'Naive' science fan faces jail for plutonium import
au.news.yahoo.com189 points by geox 2 months ago
189 points by geox 2 months ago
> 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.
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)
A chickend sandwich is probably more dangerous to Australia than a tiny vial of plutonium. Not that I'm saying the 3k fine for what clearly seems like a mistake is reasonable, just that this is even more unreasonable.
>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.
A laidback reputation can be a sign of an entrenched elite with a lot of leisure time.
This is the case in a lot of the US South.
"This is the case in a lot of the US South."
I understand your reasoning re US South but 'laid-back' in the Australian context refers more to a 'laxadaisical' or 'couldn't-care-less' attitude—or that's what it used to mean. Class doesn't much enter the picture. :-(
Funny enough I'm experiencing the opposite: I moved to Western Australia and find the police presence much lighter than Canada or America.
Traffic stops by police are virtually nonexistent because speed cameras already do the work of traffic enforcement for the police. Unlike North America, it is very rare to drive and actually see somebody pulled over by the police.
The cameras are strict through. Demerits double on holidays and no amount of fine payment can get out of a license suspension.
"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.
The message being sent is "even if we can't prove intent we still can completely ruin your life"
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> For those arguing the guy is just massively dumb and naive, are you aware this depicts the character as even more dangerous to himself and society?
No, because he hasn't done anything actually dangerous to society, it's not like he bought anything that can be weaponized. Is he a danger to himself? Only insomuch as his actions have put him at risk of going to jail.
I'm not saying there should be no consequences, but the idea he is a danger to himself or society is totally absurd.
It's a problem because if every single Australian imported one of these samples and put them in a potluck they would achieve enough mass for one or two nuclear weapons. Then Australia would become a nuclear power and finally conquer their arch enemy, the annoying island sidekick of New Zealand.
> (...) 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?
Yes, it is possible. Have seen a few nerds who could solve Math Olympiad problems in a jiffy but had extreme trouble navigating government bureaucracy.
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You should blame the Australian border force officials for being the true morons not this young man. He went ahead and ordered plutonium from a US-based science website openly with his real name and residential address - he didn't hide anything.
The most surprising thing to me is that it was actually delivered. Seems you can really buy anything from the internet.
> The most surprising thing to me is that it was actually delivered. Seems you can really buy anything from the internet.
Not surprising to me. Unrefined nuclear material really isn't particularly rare, or dangerous. You could create more havoc and terror with pool cleaning chemicals. And it's legitimately valuable for all sorts of purposes, including education and research.
It's not like we're talking about a giant green glowing rock that will generate a mushroom cloud if you drop it on a hard floor.
Hell, I've bought stuff from these guys: https://unitednuclear.com/radiation-and-nuclear-c-2/
I remember doing some radiation absorption experiment with some radioactive material in chemistry class in high school. I would be surprised to get to jail for ordering some milligram of plutonium.
I would say that "nuclear proliferation" is about not letting North Korea or Israel getting nuclear weapons [1], not chasing random guy who tried to purchase infinitesimal amount of plutonium.
[1] As we know, both efforts failed.
>investigators were aware he had obtained this material and it was in a very small quantity.
It was a small quantity. For comparison Trinity had 6 kg of plutonium.
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.)
I don’t think it’s crazy for someone to know that you can buy uranium and not realize the full difference between that and plutonium.
I think somebody who doesn’t know the full difference between uranium and plutonium definitely shouldn’t be having any.
They shouldn't have any but also shouldn't face jail.
> They shouldn't have any but also shouldn't face jail.
If they are in possession of it, yes they should.
Here's a refreshment of what harm these morons can cause ti society.
From what others have posted, this sample was apparently 35 nanograms salvaged from a smoke detector - and was sold by the online store embedded within an acrylic cube labelled "plutonium" in addition to still being in the original casing from the smoke detector.
To me it seems like that's strictly less likely to cause a Goiânia incident than when it was just in an old smoke detector that could've potentially be thrown out without consideration.
>Four months before the theft, on May 4, 1987, Saura Taniguti, then director of Ipasgo, the institute of insurance for civil servants, used police force to prevent one of the owners of IGR, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, from removing the radioactive material that had been left behind.
The Goiania accident was caused by government imposition, stopping the owners from moving it from the abandoned clinic before it was looted. The government was the moron there, just as the government is the moron in this story. So a good example, but not in the way you thought, as it shows government intervention with nuclear materials leading to needless tragedy.
