Originally Posted by
Gertcha
This may seem like a stupid question, but if Polonium 210 can be shielded by a simple cardboard box or piece of paper, then how have traces of it been found on board these aircraft?
I too was wondering why they were finding Po 210 everywhere, including the aircraft. By coincidence I read this last night, in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes, pp579-80:
...for reasons never satisfactorily explained by experiment, the metal migrates from place to place and can quickly contaminate large areas. "This isotope has been observed to migrate upstream against a current of air," notes a postwar British report on polonium, "and to translocate under conditions where it would appear to be doing so of its own accord." Chemists at Los Alamos learned to look for it in the walls of shipping containers when Thomas' foils came up short.