still believe OJ is innocent, that aliens do anal probes, and that a Nigerian will make them rich. P. T. Barnum never did say "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute", but whoever did gave a fair estimation of the availability of gullible people.
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Re:More like... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:More like... (Score:4, Insightful)
Which, for the record, isn't exactly a happy thought.
It's like still being friendly with President Musharraf after Pakistan has been implicated in spreading nuclear technology all over the place; we don't hold him responsible for the actions of the rogue intelligence agencies that control his counry's nuclear technology.
Still, I don't think this was done around Putin's back. He's a serious hardball player, not some two bit general riding an out of control tiger.
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Re:More like... (Score:5, Interesting)
-b.
The cold war never ended. The soviet empire coming down was a farce [amazon.com] according to KGB agents who defected. Notice that book was published back in 1984.
Russia is slowly getting back onto her feet economically. She paid off the last of her Paris club debt from the Soviet era under Putin. She helped Bush stumble into the Iraqi war by provinding false intellegence [myway.com] much like America did to Russia to lure them into Afghanistan years ago. The spike in oil prices has helped the Russian economy. So why was Litvinenko killed? Well, he was alleged that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB [bbc.co.uk](KGB)in Dagestan in the years before the 9/11 attacks.
The US is still fighting the cold war by proxy, even if they don't realize it.
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