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Good for him. This was an absolute ridiculous case. Lots of everyday items contain radioactive substances: old smoke detectors, uranium glass, old watches with

• ashoeafoot 1y ago
  Dont forget cobblestone in regions with high natural radioactive materials. If they mine for uranium in the rocks the rocks used to pave the surface and build houses are going to be also mildly active .
  • nandomrumber 1y ago
    Granite benchtops.
• thoroughburro 1y ago
  > if you sidestep the issue of waste If you do that, just sidestep the elephant, then nuclear is very attractive indeed!
  • fsmv 1y ago
    The waste isn't even that bad. There's not that much of it and we have extremely safe storage solutions. We way over engineered the safety by orders of magnitude. Nuclear waste storage facilities can take a direct missile hit and still be safe.
    • deng 1y ago
      Reality likes to have a word with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
      • viraptor 1y ago
        > we have extremely safe storage solutions This doesn't mean "we don't have unsafe storage solutions".
        • deng 1y ago
          Humans are simply terrible at long-term safety. How often do we have to experience that until we say: while it might be theoretically possible to store this stuff securely for thousands of years, apparently, we are just unable to do it, be it because of incompetence, greed, or both.
          • whamlastxmas 1y ago
            I’d rather us try and almost always successful store harmful waste than spew all of it directly into the air, killing millions of people. Over a million people die every year from carbon emissions from things like gas and coal power plants and vehicles
            • nandomrumber 1y ago
              You'd think if that were the case, you'd at least know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who's cause of death was coal fired power plant emissions. You're characterising it wrong. Epidemiologists estimate the days of lost life across a population due to environmental exposures. If you add all those up they aren't equivalent to number of lives lost.
• oniony 1y ago
  Isn't this the same stuff they used to put in aeroplane tails as a counterweight?
  • perihelions 1y ago
    No, it's weapons-grade fissile material (in microscopic amounts); the engineering material used for its weight, depleted uranium, is not such a thing.
    • deng 1y ago
      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.
      • perihelions 1y ago
        You're welcome to go to the front lines and attack the Russian tanks with your own preferred tools! The people doing the actual work, today, use depleted uranium[0] rounds, because they have common sense and prefer to not have a main battle tank survive long enough to shoot back at them. "Let's not use (mildly) toxic weapons" is a fair-weather principle that disappears the moment the weather ceases being fair. Like cluster bombs, or landmines: all of the civilized countries in Europe that adopted these idealistic bans, in peacetime, they're repealing those treaties left and right, now that the moral dilemmas are no longer academic. [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-send-its-first-depleted-uranium-rounds-ukraine-sources-2023-09-01/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-send-its-first-depleted-ura... ("US to send depleted-uranium munitions to Ukraine")
        • AnimalMuppet 1y ago
          Yeah. An active main battle tank will kill more people faster than inhaling uranium dust will. (This does not make depleted uranium rounds anything less than nasty. But it does make them better than the alternative.)
• perihelions 1y ago
  The case is technically about special fissionable material (regulation of nuclear weapons)—not radiological hazards—but all your points stand. Absurd lack of common sense all around.
  • deng 1y ago
    Well, the police also said he bought mercury, which "can be used in switches for a dirty bomb", which is such a stupid thing to say, because a mercury switch is just an old form of a tilt switch. The idea that someone would buy mercury for making his own tilt switch is just so wild, but of course, they just put this BS out there to scare people and justify their completely overblown reaction.
    • InsideOutSanta 1y ago
      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.
      • Cordiali 1y ago
        The Mercury is also the name of a Tasmanian newspaper. Tasmanians are stereotyped as having two heads, so Tassie criminals wear 100% more disguise per disguise.
      • AsmaraHolding 1y ago
        Suspect is hatless, repeat, hatless!
      • aruggirello 1y ago
        This is hat speech and should be prosecuted! Only tinfoil hats are allowed here.
    • cjbgkagh 1y ago
      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.
• thadt 1y ago
  Agreed, this case is bananas. If his "plutonium sample" is actually (probably) trinitite which you can just buy online [1], and if we assume an exposure of 1 uR/hr at one inch[2], then convert that to BED (Banana Equivalent Dose[3] - that taken from the naturally occurring potassium-40 in bananas) that's (handwaving actual dose calculations) about, what, 1/10 of a banana? [1] https://engineeredlabs.com/products/plutonium-element-cube-trinitite-sample https://engineeredlabs.com/products/plutonium-element-cube-t... [2] https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclear-weapons/trinity/trinitite.html https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclea... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
  • perihelions 1y ago
    The plutonium sample is reported to be something similar to this, https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/analysis-of-soviet-smoke-detector-plutonium/ https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/analysis-of-sovi... ("Analysis of Soviet smoke detector plutonium" (2017))
    • wolfd 1y ago
      I believe it was this https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale
      • tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
        "This item is now discontinued." I wonder if this incident is the reason (or if it simply sold out in the aftermath).
      • perihelions 1y ago
        Right, they're both Soviet ionization smoke detectors based on Pu-239. The Carl Willis blogpost is a teardown of one such similar item.
      • thadt 1y ago
        Oh, well if that's the case thats waaay more bananas. Like maybe around 4000. Nobody should be eating that many bananas.
• AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  To be clear this literally was an old smoke detector. Not even kidding. https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/a-tale-of-nuclear-shenanigans-from-down-under/ https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/a-tale-of-nuclear-shenanigan... He ordered an old smoke detector online as part of his collection of elements. This contained, as pretty much all old smoke detectors once did, radioactive elements. In minute quantities. It gets worse the more you look into this too. The hazmat crew that closed off his street? Days earlier they let the courier deliver his old soviet smoke detector in person, no protective gear. As in they knew it wasn't dangerous but put on theater to make a better case for prosecution.
  • martin-t 1y ago
    This is the kind of implicit lying that seems pervasive today and I am so tired of it. This alone is sufficient evidence of their malicious intent and should be enough to punish the people responsible for trying to ruin an innocent person's life. But it's not gonna happen because the law is not written to punish people using it maliciously against others and most people simply won't care anyway.
    • redeeman 1y ago
      they should be punished 10x more severely than they were trying to do to him
      • martin-t 1y ago
        A do believe causing harm without justification should automatically result in punishment that causes the same harm to the abuser multiplied by a multiplicative constant but 10x is probably too much. Usually, I'd suggest something between 1.5 and 2. He was facing 10 years IIRC, giving them 15 seems reasonable. This constant should increase with repeated abuse so people who are habitual offenders get effectively removed from society. Some countries already have something similar, like the 3 strikes law, but that has issues with discontinuity (the 3rd offense is sometimes punished too severely if minor). I'd prefer a continuous system, ideally one that is based on actual harm. --- We also need mechanisms where civil servants (or anybody else, really) can challenge any law on the basis of being stupid. If the law is written so that it prohibits any amount (or an amount so small that it is harmless, even if he imported dozens of these samples), it is stupid and should be removed.
• rootsudo 1y ago
  He didn't really walk away: "A 24-year-old Australian man who ordered uranium and plutonium to his parents’ apartment has been allowed to walk away from court on a two-year good behaviour bond. After ordering various radioactive samples over the internet in an effort to collect the entire periodic table, Emmanuel Lidden pleaded guilty to two charges: moving nuclear material into Australia and possessing nuclear material without a permit. While his actions were criminal, the judge concluded that Lidden had mental health issues and displayed no malicious intent" The court established he had mental helath issues and has 2 years probation basically.
  • crooked-v 1y ago
    "Mental health issues" sounds like both a fig leaf for the prosecution and a last-ditch smear of the man involved. Now he's stuck being publicly associated not just with "criminal", but "criminal with mental health issues".
    • skissane 1y ago
      > "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-and-impact-of-mental-illness#howmanymentallyill https://www.aihw.gov.au/mental-health/overview/prevalence-an...
      • crooked-v 1y ago
        It shouldn't be, but it is.
        • 1y ago
• wkat4242 1y ago
  This sounds a bit like it involved those glow vials that people use on torches? But those contain tritium. Not plutonium. And it's beta radiation not alpha. I can imagine that some officials had some concerns when they heard of plutonium to be honest. Besides radiation hazards it's also very toxic. But yeah they should have just taken it away and left it at that, considering the tiny quantity. Ps this whole story reminds me of back to the future :)
• hilbert42 1y ago
  "Good for him. This was an absolute ridiculous case." Absolutely so. I watched Tom's Explosions & Fire video just after he published it and as he said this prosecution was a gross overreaction by authorities. I say that as someone who once worked in nuclear safeguards/surveillance (I'm an ardent non-proliferation guy). Living in Australia one has become to expect such incidents although this was the first one involving nuclear materials. The reasons are complex and too difficult to describe in detail here but it's a combination of poor education in tech matters, a very timid, risk averse and conservative Australian population and the fact that we've precious little high tech industries/infrastructure, concomitantly we've almost no high tech culture to speak of. Moreover, it wasn't always like this, it has gotten worse over the years. For instance, when I was at school quite some decades ago we had samples of metallic uranium and some small amounts of other radioactive materials to do physics experiments with. Today, the mere thought of that would send shivers down the backs of educators and most of the population. Such high levels of timidy and concern are not just limited to radioactive materials, the same concern applies to chemicals well and above that necessary to protect public safety—for instance, the state where I live has now banned fireworks (and that's just for starters). That has ramifications past just safety considerations, one of the reasons I became interested in chemistry was fireworks and that we leaned to make black powder in highschool chemistry and actually got to test it (today, even that's banned in our school system). Similarly, we've even produced a generation of kids and young adults who've never seen liquid mercury. Let no one say I'm against safety as I'm particularly careful around dangerous substances. That said, you can have both in a well regulated environment and with a well educated population. Without hands-on experience, Australia is deskilling its population and tragically this unfortunate prosecution is testament to that.
  • kragen 1y ago
    Superstition and witch-burning are natural human behaviors. Philosophy has always required a ceaseless struggle against them. William Kamkwamba was nearly lynched by his neighbors for building a windmill.
    • hilbert42 1y ago
      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.
• giantg2 1y ago
  Nothing about the law is really about danger. It's all based on an international weapons treaty. In my opinion, the more you know about weapons and weapons laws, the more you realize how often ridiculous cases arise.