I found a link to this article on Cheat Seeking Missiles and couldn’t resist commenting on it. The passage in question reads:
Here’s the most fascinating part of the story:
“Sasha (Litvinenko) remembered the man making him a cup of tea.
“His belief is that the water from the kettle was only lukewarm and that the polonium-210 was added, which heated the drink through radiation so he had a hot cup of tea. The poison would have showed up in a cold drink,” he added.
My instincts tell me this won’t pass the smell test.
One thing about radiation is that people don’t know a whole lot about it, and they’re likely to pass along any stories about it, no matter how wrong they may be. It’s true that radiation dose is measured in terms of energy deposited per unit mass of a target, but a lethal dose of radiation corresponds to a very small amount of energy, and thus to a very small change in temperature. If you absorb enough radiation to increase your temperature noticeably, hyperthermia will be the least of your problems.
I ran some numbers:
I just went to the Health Physics Society’s information sheet for Polonium-210 and looked up some numbers.
According to the sheet, a microgram of the stuff will give a whole-body dose of 5000 rads. This is lethal enough for most purposes; we don’t have the medical technology to fix that kind of damage yet.
Going back to the sheet, the specific activity for Po-210 is 166 trillion disintegrations per second. Each disintegration releases 5.3 MeV of energy. After multiplying together with a bunch of conversion factors, it turns out each gram of Polonium-210 will yield about 33.7 calories per second.
A microgram of Po-210 mixed into a teacup of water (call it 150 grams of water) will heat that water at the rate of a quarter of a millionth of a degree per second. That means, after a day, the radiation will have driven the temperature of the water up about a fiftieth of a degree.
If you decide to up the dose by a hefty factor, just to make sure, multiply this by whatever factor you use. You’ll reach insane doses long before you reach reasonably perceivable temperature changes.
While we’re at it, consider the temperature of whatever container our assassin must be carrying. If our container has a mass of 2 grams, and a generous heat capacity half that of water, it will be increasing in temperature at a rate 150 times that of the teacup-full of water. Something that will produce, say, a 10°C rise in temperature in that cup of water in a minute will raise the temperature of the vial by 150° in that same minute.
Long before our assassin got through customs, that vial would be literally burning a hole in his pocket.No, this story doesn’t pass my smell test.
Nevertheless, it’s consistent with mainstream media fact-checking skills.
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