Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Litvinenko Case: Crank Amateur Hypothesis 4.0

Information on SLATE suggests that a rank amateur unschooled in either advanced spycratft or nuclear technology could not have been the culprit in Litvinenko's death:
Under very tight controls in the United States, minute traces of polonium-210 are embedded in plastic or ceramic, allowing them to be used safely in industrial static eliminators. To recapture these traces in any toxic quantity would require collecting over 15,000 static eliminators and then using highly sophisticated extraction technology. Such a large-scale operation would instantly be noticed, and its product would be adulterated by residual plastic or ceramic. In any case, what investigators reportedly recovered from Litvinenko's body was pure polonium-210.

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