> Lidden pleaded guilty to offences under Australia's nuclear non-proliferation act that carry a possible 10-year jail sentence.
The bureaucratic apparatus, especially dealing with law enforcement always concentrates people who enjoy punishing others. Is Australia particularly bad about it perhaps? It seems they get some kind of sadistic enjoyment out of it. It's scary that everyone in the chain here: judge Leonie Flannery, Australian Border Force officials, police, even his employer just had a grand 'ol time punishing this guy. Everyone could have stopped, realizing it's obvious what's happening, give him a warning have him turn in this sample.
And the best part for them, there is no repercussion for it. Everyone can turn around and publicly proclaim they just "did their job".
It does this because "the purpose of the system is what it does"
It ain't no different than the king's men occasionally cutting down a peasant that didn't remove his hat quickly enough when the king rode by. By screwing people on a whim the system sends a "don't cross me, I hold complete power" message which acts as a force multiplier (until it doesn't but Aus isn't there yet).
No, Australia has a very rigid import control system for biosecurity purposes, because the country is currently free of various animal and plant diseases which are endemic in other countries. One infected piece of fruit could, they believe, destroy an industry.
Arguably plutonium guy is being hit with the book precisely to remind everyone who wants to come to Australia that they take import control very, very seriously.
(as well as, you know, the xenophobia that gets involved in any discussion of borders)
I'm an Australian, and Australia is absolutely terrible in this regard. There's a saying: the problem with Australia isn't that it was founded by prisoners, it's that it was founded by prison guards. I've lived in quite a few countries and never found anywhere with as many smug and self-righteous people as back home. There used to be two kinds of Australia: the larrikin (fun loving, prankster) Australia, and the wowser (fun hating) Australia, but in recent years the wowsers have thoroughly won.
This has become a kind of stock character (or, at least, a stock archetype for characters) in Australian media, and can be seen in lots of e.g. Australian or heavily Australian-influenced films, often portrayed in a basically-positive, if imperfect, light. This sort of attitude toward life and behavior is on display among several characters in the Peter Weir film Gallipoli, for instance, including and especially Mel Gibson's. In that film, the wowser-est folks are mostly British, because national myth-making :-)
I lived in Australia for five years and this is exactly the reason I left. Everyone is a stickler, NIMBYs own the cities and the police are always out to get you. Australians have an undeserved reputation for being "laid back" but they are absolutely the opposite. Any chance for a new rule or regulation is embraced by the population.
"I've lived in quite a few countries and never found anywhere with as many smug and self-righteous people as back home."
This is pretty much my experience too although the UK would come close.
"…the larrikin (fun loving, prankster), …and the wowser (fun hating) …but in recent years the wowsers have thoroughly won."
Any Australian who's not aware of this hasn't been around long enough to notice it. Frankly it's horrible, I now feel as if I'm an alien and no longer belong here.
I've my own thoughts as to why this cultural shift has occurred in such a comparatively short time but there'd be little point me posting them here. I wonder if there's any proper research on this, if not then I'd suggest it'd be deemed politically incorrect/too hot to handle.
The best is when they use flimsy arguments about needing to "make an example" or "discourage this behavior" or "create a deterrent", as if people in these situations are even aware they're doing anything wrong.
> (...) as if people in these situations are even aware they're doing anything wrong.
Does this excuse even fly? I mean, do you actually believe that a guy who is a self-described "science nerd" with enough interest in chemistry to sought to get a sample of each element of the periodic table would somehow skip any and all references on how the element is subjected to nuclear proliferation restrictions?
Awareness that you're doing something wrong is a spectrum. Obviously this guy wasn't intending to build a nuclear bomb, but I'm extremely skeptical that a science nerd could get to the point of building a periodic table collection without learning that plutonium is dangerous and heavily restricted. (The source article doesn't cover this, so just to make sure we're on the same page: plutonium is _not_ any more legal to export from the US than it is to import into Australia, and whoever sold it to this guy was almost surely breaking the law too.)
The Royal Australian Air Force shut down airspace over an air force base to test fire a “high-powered” single-shot .50 caliber rifle. They are a parody of themselves.
Bureaucracies generally busy themselves by going after soft targets as they represent easy wins, an extra line item for the yearly review.
There is a popular Australian TV show called Utopia that satirizes modern Australian government bureaucracies, I am lead to believe that it is quite accurate.