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.
The RAAF didn't test fire, nor did they "shut down" the air space.
Politicians and the police staged an air field adjacent test firing for media that carried risks that caused restricted, and warning notices to be issued for the air space.
A Department of Defence spokeswoman said the activity was supported by Defence.
“For safety, Air Force used a notice to airmen and provided air traffic control for a period of time in the vicinity of the area,” she said.
“At no time were RAAF Base Pearce’s flying operations impacted. The activity was coordinated between WA Police and Defence in accordance with standard procedures.”
National Shooting Council vice president told News Corp the demonstration was an “orchestrated media event to create fear in the community ... they were clearly told it was too risky but they went ahead anyway”.
“There was a very, very high risk of ricochets and therefore injury to members of the public, press and police attending because of the type of targets they were shooting at … they were very lucky to get away with it with no-one being injured, killed or worse for this little sh.t show,” he said.
^^ NOTICE: this is from two years past in 2023 .. The Western Australian newspaper website has wrapped this with a masthead with todays date (2025). If you search on the story there are several links from 2023 referencing this .. I cannot fathom why The West has done this to date other than it's a rag with a monopoly in a small state and they can't be arsed to do a good job here.
As a pilot, if I see a notam "that caused restricted … notices to be issued"-- especially in a military context-- I would be very comfortable describing the affected airspace as "shut down". I'm probably missing something as your link to an apparently low quality story is also paywalled. Maybe they're referring to the fact that the military almost always exempts itself from its TFRs, so technically it wasn't completely "shut down", but by that definition no airspace is ever shut down.
“At no time were RAAF Base Pearce’s flying operations impacted.
I'd go further and guess that had the base been required for anything (sudden emergancy landing, etc) the media event would have been shut down and pushed away.
None of which supports the hyperbolic aspects of the original GP claim above.
>to test fire a “high-powered” single-shot .50 caliber rifle.
Maybe that's just the public explanation.
> 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.
> That said I would expect clemency in the sentencing.
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).
And less so now, but also speedometers. As I was growing up in Australia, there was a legislated margin of error of 10% for speedo inaccuracy. And I want to say some time in the late 90s, early aughts, that margin was changed to 3km/h across the board. I don't know how that interacted with speed camera tolerances.
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.
The attitude that ignores the reality that there is no such thing as a perfect measuring instrument...
If you make the law that simplistic, then any good lawyer can void any ticket because no one can actually prove the charge. That will surely be better.
But if the limit is N and the claim is that you did N+10, then it doesn't matter how accurate the measurement is, you definitely did something over N. They don't have to prove something unprovable, they only have to prove that their measurments have always been consistently within a range of error that is nowhere near 10.
Removing some utility for abuse (which could also be targeted/prejudicial/discrimination abuse) is a net positive.
The real world is not as neat as ideals. The real world IS fuzzy, and can not be wished or ignored away.
> But if the limit is N and the claim is that you did N+10, then it doesn't matter how accurate the measurement is, you definitely did something over N.
That isn't correct on a couple of levels. Firstly, the accuracy could be +-11 so the accuracy still matters for working out if something happened. Secondly if the accuracy is +-0.01 then if it clocks you at N+1 then we still know you've broken the law, no argument needed.
Fundamentally you're just arguing that the law is offset by 10. That doesn't really addressed the major issue, which is why offsetting the law by 10 has helped. We may as well offset the law by 0 - then the law could be interpreted by looking up the value in the rulebook instead of having to calculate a different value.
> The real world is not as neat as ideals. The real world IS fuzzy, and can not be wished or ignored away.
Sure, but we may observe that routinely offsetting the value in the law by a constant doesn't change that. In fact it only adds ambiguity because the constant probably isn't written down or consistently determined.
Not having the fuzzy zone on speed limits will make people go too slow and build traffic. You're meant to drive right up to the limit and anyone with an analog speedometer has to deal with some visual inaccuracy. It is ridiculous to punish people because the speed limit was 45 and someone is going 46 when 45 isn't even clearly marked on the speedometer for these cars.
Funny you should mention speed recommended, we have just the placard: https://imgur.com/a/R3ZeM5A
Usually spotted near very sharp turns on highway exits. They don't force you to slow down, but unless you want to suddenly switch lanes to ones 20 meters below you probably want to.
