I’ve been fas­ci­nated by much of the news cov­er­age of the recent death of for­mer KGB agent Alexan­der Litvi­nenko. One les­son: despite hav­ing made it through the cold war, the pub­lic seems pretty igno­rant about radioactivity.

One dubi­ous asser­tion made fre­quently in the media is that the Polonium-210 which appar­ently killed Litvi­nenko is dif­fi­cult to obtain and can be pro­duced only in sophis­ti­cated lab­o­ra­to­ries. Well, here at home I have a Sta­t­ic­mas­ter dust brush which cost me about $15 at the local cam­era shop. It’s use­ful for clean­ing pho­to­graphic neg­a­tives because the alpha par­ti­cles neu­tral­ize the sta­tic charges that cause dust to cling to plas­tics. When new, the brush’s radioac­tive car­tridge con­tained about 500 microcuries of 210Po. Accord­ing to Wikipedia, a lethal dose for 210Po inges­tion is some­where around 525 microcuries.

Now, the man­u­fac­turer of the brush was mind­ful of its tox­i­c­ity and had the fore­thought to encap­su­late the radioac­tive par­ti­cles in a strip of gold. To use it as a weapon, you would have to chem­i­cally or elec­tro­chem­i­cally dis­solve the gold. It doesn’t sound ter­ri­bly chal­leng­ing to me, but I’m not going to try it, either.