That said I would expect clemency in the sentencing.
> That said I would expect clemency in the sentencing.
I feel the same. Intent and impact matters. Intent: It is up to the judge to decide if the defendant's intent was pure/non-violent -- I believe it is. Impact: From the news, we can see the material never reached the defendant, and it was safely captured. So the actual impact is zero. (To be clear: I am not apologizing for him breaking the law!)
This is a great opportunity for the attorney general office to recommend a special punishment: A long suspended sentence (5 years is reasonable) with no jail time and a X-year (X=1?) commitment from the defendant to participate in a public education campaign.
I don't think he should go to jail, and it could have been handled better, but i still think laws against purchasing/importing dangerous substances are reasonable, and a fine is reasonable in such a circumstance.
>Also, speed limits in some states can't be enforced from 0 to 5mph over the limit.
In my country that's also true (with marigin larger than 5mph), but my understanding is that that's because the measurements instruments (laser-based speed meters) are not perfect and it may be a mistake and not actual speed limit breach.
Some methods of measuring car speed don't have this limitation, like range-based measurements (check time when car enters road segment, when it leaves road segment, and make sure the average is under the speed limit).
The attitude of all boundaries being fuzzy is probably more harmful than anything else. You end up with a bunch of laws that aren't laws but just overdone public guidelines. A speed limit should be the limit. If we're agreeing on a Speed Recommended then it should be called that instead. Those are states with a speed limit and then they've encoded the limit in the law as (limit - 5). It doesn't change much except to annoy the pedants and make it harder to figure out what is actually legal.
Never been there...but my impression (mostly from articles on British news web sites) is that Australia has long had a reputation for systematized legal sadism.
Particularly the Australian border security industrial complex.
Ostensibly a great idea to protect Australian agri-business (don't kind yourself it's not about the environment). But in practice hasn't been particularly effective in achieving its stated goals [1][2][3].
Extremely effective at bullying autistic kids interested in chemistry though. There's a lot of stories.
> And the best part for them, there is no repercussion for it. Everyone can turn around and publicly proclaim they just "did their job".
More than no repercussions; they all make a very good living from this. When Australia decides that they are going to ask to put him away for 10 years, they're saying that they're going to spend at least a million dollars on this incident. They know what happened, they know that it's a pointless expenditure, but they're still going to make it.
They're going to pay lawyers, use courtrooms and the time of judges, investigators and regular officers, all in the service of hopefully housing and feeding an unwilling adult for a decade. Triggered by a nerd importing an infinitesimal amount of plutonium for his nerd collection.
It will somehow be even more shameful when they go through all of this, and then the prosecutor drops the charges, or asks him to plead guilty for no time, no fine, and no record if not arrested for a similar thing outside of some time period. That will mean all of this was just makework.
My only conclusion is that either they don't have enough to do, or they are refusing to do things that are difficult. But either way this nonsense should be taken as an opportunity by management and the public which is currently highlighting government employees that it would be good to fire or replace. They don't have a problem with procedure, they have a problem with personnel.
I’ve seen ads for buying small quantities of elements including selling a full periodic table. We probably all have. I wonder how many of us on HN could have been in this poor guy’s position.
The writeup makes it sounds typically Australian in a massive law enforcement overreaction over something innocent and minimal.
In Australia, most major criminal matters are handled at the state level.
The Commonwealth Director of Prosecutions has form for this. They don't do much other than welfare fraud cases, and so when they get a brief that's actually interesting for a change, they tend to go full ham.
Whether it's actually in the public interest for them to prosecute isn't a factor they seem to give much consideration.
Such ads are common for uranium, which is less dangerous and thus less restricted. Plutonium is extremely illegal and not included in any periodic table collection I've ever seen.
From the collections of elements that I’ve seen, they’d likely include some uranium in that slot, with a note that there’s a chance of trace amounts of plutonium present from natural decay.
Fun fact: Americans are seemingly allowed to own up to 1.5 kg of yellowcake. (That's pure uranium, refined from uranium ore, but not enriched to extract the 0.7% U-235 from the 99.3% U-238.)
The atomic weight of Uranium is 238; the atomic weight of Oxygen is 16. By weight, Triuranium octoxide is ~84% Uranium. Even if you're only counting the uranium in the Triuranium octoxide, that's still 60+% of the total mass coming from Uranium Atoms. I'd take that purity any day.
