Not A Two Pipe Problem

The New York Times , always willing to cater to paranoia where radiation is concerned , spies a propaganda opportunity in Death by Polonium. Yet victims of Gotham mayor Bloomberg's sadistic desire to leave smokers out in the cold should take comfort - The Times has emphasized his campaign's lamentable innumeracy with a paranoid puff piece by Stanford historian Robert Proctor, crusading " witness in litigation against the tobacco industry."

Tying to equate smoking with the asassination toolkit of the KGB,the ingenious Doctor  Proctor notes that " A fraction of a trillionth of a curie (a unit of radiation named for polonium's discoverers, Marie and Pierre Curie) may not sound like much,"

You can say that again. " A fraction of a trillionth of " one amounts to just atoms per hour-  it takes 37 billion of the radiation units called Becquerels to equal one Curie. Named after the Curies' mentor,the Becquerel basicly designates how fast a Geiger counter clicks. That  background count never stops , but it seems lost on Inspector Proctor that everything in our environment , from the human body to Times newsprint ,organic tofu and springwater clicks just as ominously. Everyday objects naturally and ubiquitously contain trillions of atoms of dozens of elementary radioisotopes ranging from potassium 40 and carbon 14 to , of course , uranium, radium, and polonium.

As there are fewer grams of air in the Earths  atmosphere ( <10exp22) than there are molecules in a single  mole of any chemical compound (6 x 10exp23) , every one gram breath of air we draw may contain a molecule or more of every know carcinogen , so long as man or nature has produced it by the kilogram.

Tobacco is a plant of wide distribution- tons of the weed grow wild. So as suely as  lightning strikes ignite forest fires in the state of nature , no human has ever drawn a breath without inhaling first-hand smoke and or lungs constantly contain  not one, but many molecules of the carcinogens it contains . 

Forget tobacco - even broccoli is radioactive, and a propos of polonium, PeptoBismol takes the cake-- stripping smokers of their civil rights will still leave prohibitionists facing  the 7000 Becquerels their own smoke-free bodies contain--and more besides :

1 adult Stanford professor (100 Bq/kg) 1 adult   Bactrian camel       "     "   "	~7,000  Bq   28,000 Bq
1 kg of coffee or granite	1,000  Bq
Air in a dwelling (radon)	3,000 - 30,000 Bq
1 household smoke detector (americium)	30,000 Bq
1 Luminous tritium Exit sign 1  Head of Broccoli 1 Pipe of tobacco, or a cigarette	50,000,000 Bq ~10 Becquerel   > 0.01 Bq

The human body excretes polonium 210 about three times faster than the isotope decays . Since the 0.04 picoCurie  Proctor invokes works out to half a million atoms ingested by a pack -a-day smoker, the equivalent annual  dosage is ~3 × 10^-8 J/kg day) times 365 = ~ 10 microsievert per year, or 1/240 of average background radiation of  2.4 millisievert. So a cigarette adds about one part in 1.7 million to a smoker's radiation exposure.

If counts count , reckoning polonium's place in the hierarchy of hazards is scarcely a two-pipe problem -- smoking a Camel scarely rivals hanging around Professor Proctor for an hour.

Riding a camel is another matter , and Bill Broad reports in today's (Dec 5 ) New York Times that :
“An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe”

   This seems a better buy for spies than extracting polonium from cigarettes. At $7 a pack , 31,500 microcuries worth of Camels would cost $ 33,075,000,000.00. Besides the usual suspects- Strangeloves working for oily oligarchs, those on the case should recall that polonium was once the bane of the Soviet Nuclear Navy's attempt to equip November class subs with  liquid metal cooled reactors- bismuth readily soaks up neutrons, producing 210 Po. So watch out for Russian oilfield hands turning californium 254 neutron slugs used for well logging into bottles of Peptobismol that glow in the dark.

Very little is new under the thermonuclear sun. Long before the UN World Health Organization risked World War III by purloining the ashtrays in the Security Council chamber, or Ambassador Wilson made uranium a hot topic for Secretary Powell, the  pipe-smoking mentor  of the two gentlemen on the right sent them in pursuit of  a radioactive camel, a quest that however fictitious, seems less quixotic than the Times predictable views on second hand smoke.

Comments

[David Gillies]

A few quick calculations give a worst-case exposure for a 20-a-day smoker of 32 microsievert per year. Here's my calculations:

http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2006/12/polonium_210_an.html#comments

[Michael J. McFadden]

This Polonium/Russian/Smoking thing is simply another example of how Antismokers twist truth to their agenda. In connecting the Russian spy's death to exposure to wisps of secondary smoke they are lying in the same way that a lawyer would be lying if he said he regularly gives to charity while in reality just tossing a penny at a street bum once every ten years.

The amount of polonium that poisoned Litvinenko is estimated by MSNBC to have been 5 millicuries. According to a Dec. 1st Op Ed in the New York Times by Robert Proctor, a cigarette emits .04 picocuries. A millicurie is a thousand microcuries. A microcurie is a thousand nanocuries. And a nanocurie is a thousand picocuries. The Russian was killed by the amount of radiation found in the smoke of one hundred and twenty five BILLION cigarettes.

As far as "secondhand smokers" in a decently ventilated pub or casino go, they'd have to work 40 hour weeks, 50 weeks a year around smokers for roughly 6 billion years to absorb that much poison. And even then that fact would only be true if the Lord High Almighty suspended the laws of physics and did away with polonium's normal half life of 138 days.

And of course there's the problem of excretion. During those 6 billion years our poor pub/casino worker would have to suffer from a rather total case of constipation. I'd guess that when the six billion year mark rolled around our poor poisoned worker would be quite happy to pass from this benighted mortal plane.

Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
http://pasan.TheTruthIsALie.com

[dave]

Quoting becquerels is pointless, this doesn't relate to the dose you receive, much less the TYPE of radiation. Who cares how much radiation a camel contains, are you likely to inhale one?

Nothing concentrates damaging alpha radiation more effectively than smoking cigarettes (apart from obviously swallowing polonium salts directly).

[Russell Seitz]

I'm all for doing it in Sieverts,as long as you do the math,including the 210 Po excretion half life.
If you do you will sleuth out that the energy absorbed by the pack a day smoker's body is 183000 Bq × 5.4 MeV @ 1.6 10^-13 J/MeV = ~ 2.7 10^-7 J/day.

A quality factor of 20 yields an equivalent dosage .7 x 2.6× 10^-8 J/(kg day, or ~ 10 microsievert per year.

I think equating 10 microseiverts with a death wish bespeaks a certain timidity, but then I assume riding a camel more hazardous than smoking one.

I have recommended the Bactrian species, as in my judgement reducing the risk of falling off outweighs the doubling of the radiation dose by the second hump.

[work]

My mind is like a fog. I've just been sitting around doing nothing. Today was a loss.

[jeroen lugtigheid]

according to Health Physics Society the max. yearly dose of polonium 210 to be regarded 'safe' for workers to ingest is 5000 mrad. A chest X-ray of which Proctor claims a one and a half pack a day smoker receives 300 per year yields 6 mrad. So the smoker would ingests 6 x 300 = 1800 mrad a year according to Proctor. I must admit this is not nothing but you would have to smoke more than four packs a day to start getting worried about polonium 210.