Lenin's Bismuth-210 Effect

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We know that the death of Litvinenko is most likely a deliberate act because there is no way that a Russian spy would poison himself with such a rare substance as polonium or that a food or drink company would put in purposely. Thus, people whom he knows really well and is against must be the ones behind his death especially due to some issue between each other. For instance, when he was given injunctions to slaughter an influential Russian business magnate, Alexander Litvinenko ended up disobeying those orders and then publicly exposing the matter among other KGB and FSB activities, on the international stage. This act of his angered the Kremlin as a whole and the director of the FSB, Vladimir Putin to a very high level because this disclosure …show more content…
For example, you need to get bismuth-209 and then bombard with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. However, a particle accelerator can be used as well. In this process, bismuth-210 gets created which is known to have a half-life of five days. Afterwards, bismuth-210 decays into the element we need, polonium-210. This change occurs due to beta decay. Once this is made it can be used as poison to kill others. For instance, if it is combined in some type of dissolvable salt, then you can easily later add it to some food or drink by stirring or mixing it into the substance. Alexander Litvinenko’s cup of tea which he had drank, showed evidence of bars which showed levels of polonium-210 that were basically off the charts. Thus, his fellow Russians enemies which he went against held a conspiracy against him in order to end their problems that revolved around him. Killing his through this poison tactic was definitely a deliberate planned out …show more content…
Moreover, it spreads over time, thus, polluting the environment. This ends up leaving its trackings behind, which is known to be a property called creeping. Nevertheless, I also found out from another source known as http://www.iem-inc.com/information/radioactivity-basics/decay-half-life, that half-life the time for half of the radioactive nuclei to experience a radioactive decay. Therefore, the rate at which is decays is measured due to the consequence of of the emission of the radiation. Moving on, similarly to the article on how it leaves trails behind, half-life can be served as fingerprints to date organic materials. Adding on, I found out that half-life ranges from microseconds to billions of years which connects to polonium’s half-life of 138 days. The significant part is that half-life depends upon a lot of radioactive atoms being present themselves in order to actually predict when one-half of them have decayed. Nevertheless, I also wanted to some other information on this matter so I used another website, https://www.nde-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/RadiationSafety/theory/decay.htm. From there I found out that, decaying takes a long process because to change from an unstable atom many steps and radiation are given off at each step. Additionally, an element does not only decay due to giving off energy and matter but at a rate that is characteristic to itself. Yet, once it