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A Beginners List of Water Poisoning Agents
Getting Lots of the Stuff for a Discount and Viral materials
Date: 27 Nov 1998 08:39:57 GMT
From: "Jacob Busby Bsc." <ITDCJB@hants.gov.uk>
>Skimming through the ICE CAVE gave me an idea for a scenario, and
I was
>wondering if any chemists out there had any idea how
much
>plutonium/uranium (perferrably in grams) had to be reacted to
create
>about a 1 mile radius blast? That's just a small distance I
thought
of.
>I'm assuming if I wanted to know how much it would take for a
2 mile
>radius, I'd just double the number given to me, am I wrong?
On a similar theme, what material (and how much would you need) to poison or irradiate the nearest reservoir? How long would the water be undrinkable?
From: Davide Mana
>On a similar theme, what material (and how much would you need) to
poison or
>irradiate the nearest reservoir?
Time to shine the old Environmental Data Analyst background
Maybe I'm too conservative, but I would not use nuclear material to poison water; there's lots of other stuff you can use that's easier to get, safer to handle and just as nasty:
...
Just go for the azchem of your choice, even if (as I fear it shows) I'm partial to metals. This way, the poisoning can always be interpreted as depending on malpractice or plain hu man stupidity. You walk away with no problems, while people gets some really nasty effects (a lot of metals get concentrated in the body fat and make up your very own Toxic Time Bomb).
The quantity depends on the volume of the reservoir, but usually we are working with a few parts per million.
[so that to poison a 1 million litres water reservoir you'll need less than 1 litre of mercury]
>How long would the water be undrinkable?
This depends again on the volume of the reservoir, and also on the mixing of the reservoir and on the inputs and outputs of water. You'll have to calculate how long it takes for the whole water mass to be renewed.
The material of the reservoir is also important, natural reservoirs being generally better at cleaning themselves than artificial tanks: clay in a lake can act as a sponge and collect by adsorption a good part of the stuff you pour in.
[on the other hand, the stuff adsorbed and concentrated by clay stays there, becoming a "Toxic Time Bomb", you only need to mobilize it (during a flood, for instance) to cause real trouble - Toxicity Spike is the name of the game]
The worst case is a big concrete reservoir for rainwater, of the kind used in some cases for irrigation purposes. There are no currents, no constant freshwater input, no clay to filter the stuff. A chemical (or some fixile stuff) "dropped" in the water can pollute it almost indefinitely. You water the crops and...
Different materials have different permanence times in the system. As already noted, Ammonia is bad but goes pretty fast, while Cadmium is a killer and has a long permanence time.
A few other infos in this sense can probably be gathered at the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) web-site. I hope I remember the right URL
should do the trick.
From: Phil A Posehn
I presume that you mean Methyl-mercury.
Metalic mercury can sit there in the water quite harmlessly, doing little other than forming an amalgam with any gold that comes its way for centuries...as most California gold miners know.
Methyl-mercury and soluable mercury salts on the other hand, are very nasty indeed!!
So is the vapor in a poorly ventelated area.
The miners in the Almaden mine in Spain were only allowed something like 16 hours a month underground and still ovten had to spend 12 hours in a sauna sweating out the mercury.
From: Rob Shankly
Of course, the traditional thing is a Colour Out of Space....
(Cut)
> - mercury (another killer: 1 ppm is considered High Pollution by
the EPA)
(trim)
> The quantity depends on the volume of the reservoir, but usually
we are
> working with a few parts per million.
> [so that to
poison a 1 million litres water reservoir you'll need
less than
> 1 litre of mercury]
(cut)
My back-of-envelope calculation says a reservoir of 3km x 1km, average depth 10m, would require 30 litres of Mercury. If I remember correctly Mercury has density of about 13.5, so our poison would weigh >400kg (900lbs, more or less). How easy is it to obtain that much heavy metal?
As an aside, it is quite challenging to do a net search on "Mercury" without ploughing up a collection of sites dealing with the dangers of dental amalgam. These people clearly don't think about the risks of infected teeth. But that's another topic.
Does anyone have any clues as to the amount of bio-weapon required to affect a reservoir? Types and delivery method?
From: Davide Mana
Phil A. Posehn rightly observed
>I presume that you mean Methyl-mercury.
Sorry.
I did not think it could cause any confusion, but sure, I meant salt or other soluble forms of the elements mentioned. Dropping a brick of silver in a pond is not a good way to poison it, while a few fistfuls of silver salts....
[you want insoluble killer particles? I can give you that too... but you'll have to breathe them, not to drink them]
But just in case, let's not forget other stuff that can come in handy...
[is there a chemist in the house?]
All of the above are routinely found in rivers and other water courses, and all can be cancerogenic _at best_.
Their concentrations are usually measured in parts per billion, so you get a pretty idea of what it takes to kill off a medium sized city. Also, all these compounds have the nasty habit of being concentrated by the medium to fine sized sediments, so all can cause Toxic Time Bombs.
Incidentally, anyone living downriver from a fuel deposit is probably getting his fair share of the above and then some.
From:Graeme Price
>My back-of-envelope calculation says a reservoir of 3km x 1km,
average
>depth 10m, would require 30 litres of Mercury. If I remember
correctly
>Mercury has density of about 13.5, so our poison would weigh
>400kg
>(900lbs, more or less). How easy is it to obtain that much
heavy metal?
Depends (in the case of mercury). It's generally not available in large quantities, and asking for 400kg of elemental mercury (or salts) will raise eyebrows to say the least, but if you wanted to you could probably file an order with a chemical company, provided you could file the requisite paperwork. Checking with my handy chemical supply catalogue reveals the following data: Mercury, 99.999% pure: 500 g costs US$84.30... meaning that 400 kg will be roughly $67,440 (but you could probably arrange for a bulk discount. Yes. Really.).
>As an aside, it is quite challenging to do a net search on
"Mercury"
>without ploughing up a collection of sites dealing with
the dangers
of
>dental amalgam. These people clearly don't think about the risks
of
>infected teeth. But that's another topic.
Actually infected teeth are a quite different matter. In the antibiotic age, they really don't pose that much of a problem - other than cosmetic. Of course, a lot of antibiotic resistance genes are switched on by mercury (as part of the bacterial response to environmental stress)... so you're damned either way really!
>Does anyone have any clues as to the amount of bio-weapon required
to
>affect a reservoir? Types and delivery method?
Again, depends on what type of organism/toxin and reservoir size. Diffusion rate could be a problem (for toxins, especially) unless there is a strong current. Then you have stability issues, including whether or not the agent survives the treatment process. Putting the agent directly into the water mains (circumventing the treatment processes) would be a better option....
There are plenty of agents that could be used (botulinus toxin, the various staphylococcal toxins, hepatitis A and E viruses, Norwalk virus, Cholera, Giardia, Cryptosporidum etc.), but I have a suspicion that it's not quiet as easy to do as it would seem on paper.
