nuclear-news

Uranium mining and polonium: remember Litvinenko

Roxby’s radioactive risk,  The Independent Weekly. HENDRIK GOUT04 Jun, 2010 “…….Litvinenko was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence operative who turned against the KGB over a range of political assassinations he said had been carried out by the spy agency.He was then murdered, almost certainly by a former KGB colleague acting – so Litvinenko alleged before he died – on the implicit orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The murder weapon was polonium-210, a radioactive metalloid and one of the most toxic elements known to science – a quarter of a million times more toxic than cyanide. A particle weighing less than one-hundredth of one microgram (about the weight of a single scale on a butterfly’s wing) is a lethal dose.

Ten million people can die from just one gram of polonium-210.Fortunately, polonium-210 is rare in nature because it has a very short half-life. Equally fortunately, its radiation cannot penetrate the skin, meaning that for it to kill it needs to enter the body by being breathed in or swallowed. One of the reasons cigarettes cause lung cancer is because of the infinitesimally tiny amount of Polonium-210 found in tobacco fertilised by phosphates……..

On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko suddenly became very sick. It was the day he’d met in a London cafe with two former KGB agents, one of whom was a man called Andrei Lugovoy. Polonium-210 had been slipped into Litvinenko’s teacup.

He took three painful weeks to die.

The British Government attempted to extradite the alleged assassin from Russia. Putin refused to accede to the request. Now a member of the Russian parliament, Lugovoy has since become immune from prosecution or extradition.

And in a prestigious though obscure British medical journal, Critical Care Medicine, an equally prestigious and similarly obscure British physician, Dr Andrew Patterson, wrote 14 words which have become more famous than the doctor himself.

“Litvinenko’s murder represents an ominous landmark,” he said, “the beginning of an era of nuclear terrorism.”

Roxby’s radioactive risk – Local News – News – General – The Independent Weekly

June 5, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia