Apparently the two killers left a trail of Polonium 210 all over London, including a highly radioactive teapot. Given they didn’t discover it was Radiation sickness till shortly after his death and he’d been in hospital for weeks, how many people have drunk tea from that tea pot and what will happen to them?

He said the heaviest contamination in the boardroom and the teapot was “off the scale” at in excess of 10,000 counts per second (cps).

Yeah I wondered that, not sure how easily alpha particles would be displaced again when the teapot was reused ?

Also wonder if lugovi contaminated himself, they apparently didn’t know it was radiation they were using, he’d basically have to invest some but there was a spillage of some sort in his hotel bin
Fascinating and scary stuff

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/alexander-litvinenko-six-things-russia-inquiry

The wikipedia page for polonium is a bit of an eye-opener – I didn’t realise Polonium was also implicated Yasser Arafat’s death …. or that theres polonium in tobacco

Also the poor pot scrubber who washed out the teapot and then put it back on the shelf just after it had been used….

Looks like the pot scrubber is ok, but the next customer to drink from it, not so good!

Alpha particles emitted by polonium will damage organic tissue easily if polonium is ingested, inhaled, or absorbed, although they do not penetrate the epidermis and hence are not hazardous as long as the alpha particles remain outside the body.

There’s some interesting reading about Litvinenko on Wikipedia.

10000 counts per second is a very small amount, compared with what Litvinenko drank, which would have been a couple of hundred million counts per second. I wouldn’t be happy at drinking from that pot, but I wouldn’t be concerned by doing so.

There was a lot of health screening in the aftermath. The authorities used NHS Direct as the first line, and it took 3837 calls, based on which 1844 people were sent questionnaires and 753 of those asked to provide 24 hour urine samples for polonium analysis. About 50 showed contamination at levels corresponding to the sort of risk associated with a medical X-ray. None showed anything close to the levels needed to see acute effects like Litvinenko suffered.

This was actually a rather well managed incident. Lots of stuff has been in the public domain from the time, for example this and this.

Oh and Yasser Arafat- that’s nonsense.

Yeah, the nuclear authority bods are pretty good at tracing and detecting this sort of thing – you can read about all sorts of accidental contamination incidents on wikipedia and the extent to which the source of and path followed by contamination can be traced is very impressive.