Yeah "They terminated him for lack of transparency and honesty", which is ridiculous since the opposite was the case. (He was being transparent and honest towards his employer that he is being investigated.)
We have (had?) good employee protections but these have been degraded over time especially in the lower end of the job market. The train union is fairly powerful, if he had completed his training the termination probably wouldn't have happened but trainees get less protections.
This poor bugger has only done "the right thing" at every stage and has been completely screwed for it. Shameful. Makes me ashamed to live here.
Small uranium samples are very often used to test geiger counters and is pretty common and not dangerous unless it becomes dust. Even then a far cry from anything massively concerning.
in terms of spicy rocks doesnt the specific plutonium(number) make a massive difference?
According to the Luciteria listing linked by other commenters, this was a microscopic sample of plutonium, as plutonium oxide, enclosed as part of an old Soviet smoke detector. It's like the radioactive americium source used in modern smoke detectors but made with an element one atomic number lower.
A plutonium bomb core requires a mass of several kilograms. This sample was 35 nanograms, or about 11 orders of magnitude away from being a nuclear weapons proliferation risk. The authorities might as well accuse someone of running a biological warfare program for having bacteria on their house's doorknobs.
In addition to the minute quantity, this analysis of a Soviet smoke detector source shows that the plutonium was mixed isotopes, containing only about 73% Pu-239:
Technically, I think it would get shutdown. Plutonium, U-235, and some other stuff requires special approval to own. But it's possible that if it's not pure and was part of a product, that it might be overlooked. There's probably a few nanograms of Plutonium in the legally allowed Uranium samples that you can own.
Outlawing tiny samples of specific elements is so ridiculous. Whats he gunna do with it, nuke a small ant hill with it? Make a neat spectrograph of it?
You can buy bleach at the store, but if you drink a mouthful of it you're probably toast. We don't ban things just because they kill you when you eat them.
Honestly no. That guy was fucking around and found out in the end. This guy ordered something that was basically supposed to be a novelty for collecting purposes and has been fucked for it.
> border force officials had engaged in duplicitous and unfair conduct by returning some of the material to Lidden after initially seizing it
What was the reasoning here - why was the material returned? I assume this would happen in some exceptional scenario and the default behavior would be to seize it. Is it not the case?
The behaviors demonstrated by Lidden here in the article sound to me like classic autistic behaviors. Is there any protection under the law in Australia for the fact that he's acting out an obsession tied to his "personality disorder"? Obsessive collecting, the interest in trains, and ultimately an overabundance of honesty and trying to rigidly follow rules to his own detriment, the court system should also be looking out for him as a defendant and not furthering this travesty of justice.
I don't agree with that part. The immediate cost will be outweighed, I expect, by the impact on the judge; possibly, if Lidden isn't jailed, on the employer who will remember that Lidden was so honest under pressure and at personal cost; and on everyone around Lidden for the rest of their life, having earned trust that few of us have.
As someone raised to place, I later had to learn, dangerous levels of value on honesty and forthrightness and to assume that others would largely do the same, unless they were, you know, those relatively rare bad people... yeah, I'd guess it's just going to result in bad stuff, almost entirely.
Cheaters never win, liars never prosper—sadly, these are closer to being the exact opposite of the truth, than to being true. Substitute "usually" and "often" and it's getting near to the truth.
If Theodore Gray (the eccentric millionaire co-founder of Wolfram) doesn't have a plutonium sample in his famous periodic table, I really doubt there's any available for sale in the US, outside of NRC-regulated places. He'd had found one by now, if one existed.
Is it possible someone confused plutonium with polonium? That's the Occam's razor here.
And this is the biggest weakness of the current top down model of governance that we have.
Id like to see a system where judging those who have supposedly done wrong is done almost entirely by the community, not the government. Government/security forces (including police) intervention should be a last resort.
The law has little gaps like this where someone well meaning who is not intending to break a law inadvertently does so.
Minorities tend to have the law applied to them more harshly.
Not everyone has safe access to the legal system, i.e. undocumented migrants.
If you are in a marginalised group and have a crime committed against you, your experience will likely be different compared to what a white heterosexual christian male would experience.
