Posted on 12/02/2006 6:20:16 PM PST by woofie
No luck shopping for that hard-to-buy-for science hobbyist in the family? The rare isotope linked to the death of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko is surprisingly easy to buy - in fact, for $69, it's a mouse-click away.
The polonium-210 you can get online from a Sandia Park mail-order company, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, is available to the general public in 0.1 microcurie units, an invisibly tiny amount that's exempt from federal licensing restrictions, according to the company's Web site.
In a note on the site, United Nuclear founder Bob Lazar says it's not a practical poison: You'd need 15,000 orders from him, more than $1 million worth, to potentially harm anyone, and each order comes electroplated on the inside of the eye of a needle.
Lazar - a former Las Vegas, Nev., resident who gained attention years ago for claiming to have worked on a crashed UFO at the Nevada military base known as Area 51 - was out of town and not available for comment Friday, said Michelle, his customer service agent.
Michelle declined to give her last name and said she could not answer any questions. But she noted that Lazar recently updated his Web site to deal with the clamor over polonium-210 that followed Litvinenko's death.
The site (www.unitednuclear.com) says it aims to put the fun back into science by selling an array of scientific materials and equipment, as well as things like science-themed T-shirts and coffee mugs.
Polonium-210, used by the former Soviet Union in power supply systems for spacecraft in the 1970s, also can be used in industrial devices, such as those designed to eliminate static electricity.
The United Nuclear Web site says it sells only one or two orders of polonium every three months. With a half-life of just 138 days, the doses are made to order at a federally licensed reactor in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and shipped directly to the customer.
And the statement on the United Nuclear website is very similar to the one in the Sunday Times (UK) story.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1747654/posts
If the stuff is this expensive to produce, was the KGB trying to send a message besides "don't betray us?"
Maybe "we've got Polonium?" "we have cash, or had cash?"
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