WI: Polonium-210 used in a Terrorist attack in Water Supply

According to Wikipedia. . . . so it must be gospel!, a 100 grams of Polonium 210 is produced by Russia every year, and 1 gram could kill anywhere up to 20 million people.

What if, a doomsday cult like Aum, or a terrorist group such as Al Qaida managed to get hold of or puchase a substantial amount of P-210, lets just say for arguments sake around 10 grams.

How easy would it be to take a specified dosage (0.5 grams each) and add it to the water supply of a twenty or so water treatment works in a European, Japanese or North American city.

Would it be viable? and if so what would be the consequences?

Regards filers

Would you not have to separate it might be quite hard ?

I think you might well get a very bad response as it could only have come from Russia (would NATO believe it was not allowed/done by Putin/others if it didn't hit Russia but only NATO + Japan ?) and would be likely to be interpreted as stepping beyond the nuclear threshold.........

All-out nuclear war would be the result.

There are many chemical compounds which are easy to make/obtain and fiendishly toxic, no need of anything so fancy (unless you want to frame Russia for the attack).

You might want to go back to Wiki again - it quotes 1mg (1/1000 g) as the mean lethal dose. Given that it's an Alpha emitter (so minimal contact risk) and water systems will dilute it massively, you need a LOT for an effective attack if you are trying to cause casualties - although decontaminating the pipes would be a nightmare.

Half life of about 137 days. A alpha emitter does quite a bit of damage inside the body, but a human would remove it from their body within a few days. Maybe a spike in cancer statistics at worst.

Polonium is removed extremely slowly from the human body and even with aggressive chelation it is a beast.

If you want something less complex to procure and even worse, look no further than dymethylmercury, the stuff nightmares are made of. If the thing is to be breathed, dymethylcadium is your man.

We are really lucky that certain people spend their time reading the Quran and not chemistry books.

WILDGEESE99 said:

How easy would it be to take a specified dosage (0.5 grams each) and add it to the water supply of a twenty or so water treatment works in a European, Japanese or North American city.

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It's soluble.

Problem is, you would need a lot of it to spike a municipal system.

Chicago puts a billion gallons a day thru its water treatment centers

marathag said:

It's soluble.

Problem is, you would need a lot of it to spike a municipal system.

Chicago puts a billion gallons a day thru its water treatment centers

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That's the problem with poisoning most modern water supplies with anything, you need lots and lots of most chemicals to have a noticeable effect.