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'Naive' science fan faces jail for plutonium import

'Naive' science fan faces jail for plutonium import

geox

Comments (131)

  • rdtsc
    > 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".
  • vintagedave
    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.
  • dynm
    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...
  • IshKebab
    Shame on his employer for firing him. That's probably the shittiest behaviour here (which is saying something).
  • puppycodes
    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?
  • mmooss
    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'?)
  • palmotea
    > 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?
  • ungreased0675
    What shameful behavior by the government. Let the man have his hobby.
  • AngryData
    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?
  • SoftTalker
    Reminds me of the Nuclear Boy Scout story.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
  • thih9
    > border force officials had engaged in duplicitous and unfair conduct by returning some of the material to Lidden after initially seizing itWhat 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?
  • perihelions
    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.
  • xeckr
    One reads this kind of story and simply wants to weep.
  • d_silin
    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.
  • FpUser
    Sadistic police state masquerading as something else since they have elections.
  • mordymoop
    Disparaging the boot is a bootable offense.
  • looofooo0
  • tristor
    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.
  • renewiltord
    Listen, if you’re in a police state being open and honest is an idiot’s choice.
  • kbutler
    > 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.
  • aussieguy1234
    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.
  • bigbacaloa
    [dead]