Apparently the author has never heard of Polonium-210, arguably the deadliest substance on Earth. what makes it so deadly is it has an extremely short half life

Apparently the author has never heard of Polonium-210, arguably the deadliest substance on Earth. what makes it so deadly is it has an extremely short half life (~138 days) and releases almost all of that energy as alpha particles. How leathal? Roughly 6.8 trillionths of a gram [1]. Luckily Po-210 isn't a huge danger because of the short half life and it's really only produced by governments in very small quantities. But the point is that any alpha particle emitter ingested is potentially a massive health risk. And what happens at an accident like Chernobyl? It scatters a ton of dust over a huge area that consists of many radioactive isotopes, some of which are just toxic by themselves (eg Caesium) but also some of them are alpha particle emitters. That dust gets into the food chain. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-polonium-idINDEE87T0EJ20120830 https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-po...