I would also like to see a world where undocumented migrants can report to the police without fear of their residency status, where they are judged by their peers who also may be undocumented migrants, where they are provided the basic necessities as a human right such as food, housing, education, and medical care.
In such a world I would gladly go move to Japan in an undocumented fashion with 30 million of my closest friends and enjoy the human rights of housing, food, and education.
> Id like to see a system where judging those who have supposedly done wrong is done almost entirely by the community, not the government. Government/security forces (including police) intervention should be a last resort.
I'm sure all those children abused by priests will agree with you.
Putting uranium under some neutron flux one can probably cook some plutonium on the kitchen table (and bury the whole kitchen or even the whole house deep underground after that :)
> Lidden pleaded guilty to offences under Australia's nuclear non-proliferation act that carry a possible 10-year jail sentence.
The bureaucratic apparatus, especially dealing with law enforcement always concentrates people who enjoy punishing others. Is Australia particularly bad about it perhaps? It seems they get some kind of sadistic enjoyment out of it. It's scary that everyone in the chain here: judge Leonie Flannery, Australian Border Force officials, police, even his employer just had a grand 'ol time punishing this guy. Everyone could have stopped, realizing it's obvious what's happening, give him a warning have him turn in this sample.
And the best part for them, there is no repercussion for it. Everyone can turn around and publicly proclaim they just "did their job".
It does this because "the purpose of the system is what it does"
It ain't no different than the king's men occasionally cutting down a peasant that didn't remove his hat quickly enough when the king rode by. By screwing people on a whim the system sends a "don't cross me, I hold complete power" message which acts as a force multiplier (until it doesn't but Aus isn't there yet).
you wrote a lot of words to mean "they want to send a message"
and that's what's happening to plutonium joe over there: a not so gentle reminder to the rest of the country not to import shit you shouldn't.
and often in cases like these they do a quite "good behavior" release a year later or something. sometimes, anyway.
What's the recommended way to handle being in such a Kafkaesque situation?
No, Australia has a very rigid import control system for biosecurity purposes, because the country is currently free of various animal and plant diseases which are endemic in other countries. One infected piece of fruit could, they believe, destroy an industry.
If they fine someone $3k for a chicken sandwich, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/fined-3300-for-chicken-sandwic... , what are they going to do with plutonium?
Arguably plutonium guy is being hit with the book precisely to remind everyone who wants to come to Australia that they take import control very, very seriously.
(as well as, you know, the xenophobia that gets involved in any discussion of borders)
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>Is Australia particularly bad about it perhaps
I'm an Australian, and Australia is absolutely terrible in this regard. There's a saying: the problem with Australia isn't that it was founded by prisoners, it's that it was founded by prison guards. I've lived in quite a few countries and never found anywhere with as many smug and self-righteous people as back home. There used to be two kinds of Australia: the larrikin (fun loving, prankster) Australia, and the wowser (fun hating) Australia, but in recent years the wowsers have thoroughly won.
> larrikin
This has become a kind of stock character (or, at least, a stock archetype for characters) in Australian media, and can be seen in lots of e.g. Australian or heavily Australian-influenced films, often portrayed in a basically-positive, if imperfect, light. This sort of attitude toward life and behavior is on display among several characters in the Peter Weir film Gallipoli, for instance, including and especially Mel Gibson's. In that film, the wowser-est folks are mostly British, because national myth-making :-)
I lived in Australia for five years and this is exactly the reason I left. Everyone is a stickler, NIMBYs own the cities and the police are always out to get you. Australians have an undeserved reputation for being "laid back" but they are absolutely the opposite. Any chance for a new rule or regulation is embraced by the population.
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Hopefully they make a come back
"I've lived in quite a few countries and never found anywhere with as many smug and self-righteous people as back home."
This is pretty much my experience too although the UK would come close.
"…the larrikin (fun loving, prankster), …and the wowser (fun hating) …but in recent years the wowsers have thoroughly won."
Any Australian who's not aware of this hasn't been around long enough to notice it. Frankly it's horrible, I now feel as if I'm an alien and no longer belong here.
I've my own thoughts as to why this cultural shift has occurred in such a comparatively short time but there'd be little point me posting them here. I wonder if there's any proper research on this, if not then I'd suggest it'd be deemed politically incorrect/too hot to handle.
Is this basically the source of a lot of Rhys Dharby jokes?
