'Naive' science fan faces jail for plutonium import
172 comments
·March 22, 2025rdtsc
potato3732842
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).
red-iron-pine
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.
GistNoesis
What's the recommended way to handle being in such a Kafkaesque situation?
pjc50
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)
franga2000
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.
intrasight
[flagged]
logicchains
>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.
alabastervlog
> 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 :-)
mvdtnz
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.
smelendez
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.
kelseydh
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.
Larrikin
Hopefully they make a come back
hilbert42
"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.
caycep
Is this basically the source of a lot of Rhys Dharby jokes?
jayrot
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.
potato3732842
The message being sent is "even if we can't prove intent we still can completely ruin your life"
motorest
[flagged]
motorest
> (...) 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?
lenkite
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.
piokoch
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.
GoblinSlayer
>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.
SpicyLemonZest
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.)
AuryGlenz
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.
greenavocado
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.
defrost
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.
HeatrayEnjoyer
>to test fire a “high-powered” single-shot .50 caliber rifle.
Maybe that's just the public explanation.
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mrkeen
> 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.
randomNumber7
> 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.
cjbgkagh
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.
throwaway2037
> 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.
m463
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.
msm_
>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).
FireBeyond
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.
roenxi
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.
Brian_K_White
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.
BrawnyBadger53
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.
directgimkc
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.
m463
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.
bawolff
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.
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.
jjk166
Beyond a person's life being turned upside down, one also has to wonder how much this investigation and "major hazmat incident" cost taxpayers.
bigfatkitten
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/...
trhway
>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".
nukem222
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.
johnsmth
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.
Canada
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.
SpicyLemonZest
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.
windhaven
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.
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...
ninalanyon
> 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)"
GauntletWizard
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.
justatdotin
purity invites gradation; 'pure' does not.
01100011
United Nuclear has it for sale. No more dangerous than ore samples unless you cut a line and snort it.
throwaway743
Bob Lazar's company. That's kinda cool.
mlindner
Yeah and you can even buy it directly online. https://unitednuclear.com/restricted-to-ups-only-c-105_87/ye...
water-data-dude
Oh no, don’t link United Nuclear! To paraphrase an xkcd: “it’s like rickrolling, but the victim’s stuck all day”
leblancfg
According to that link that's for dispersible form (gas, powder) – it's up to 7kg in solid form ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
IshKebab
Shame on his employer for firing him. That's probably the shittiest behaviour here (which is saying something).
GolDDranks
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.)
bawolff
Indeed. Does australia not have laws against wrongful termination?
denkmoon
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.
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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?
kragen
Not really.
CrossVR
Given that this guy was charged under a non-proliferation act it makes a massive difference whether it's Pu-238 or Pu-239.
kragen
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.
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?
perihelions
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")
giantg2
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.
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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'?)
philipkglass
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.
mmooss
> Luciteria listing
Did they buy it from Luciteria? This article doesn't say.
ThinkBeat
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>
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?
colechristensen
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.
atomicnumber3
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.
achierius
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.
somenameforme
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.
cyberax
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-...
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SoftTalker
Reminds me of the Nuclear Boy Scout story.
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mmmlinux
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.
FpUser
Sadistic police state masquerading as something else since they have elections.
thih9
> 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?
> 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".