Shouldn't there be some fuzzy laws and some not?
Speed limits are something that people could break through a moment of inattention, so maybe there should be some resilience, even though there is a numerical limit.
On the other hand "high crimes and misdemeanors" might be purposefully vague.
Yes and no. The speeder will always drive on the limit plus tolerance. Trucks in Germany are limited to 80 km/h, there are still 'races' between two trucks overtaking each other at their 80.
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.
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".
That kid stated he tried to contact ISIS, had pledged allegiance to the current ISIS leader, expressed a desire to be an ISIS recruiter, and to build and detonate a bomb at a government building. (June 2021).
It looks like he was searched on 6 October 2021 and granted bail on 8 October.
I don't know what the conditions of his bail were, but when it was revoked in June 2022, his
Google searches involved topics such as “10 ways to cover up a murder”, “how to murder”, “16 steps to kill someone and not get caught” and references to a schoolteacher.
https://www.childrenscourt.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-01/Application%20for%20bail%20by%20Carrick%20%28a%20pseudonym%29%20%5B2022%5D%20VChC%204.pdfThat exactly sounds like some unhealthy obsession of a mentally unhealthy individual. It should be treated as mental disease, not as a crime, especially given the age and already established medical condition of autism.
And that's how it was being treated by the state police, before the feds engaged the kid online, and actively and deliberately undermined his rehabilitation.
Damn, why didn't they prosecute that instead? Probably would have won some public support. Declarations of a desire to commit violence are an entirely different beast than purchasing plutonium, and far more worth prosecuting.
The 13 year old ISIS supporter is a different person than the 24 year old plutonium science nerd. You're discussing a different person than TFA was about.
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.
When you say it like that it is so obvious. If we collectively kept our heads out of our asses and just thought how to deescalate things rather than be parsimonious little nobodies we would all be better.
The other day somebody said I could not join a huge table in a coworking space because there was a meeting. Private meeting tables or rooms are paid and require reservation and that table was in the common area. I got annoyed because the guy did not ask if I could wait and go to another table, instead he just matter of fact told me they were having a meeting and would rather I would not sit in the free seats. I told him that I believe this was a public usage table, to which he then asked if I could allow them to remain alone. I considered being a prick but then I considered, what would be the gain of antagonising a dude that also goes there often and all for the pleasure of sitting in my favourite table? I stewed a bit but the next day I forgot it. If I had confronted him I would be reminded of the incident every time I crossed the guys path.
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)"
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.
United Nuclear has it for sale. No more dangerous than ore samples unless you cut a line and snort it.
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.
Why, because one has a critical mass of 9-10 kg and the other has a critical mass of 11 kg? You'd think it would matter a great deal more that the amount he obtained was apparently 35 nanograms, so he was about a hundred million samples short of a working reactor.
Pu-238 isn't usably fissile for weapons purposes (and apparently[0] isn't regulated as such (?)). Just look at the hero image on its Wikipedia entry[1]. A critical mass would have >5 kW of decay heat.
[0] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part071/p... ("Fissile material means the radionuclides uranium-233, uranium-235, plutonium-239, and plutonium-241")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238 ("Plutonium-238 oxide pellet glowing from its decay heat")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_heat_source#St...
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.
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.
To say nothing of the fact that if you accidentally mix a bit with ammonia, which is extremely easy to do because they are both used in cleaning, you just created a deadly chemical weapon that is also a gas. The world would be much better, even if perhaps a bit 'scarier', if people treated each other like adults.
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.
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.
Save the nonsense characterizations and dismissals. What actual evidence do you have? In my experience, that's how things work - not 100% but it's a powerful effect.
Evidence of what? That Lidden is autistic? None, other than the contents of the article and my own knowledge of those traits (that I myself have). That the Just World Fallacy is strong and we all get kicked in the pants because of our better expectations? My evidence is a good 40-50% of my entire life's story, where I have been punished repeatedly for doing the right thing.
To be clear, I am not being dismissive of your comment. I wish very deeply that it were true, and that I am wrong. Unfortunately I don't believe that to be the case.
It's dismissive to assign my argument to a Internet argument (your fallacy) rather than address its merits. I'm not wasting time on defending my argument against your fabrications about it; I stand by what I actually say. And wanting to be true and dismissing it is still dismissing it.