The best is when they use flimsy arguments about needing to "make an example" or "discourage this behavior" or "create a deterrent", as if people in these situations are even aware they're doing anything wrong.
The message being sent is "even if we can't prove intent we still can completely ruin your life"
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> (...) as if people in these situations are even aware they're doing anything wrong.
Does this excuse even fly? I mean, do you actually believe that a guy who is a self-described "science nerd" with enough interest in chemistry to sought to get a sample of each element of the periodic table would somehow skip any and all references on how the element is subjected to nuclear proliferation restrictions?
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Awareness that you're doing something wrong is a spectrum. Obviously this guy wasn't intending to build a nuclear bomb, but I'm extremely skeptical that a science nerd could get to the point of building a periodic table collection without learning that plutonium is dangerous and heavily restricted. (The source article doesn't cover this, so just to make sure we're on the same page: plutonium is _not_ any more legal to export from the US than it is to import into Australia, and whoever sold it to this guy was almost surely breaking the law too.)
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The Royal Australian Air Force shut down airspace over an air force base to test fire a “high-powered” single-shot .50 caliber rifle. They are a parody of themselves.
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> Is Australia particularly bad about it perhaps?
We may need to gather more data. He's literally the first person to be sentenced for a law which has been on the books for decades. In the meantime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
> Judge Leonie Flannery, Australian Border Force officials, police, even his employer just had a grand 'ol time punishing this guy.
Maybe? I'm gonna wait until after the sentence has been imposed to decide whether it's excessive or not.
> It seems they get some kind of sadistic enjoyment out of it.
> Everyone could have stopped, realizing it's obvious what's happening, give him a warning have him turn in this sample.
I think the sad truth is that they are probably ignorant enough to not even think about it.
Bureaucracies generally busy themselves by going after soft targets as they represent easy wins, an extra line item for the yearly review.
There is a popular Australian TV show called Utopia that satirizes modern Australian government bureaucracies, I am lead to believe that it is quite accurate.
That said I would expect clemency in the sentencing.
I feel the same. Intent and impact matters. Intent: It is up to the judge to decide if the defendant's intent was pure/non-violent -- I believe it is. Impact: From the news, we can see the material never reached the defendant, and it was safely captured. So the actual impact is zero. (To be clear: I am not apologizing for him breaking the law!)
This is a great opportunity for the attorney general office to recommend a special punishment: A long suspended sentence (5 years is reasonable) with no jail time and a X-year (X=1?) commitment from the defendant to participate in a public education campaign.
I don't think he should go to jail, and it could have been handled better, but i still think laws against purchasing/importing dangerous substances are reasonable, and a fine is reasonable in such a circumstance.
I seem to recall drug laws in mexico having carveouts to decriminalize small quantities to prevent abuse by law enforcement anywhere in the chain.
Also, speed limits in some states can't be enforced from 0 to 5mph over the limit.
>Also, speed limits in some states can't be enforced from 0 to 5mph over the limit.
In my country that's also true (with marigin larger than 5mph), but my understanding is that that's because the measurements instruments (laser-based speed meters) are not perfect and it may be a mistake and not actual speed limit breach.
Some methods of measuring car speed don't have this limitation, like range-based measurements (check time when car enters road segment, when it leaves road segment, and make sure the average is under the speed limit).
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The attitude of all boundaries being fuzzy is probably more harmful than anything else. You end up with a bunch of laws that aren't laws but just overdone public guidelines. A speed limit should be the limit. If we're agreeing on a Speed Recommended then it should be called that instead. Those are states with a speed limit and then they've encoded the limit in the law as (limit - 5). It doesn't change much except to annoy the pedants and make it harder to figure out what is actually legal.
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Never been there...but my impression (mostly from articles on British news web sites) is that Australia has long had a reputation for systematized legal sadism.
Particularly the Australian border security industrial complex.
Ostensibly a great idea to protect Australian agri-business (don't kind yourself it's not about the environment). But in practice hasn't been particularly effective in achieving its stated goals [1][2][3].
Extremely effective at bullying autistic kids interested in chemistry though. There's a lot of stories.
1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-26/white-spot-prawn-dise...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/...
3. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-03/black-market-tobacco-...
Damn are you sure you’ve never been to Australia? I can confirm that your instincts are absolutely spot on about this country in general.
