Comment by vintagedave
1 month ago
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/...
>Another recent fiasco caused by their heavy handedness: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/...
"He spent three months in custody before he was granted bail in October 2022, after an earlier bail was revoked because he failed to comply with conditions."
a 13 year old with autism "failed to comply with conditions".
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Surely there's some sort of safeguard in the Australian government preventing this sort of embarrassment. The second anyone hears how much was involved they're gonna know this prosecution makes a mockery of their own laws.
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.
They could have just kept it at customs and sent a letter saying it's illegal and let that be the end of it.
Whoever was involved in creating a circus out of it should be fired.
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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.