From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 94 10:54:39 PDT
To: ghio@chaos.bsu.edu (Matthew Ghio)
Subject: Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
In-Reply-To: <199408231658.LAA11167@chaos.bsu.edu>
Message-ID: <199408231753.KAA12786@netcom4.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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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Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
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