> Is Australia particularly bad about it perhaps?
Australian border security is notoriously strict. So in this specific case, yes, and everyone knows it.
> And the best part for them, there is no repercussion for it. Everyone can turn around and publicly proclaim they just "did their job".
More than no repercussions; they all make a very good living from this. When Australia decides that they are going to ask to put him away for 10 years, they're saying that they're going to spend at least a million dollars on this incident. They know what happened, they know that it's a pointless expenditure, but they're still going to make it.
They're going to pay lawyers, use courtrooms and the time of judges, investigators and regular officers, all in the service of hopefully housing and feeding an unwilling adult for a decade. Triggered by a nerd importing an infinitesimal amount of plutonium for his nerd collection.
It will somehow be even more shameful when they go through all of this, and then the prosecutor drops the charges, or asks him to plead guilty for no time, no fine, and no record if not arrested for a similar thing outside of some time period. That will mean all of this was just makework.
My only conclusion is that either they don't have enough to do, or they are refusing to do things that are difficult. But either way this nonsense should be taken as an opportunity by management and the public which is currently highlighting government employees that it would be good to fire or replace. They don't have a problem with procedure, they have a problem with personnel.
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I’ve seen ads for buying small quantities of elements including selling a full periodic table. We probably all have. I wonder how many of us on HN could have been in this poor guy’s position.
The writeup makes it sounds typically Australian in a massive law enforcement overreaction over something innocent and minimal.
Beyond a person's life being turned upside down, one also has to wonder how much this investigation and "major hazmat incident" cost taxpayers.
In Australia, most major criminal matters are handled at the state level.
The Commonwealth Director of Prosecutions has form for this. They don't do much other than welfare fraud cases, and so when they get a brief that's actually interesting for a change, they tend to go full ham.
Whether it's actually in the public interest for them to prosecute isn't a factor they seem to give much consideration.
Another recent fiasco caused by their heavy handedness: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/...
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Would have been easier too, just to send a car to the kid's house to knock on the door. Here in the US cops would do it for the PR, sometimes.
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Such ads are common for uranium, which is less dangerous and thus less restricted. Plutonium is extremely illegal and not included in any periodic table collection I've ever seen.
From the collections of elements that I’ve seen, they’d likely include some uranium in that slot, with a note that there’s a chance of trace amounts of plutonium present from natural decay.
Fun fact: Americans are seemingly allowed to own up to 1.5 kg of yellowcake. (That's pure uranium, refined from uranium ore, but not enriched to extract the 0.7% U-235 from the 99.3% U-238.)
Citation: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part040/p...
> That's pure uranium,
Not exactly.
Yellowcake is about 80% uranium oxide:
"Triuranium octoxide (U3O8), the most stable uranium oxide; yellowcake typically contains 70 to 90 percent triuranium octoxide)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_oxide
The atomic weight of Uranium is 238; the atomic weight of Oxygen is 16. By weight, Triuranium octoxide is ~84% Uranium. Even if you're only counting the uranium in the Triuranium octoxide, that's still 60+% of the total mass coming from Uranium Atoms. I'd take that purity any day.
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United Nuclear has it for sale. No more dangerous than ore samples unless you cut a line and snort it.
Bob Lazar's company. That's kinda cool.
Yeah and you can even buy it directly online. https://unitednuclear.com/restricted-to-ups-only-c-105_87/ye...
Oh no, don’t link United Nuclear! To paraphrase an xkcd: “it’s like rickrolling, but the victim’s stuck all day”
According to that link that's for dispersible form (gas, powder) – it's up to 7kg in solid form ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Shame on his employer for firing him. That's probably the shittiest behaviour here (which is saying something).
Yeah "They terminated him for lack of transparency and honesty", which is ridiculous since the opposite was the case. (He was being transparent and honest towards his employer that he is being investigated.)
Indeed. Does australia not have laws against wrongful termination?
We have (had?) good employee protections but these have been degraded over time especially in the lower end of the job market. The train union is fairly powerful, if he had completed his training the termination probably wouldn't have happened but trainees get less protections.
This poor bugger has only done "the right thing" at every stage and has been completely screwed for it. Shameful. Makes me ashamed to live here.
Small uranium samples are very often used to test geiger counters and is pretty common and not dangerous unless it becomes dust. Even then a far cry from anything massively concerning.
in terms of spicy rocks doesnt the specific plutonium(number) make a massive difference?
