Re: Nuclear Weapons Material

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Matthew Ghio writes: (after a long absence from the list?--welcome back)

> Polonium is primarilly an alpha emitter.  It would work as part of a
> neutron source, but it is not a particularily good choice because its
> half-life is only 138.4 days (polonium-210).  This makes it expensive
> to obtain, and impractical to store.

When we needed sources of alpha particles, we cracked open smoke
detectors and took out the Americium sources.

Later, we found a supplier of "anti-static" modules, for use in air
guns used to clean wafers, each containing 10 milliCuries (!!) of
Po-210. We called this our "Kong source."

Nothing to do with crypto, except that the alphas scrambled data in
our chips.


--Tim May


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