Two or three times I've read a story in which someone uses the graphite in a golf club to block Kryptonite radiation, and I've thought "What????"
After some thought I've realised that that the error comes from the idea that pencils use lead. Since pencil lead is made from grapite, there's an idea that graphite contains lead. It's a natural assumption, but it's wrong.
Graphite is actually a form of pure carbon, with the molecules arranged a little differently from diamond. The difference means that molecules break off fairly easily, so that graphite is transferred from the pencil to the paper as you write.
Pencil leads really were made of lead until 1500-ish. Around then a big deposit of graphite (at that time believed to be a form of lead) was found in Cumbria, England, and tried as an alternative. That was the only large deposit of pure graphite ever found, and pencils from that source were simply long shards of it. By the 1670s pencils were being made of graphite from other sources, purified, crushed, and made into sticks. They were still a bit toxic because of the other ingredients, but even then there was little or no actual lead in them. Today the toxic ingredients are pretty much gone, a pencil lead is just graphite and clay baked to make a solid stick. Things like the proportions and baking method determine pencil hardness,
So... pencil lead isn't lead, and none of the other things that graphite is used for, e.g. fishing rods, golf clubs, etc., contain any lead at all. They wouldn't be any use in blocking Kryptonite radiation.
Hope someone finds this useful.