Not really.
Given that this guy was charged under a non-proliferation act it makes a massive difference whether it's Pu-238 or Pu-239.
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Does anyone know how much plutonium and how enriched? (I assume it's not pure plutonium, which I think would be more pure than 'weapons grade'?)
According to the Luciteria listing linked by other commenters, this was a microscopic sample of plutonium, as plutonium oxide, enclosed as part of an old Soviet smoke detector. It's like the radioactive americium source used in modern smoke detectors but made with an element one atomic number lower.
A plutonium bomb core requires a mass of several kilograms. This sample was 35 nanograms, or about 11 orders of magnitude away from being a nuclear weapons proliferation risk. The authorities might as well accuse someone of running a biological warfare program for having bacteria on their house's doorknobs.
In addition to the minute quantity, this analysis of a Soviet smoke detector source shows that the plutonium was mixed isotopes, containing only about 73% Pu-239:
https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/analysis-of-sovi...
It is not weapons grade plutonium, though it is higher in Pu-239 than plutonium from modern spent reactor fuel.
> Luciteria listing
Did they buy it from Luciteria? This article doesn't say.
All an evil doer has to do then is order a veritable mountain of samples and lump them all together once he has enough.
</s>
> Lidden ordered the [plutonium] from a US-based science website and they were delivered to his parents' home.
So private ownership of plutonium is legal in the US, or is that site about to get shut down?
I think small test sources are exempt,
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part071/p... ("[10 CFR] §71.15 Exemption from classification as fissile material")
Technically, I think it would get shutdown. Plutonium, U-235, and some other stuff requires special approval to own. But it's possible that if it's not pure and was part of a product, that it might be overlooked. There's probably a few nanograms of Plutonium in the legally allowed Uranium samples that you can own.
What shameful behavior by the government. Let the man have his hobby.
Outlawing tiny samples of specific elements is so ridiculous. Whats he gunna do with it, nuke a small ant hill with it? Make a neat spectrograph of it?
The median lethal dose of Polonium-210 is about 50 nanograms. (1 twenty millionth of a gram)
30 mg of plutonium administered properly is fatal. Much less will give you a significant increased risk for cancer.
These things are dangerous in any quantity and no amount of enthusiasm overrides the risk when it comes to writing laws.
1lb of hammer administered properly is also fatal and I can buy that at the store.
EDIT: this also appears to be 30 nanograms, not mg.
You can buy bleach at the store, but if you drink a mouthful of it you're probably toast. We don't ban things just because they kill you when you eat them.
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You can buy a polonium anti-static brush for photofilm cleaning, with about 1 millicurie (~250 nanograms) of polonium. Absolutely legally: https://amstat.com/products/anti-static-brush-with-ionizing-...
Reminds me of the Nuclear Boy Scout story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
Honestly no. That guy was fucking around and found out in the end. This guy ordered something that was basically supposed to be a novelty for collecting purposes and has been fucked for it.
> border force officials had engaged in duplicitous and unfair conduct by returning some of the material to Lidden after initially seizing it
What was the reasoning here - why was the material returned? I assume this would happen in some exceptional scenario and the default behavior would be to seize it. Is it not the case?
Sadistic police state masquerading as something else since they have elections.
The behaviors demonstrated by Lidden here in the article sound to me like classic autistic behaviors. Is there any protection under the law in Australia for the fact that he's acting out an obsession tied to his "personality disorder"? Obsessive collecting, the interest in trains, and ultimately an overabundance of honesty and trying to rigidly follow rules to his own detriment, the court system should also be looking out for him as a defendant and not furthering this travesty of justice.
> overabundance of honesty
I don't agree with that part. The immediate cost will be outweighed, I expect, by the impact on the judge; possibly, if Lidden isn't jailed, on the employer who will remember that Lidden was so honest under pressure and at personal cost; and on everyone around Lidden for the rest of their life, having earned trust that few of us have.
I really really really wish that this is true, unfortunately it very often isn't. The Just World Fallacy is something I wish were not a fallacy.
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Id like to have a word with you about confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
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As someone raised to place, I later had to learn, dangerous levels of value on honesty and forthrightness and to assume that others would largely do the same, unless they were, you know, those relatively rare bad people... yeah, I'd guess it's just going to result in bad stuff, almost entirely.