You don't know the outcome of the path not taken - lying, for example, also fails, much worse and much more often, and it fails in destroying your self-respect even when it 'succeeds' in some other narrow fashion.
Maybe you would have failed anyway. We all fail plenty. Being honest isn't usually sufficient - you need other skills and resources too. The skills and resources for being honest, IME, differ from those of liars - they take experience and failure to master, like any other sophisticated skils (including lying). Why not spend time mastering them? I promise it pays off far better - even when you fail spectacularly, you retain your self-respect, and you spend a lot less time doubting what you should do (though you still need to figure out how to do it effectively).
Whether the world - your world - is just or not is mainly up to you. You can't always succeed - liars don't get everything they want either - but you can have a big influence, on yourself and others. The world is what you make it.
The opposite of "an overabundance of honesty" is not lying. It's knowing when to not speak at all.
Perhaps rather than assuming I haven't mastered the skills of honesty, or that I am a dishonest person, you should really re-read what I wrote in all of my comments. I am not dismissing you, you are overreacting to a phrase I used which you understood differently than it was intended and has since been clarified.
It is a BS characterization - it wasn't something I said, but your imagination - and of course a characterization that served as something you could dismiss, which you did. Even the name of your fabricated characterization included the word "fallacy" - that doesn't leave much room to take the other person's idea seriously. It is much easier arguing with your personal strawperson than to understand a real person.
I didn't assume anything about you; I just made my point.
Well, he was fired, so there goes any hope of his employer valuing his honesty.
Id like to have a word with you about confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
Perhaps if you had an intelligent, constructive argument of your own, and not a worthless dismissal based on pure ignorance, I'd listen to you.
Or you could interpret my comment charitably, in accordance with the HN guidelines.
When you're entire professional life is based on enforcing the law and dealing with criminals, you end up protecting yourself to avoid cognitive dissonance. I see it all the time with police and judges (so much for your ignorance claim).
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.
There's a popular 'wisdom' to dismiss things like honesty, but they actually do work, and they are used widely by most successful professionals, in my experience.
Yes, they aren't usually sufficient by themselves - you need other things too. And sometimes the payoff is later, as I suggest it will be for Lidden. And people point to failures but nothing succeeds all the time; it's the distribution of outcomes you should look at: Lying fails more and worse and it damages and sometimes destroys the most valuable things in the world: your self-respect, your reputation with others, your relationships, and trust.
Trust is one of the most powerful techniques in business and life. With it, people can make any arrangement with a few words, and not expend resources ensuring and verifying the other people do it. People trust me and I trust them (the ones I have relationships with), and that allows us to move quickly and accomplish much more.
Integrity does one more great thing, it sets an example for others. People are social creatures that follow the herd much more than they realize. If you behave with integrity, you establish a norm that people follow. If you do the wrong thing, you have the same effect. I think Trump, the Republicans, and the far right are having that effect. We are each responsible for our communities - we are the doers and makers, not consumers of morality (except children and maybe others unsophisticated in these things).
It's our free will, you can choose either - an understanding going back to the Genesis and further. And the consequences are very real.
I agree with every single thing you just wrote, and yet it doesn't address the fact that the world is an unfair place and that being too honest is a character fault, maybe a different take on the meaning of "discretion" in "Discretion is the better part of valor" best expresses what I had originally meant by "overabundance of honesty".
I'm an extremely honest person, and it has paid dividends personally and professionally. It's also cost me a /lot/. But I am not "honest to a fault", which is a saying for a reason. I know when it's better to shut my mouth than to speak out, and sometimes I speak out even though I know I will suffer for it because it's the right thing to do, but it's not /always/ the right thing to do.
Whether to speak or not is often different than whether to be honest or not. I don't tell people that I find their hairdo to be awful.
In the case of the OP, arguably it's assumed that if it would impact your employer, you will tell them. Not telling them is therefore dishonest - it's strongly implying there is no problem. (For the OP, it depends heavily on the employer and their relationship.)
> It's also cost me a /lot/.
Is there an option that doesn't cost you a lot?
> 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://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/analysis-of-sovi... ("Analysis of Soviet smoke detector plutonium" (2017))
(and HN thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13616574 )
That analysis says these contained about 40 μCi of Pu-239, or 0.7 mg.
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.
You can still buy Americium detectors.
They're more reliable because they don't stop working when a little dust gets in them like optical sensors.
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.
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.
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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