Comment by deng

I believe this behaviour is normalized in prosecution. Accusing someone or a crime? Raid their kitchen and bag every knife as a weapon and every household chemical as explosive precursors to get the jury on your side.

Australia is so ridiculous they closed airspace to fire a 50 BMG sniper rifle

For context these rounds are fired everywhere in America daily thousand of times.

they should be punished 10x more severely than they were trying to do to him

> This is the kind of implicit lying that seems pervasive today and I am so tired of it.

I am so tired of it, too. Toying with the legal boundary of lying in communication is pathological, maybe even sociopathic.

Everyone knows when someone is doing it, too. We just don’t have the means to punish it, even in the courts.

The whole “I won’t get punished so I’m doing all the immoral things” habit is foul to begin with. I don’t know how, but I hope our society can get over it. As things stand, there is no way to outlaw being an asshole.

Plutonium from soviet smoke detectors is a common item for the element collectors subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elementcollection/comments/w557i6/2...

- "We still have 30+ nuclear reactors hanging over our heads in space that will come down one day."

To be fair that's multiple centuries away, so there won't be very much radiation left. And since they were relatively low-power reactors, there wasn't that much to begin with.

I’m surprised you know this but didn’t think further about the situation.

Where was anericum used in smoke detectors, and was there perhaps some other region where plutonium was used?

Perhaps somewhere colder, more, soviet-ey?

> "Mental health issues" sounds like both a fig leaf for the prosecution and a last-ditch smear of the man involved.

Mental health issues shouldn't be seen as a smear though – is it a smear if someone has physical health issues (who doesn't, at least from time-to-time?)

A recent study carried out on behalf of the Australian government estimated that 43% of Australians aged 18-to-65 had experienced mental illness at some time in their lives, and 22% at some time in the last 12 months.

The same study estimates that in the 12 months prior to the study, 17% of Australians had an anxiety disorder, 8% an affective disorder (depression or bipolar), 3% a substance use disorder.

https://www.aihw.gov.au/mental-health/overview/prevalence-an...

Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of the fact. BTW, I've always thought civilization is only one step removed from superstition and witch-burning if but not for the fact of education.

That film was made about 40 years ago and even then the Dundee character was a dying breed and only found in pockets of Australian society—those parts where life was hard and day-to-day activities were hands-on with the physical world (like those portrayed in the film).

Even in the '80s most Australians wouldn't have lived and worked like that, these days much less so. Most Australians live in a highly urbanized city environment and many of them live in high-rise buildings without even a backyard. Moreover, nowadays, they mostly work in the service industries such as banking, finance, tourism and retail. Put simply, a reasonable percentage would hardly know one end of a screwdriver from another let alone perform manual labour or know how to ride a horse, or use a lathe or milling machine.

That may sound harsh but having lived through that time (I was an adult when the film was released) I reckon that's a reasonable assessment. You also need to keep in mind that Australia has essentially killed off its manufacturing industries over that time with China being the beneficiary. Thus, Australian society has lost many of those hands-on, down-to-earth skills it had at the end of WWII through to the end of the 1960s. Today's Australian society is nothing like it was when I was growing up, I now live in a totally different world.

BTW, what made Paul Hogan (Dundee) so suitable for the film's character was that he is one of that dying breed of hardworking ruffians and was so before he became an actor, his persona was essentially behind the making of the film. He came from the rough outback opal mining town of Lightning Ridge and then worked as a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge—a very dangerous job that required working at hundreds of feet in the air—those with the slightest fear of heights would have been terrified, and that would include most Australians. (I can say that because in my younger days I used to work on radio and television towers—shame I can't show you photos I took from the top of them).

I believe it was this https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale

Mercury can also be used to make felt hats, and criminals often wear hats to disguise themselves, so it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to Mercury.

There are two or three mercury switches in my house and they were all installed maybe ten years ago.

This case is almost as dumb as the Boston PD got in the couple of years after the Marathon incident. But at least they had ptsd as an excuse.

I've had several analog thermostats that use a mercury tilt switch. I assume it'd be easier to just buy an old thermostat than to make your own switch.

That’s stupid as fuck as they still use mercury wetted relays to this day in some places.

Are mercury thermometers no longer a thing? My parents had a few while I was growing up in the 80’s

Oh, as switch, I was thinking they were thinking that the mercury would be used in a DIY detonator. I always figured the 'dirty' bomb would need more raw materials rather than less - though the materials wouldn't need to be fissible.

As a child I bought mercury tilt switches from a tandy store (in Australia) with the intent of making a tilt game controller input for my terrible 8 bit computer (this was decades before acceleromters in game controllers). It was too laggy and had to be debounced and it sat in a box for years. Also had a collection of mineral ores in a drawer near my bed which probably included some dodgy stuff. This case was bullshit and appears to be more about agency politics than public safety.

Wait until the work out mixing household bleach and vinegar liberates free chlorine.

Chlorine can also be used as a chemical weapon.

The Pu is from an old soviet smoke detector, containing roughly 40μg of Pu, which creates a few μCi of radiation needed for smoke detection. For fission, you need at least several kg of pure Pu239. For a "dirty bomb", any amount will do, of course.

Not at the current price levels of $50 a pack they don't. (Which is inevitably leading to hugely profitable smuggling and increasingly violent turf wars, but I digress.)

However kitty litter will take them out https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/4/15/when-kitty-litt...

Hanford.

Reality likes to have a word with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

It is not "THE" issue, it's barely even "an issue". The amount of radioactive material produced by a fission plant, and the form in which it comes, makes it trivial to store relatively safely - certainly much, much easier than the CO2 waste that most of our other energy generation solutions emit.

Also, the biggest issues with nuclear power are (1) the risk of catastrophic meltdowns, (2) the risk of using it as cover for nuclear armament, (3) the massive capital expenditure to create a plant, and (4) the amount of water needed for cooling and running the plant. All of these make the problem of taking some radioactive rocks and burying them trivial in comparison.

The nuclear waste issue is such a non-issue that the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste, the actual spent fuel, is stored on site at the nuclear power plants.

Long lived nuclear waste just isn't that radioactive, and highly reactive nuclear waste products just aren't that long lived.

If the waste is vitrified (glassified) it becomes basically chemically non-reactive too.

True, depleted uranium is not fissionable, but it's still nasty stuff. It is used for amor-piercing ammunition and turns into fine dust on impact. For instance, kids playing in abandoned tanks inhale it, and it still radiates alpha and beta particles, leading to lung cancer later in life. It needs to be outlawed.