Cheaters never win, liars never prosper—sadly, these are closer to being the exact opposite of the truth, than to being true. Substitute "usually" and "often" and it's getting near to the truth.
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> Lidden ordered the [plutonium] from a US-based science website and they were delivered to his parents' home.
Anybody have the URL?
https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale?s...
says "sold out"
https://web.archive.org/web/20200904082652/https://www.lucit... says they had one of the Russian smoke detector sources for $5,000 in 2020.
https://the-collectable-periodic-table2.mybigcommerce.com/pl... has it listed (well, "wish listed") for $500.
If Theodore Gray (the eccentric millionaire co-founder of Wolfram) doesn't have a plutonium sample in his famous periodic table, I really doubt there's any available for sale in the US, outside of NRC-regulated places. He'd had found one by now, if one existed.
Is it possible someone confused plutonium with polonium? That's the Occam's razor here.
Apparently this was the offending Plutonium purchase.
https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale?s...
I'll be eating my hat, then; this thing is indeed real,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13616574 )
That analysis says these contained about 40 μCi of Pu-239, or 0.7 mg.
How do we know?
And this is the biggest weakness of the current top down model of governance that we have.
Id like to see a system where judging those who have supposedly done wrong is done almost entirely by the community, not the government. Government/security forces (including police) intervention should be a last resort.
The law has little gaps like this where someone well meaning who is not intending to break a law inadvertently does so.
Minorities tend to have the law applied to them more harshly.
Not everyone has safe access to the legal system, i.e. undocumented migrants.
If you are in a marginalised group and have a crime committed against you, your experience will likely be different compared to what a white heterosexual christian male would experience.
I would also like to see a world where undocumented migrants can report to the police without fear of their residency status, where they are judged by their peers who also may be undocumented migrants, where they are provided the basic necessities as a human right such as food, housing, education, and medical care.
In such a world I would gladly go move to Japan in an undocumented fashion with 30 million of my closest friends and enjoy the human rights of housing, food, and education.
> Id like to see a system where judging those who have supposedly done wrong is done almost entirely by the community, not the government. Government/security forces (including police) intervention should be a last resort.
I'm sure all those children abused by priests will agree with you.
What if the abuse can't be 100% proven but you have multiple victims? In this type of case, the perp gets away with it alot of the time.
However...if judged by the community, its highly unlikely that they would get away with it.
The law fails victims of all kinds of sexual abuse all the time, to the point where most perpetrators get away with it.
Gaps the legal system let some paedophile priests get away with it and also lead to unjust prosecutions like we see in the article.
That's basically the entire premise behind a jury trial.
Well that's the intent anyway.
In reality, the jury has to follow the law as written and there are gaps with various consequences.
If they try to make some ruling outside of the law, it would just get appealed and oveturned.
One reads this kind of story and simply wants to weep.
I wonder where one can even order plutonium online? I am aware of legal way to buy some uranium, but that's within US only.
This claims to have plutonium https://engineeredlabs.com/products/plutonium-element-cube-t.... Although other studies of trinitite have failed to find any.
It also appears that the soviets used plutonium in fire detectors, and that people were selling these sources at one point https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale
you could buy the ones with Americium in most of the EU and US too. I think you can still find some, here and there.
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Putting uranium under some neutron flux one can probably cook some plutonium on the kitchen table (and bury the whole kitchen or even the whole house deep underground after that :)
Obviously neutrons should be made illegal. Neutron flux sources are perhaps not so simple to acquire or build.
lol someones about to knock knock at ur door.
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I was going to guess United Nuclear myself but that was the uranium supplier ;)
Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/elementcollection/comments/mf5v0u/i...) says that you were able to get some here: https://www.luciteria.com/elements-for-sale but I didn't see it listed.
edit: found it but discontinued... https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale
Just here to say that you can order small samples of natural Uranium on Amazon.
As well as uranium glass beads, which glow under UV light and are measurably radioactive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_glass
I'd probably not wear those as jewelry.
You can also go pick it up off the ground in some western areas of the US.
Disparaging the boot is a bootable offense.
Listen, if you’re in a police state being open and honest is an idiot’s choice.
XKCD-Comic: Periodic Wall of Elements https://englishatlc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/randall-m...
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