dont send that Plutonium guy to jail

Good day. Today I'm coming to you from inside a house to complain about something. You might have seen this news story that's been going around a bit recently. Sydney science nerd who might face jail due to importing plutonium. And I've been getting real mad at this. I'm getting mad at so many people involved in this story. And this story's been going on for a little while now. It's just bizarre and rage inducing. And I have to talk about it because like what is going on and why and what are we doing about it? And there were dramatic scenes at Arcliffe in Sydney South when a border force raid uncovered radioactive isotopes swarming with hazmat officers. The unit block in Ancliffe in Sydney South officially declared a no-go zone. The highly sensitive border force raid uncovering what's believed to be uranium isotopes and mercury. Inside number 24, a quantity of mercury and what's been described to us as a very small amount of a radioactive isotope, uranium 238, also known as depleted uranium. 9 News understands officers seized several jars, some labeled plutonium and radium, which are now being tested. After nearly 10 hours, emergency services finally confirmed they found low-level radioactive isotopes. Hazmat specialists say the material was stored in effective containers and there was no leakage. Depleted uranium can be used in a so-called dirty bomb and mercury certain kind of booby trap detonator. Is any of that relevant? Well, Border Force is saying nothing about the future direction of its investigation. There is uranium around in our kind of industrial economy. why you would want it in your house. I think there's no um logical explanation. With low levels of radioactivity, uranium 238 is not the first choice for a dirty bomb. Although it is easier than other isotopes to get hold of. This man was taken away by officers. There are so many questions. All right, this is the story. This is the new story if you haven't seen it. Uh Sydney science nerd may face jail for importing plutonium. So, importing plutonium. I'm going to talk about what this guy has done. He's guilty of this charge that they're charging with him. He's been found guilty. So, sentencing is very soon on April 11th. Apparently, he's guilty. I don't have to do too much alleged stuff. This guy is guilty of this crime, but it's a bizarre crime. No one in Australia has ever been prosecuted of this crime before. And like, it just doesn't need to happen. All right. So, first of all, we got to talk about this news story. Let's talk about what's in the news, what's being reported, and perhaps some of the language that they're using to sort of paint this guy a certain way. It's a guy from Sydney, right? And he was 22 at the time, and he bought some plutonium. All right, so the charge is that he's imported this plutonium. You can't do that. You can't import plutonium. Plutonium is used to make nuclear weapons, and Australia doesn't make nuclear weapons. So it's in fact extremely illegal to try and make nuclear weapons in Australia. So this is a nuclear nonprololiferation act. So it's basically stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. So you can't import plutonium and plutonium's only made in nuclear reactors and it's hardly even manufactured anymore. A lot of the plutonium supplies come from the 40s to 60s. A lot of it comes out of Russia. So it's very hard to get any plutonium at all, let alone enough to make a nuclear device. But that's what the law is prohibiting. Obviously, you can't make nuclear weapons. Everyone knows that it's obviously illegal to make nuclear weapons. Emanuel Lidden, 24, will have to wait to learn his sentence after breaching nuclear non-prololiferation laws by shipping samples of plutonium to his parents' suburban Sydney apartment. Lyen pleaded guilty to offenses under Australia's non-nuclear Proliferation Act that carry a possible 10-year jail sentence and is due to receive his sentence from the judge on 11th of April. The importation sparked a major hazmat alert with Australian Border Porce officials, firefighters, police, and paramedics all attending the scene in August 2023. Now, a couple things to note in that paragraph. First of all, we'll talk about who attended the scene in detail soon and what they're doing, but also it is August 2023. So, he's been arrested August 2023. It's so these crime happened a long time ago. So, we can piece together a timeline. We'll do that a bit later as well, but it was a while ago. So, August 2023. Far from there being any intention of building something nefarious like a nuclear weapon, Lyden's lawyer described his client as an innocent collector and science nerd who had been left flipping burgers after being sacked from his job because of the investigation. Hate the term flipping burgers. The guy uh was a

traininee train driver and he told that he was getting investigated. um and they immediately sacked him. So now he is working in a fast food restaurant. And the article later refers to it again as flipping burgers. I think a fast food restaurant job is harder than Sydney trains. Uh I couldn't work in a fast food restaurant, but I'm pretty sure I could drive a train. So um please correct me if I'm wrong if trains are actually really difficult to drive. But um you don't have to steer, right? steer. Christ, there's so many ads on these articles. Um, the prosecutors said describing the young man as a simple collector and science nerd was a mischaracterization. Collectors seeking illegal material created a market that might not have otherwise existed, a court was told. Sutton, uh, this is Lyen's lawyer, argued that Border Force officials had engaged in duplicitus and unfair contact by returning some of the material to Lyen after initially seizing it. Litter knew this was a radioactive substance, but he was allowed to possess it. And perhaps he thought it was because it was a minimal quantity. We will come to this very soon as well. He knows it's radioactive. He's bought it. He probably thought it was okay. I mean, we his lawyer is saying he thought it was okay because it was a minimal quantity. At the end of the article, the lawyer is quoted as saying the level of the response was a massive overreaction given what the investigative authority already knew. This is a really important question which we will also answer in this video. Was this an appropriate reaction given what the authorities knew? Okay, that's the story. That's what you'll read in the papers. Let's get to the actual crime. What did this guy import? What did he buy? It's not hard to work out what this guy has actually bought. He has not undertaken some shady importation deal. Let's just type in buy plutonium into Google. Look, first thing that comes up, plutonium cube. This is what this man has bought. Uh, and we know this cuz some articles, very few of them, but some of them do mention the website that he's bought it from. And it's a well-known element collecting site with a name that is lutisseria. Lutisseria Lucid Lucid. Anyway, this is a very normal website. They sell element samples. They're embedded in these acrylic cubes. Lots of people buy them. They're very pretty. They are based in the USA. This man has bought this plutonium sample. So, the details about this plutonium cube is uh still up online. Uh the item says it's discontinued now, but we can, you know, channel some advanced journalism and use the bloody way back machine to uh go back to an earlier year when the uh element sample was still available. And the description is still the same, yet we get to see the price of it. And we see that it is $400. In fact, actually the Wayback Machine has a couple of screenshots in here. Um, and it tells us when it was sold out. Uh, for now, let's have a look at what this website says about this sample. It may seem like a big joke at first, but yes, this is actual plutonium for sale with a big asterisk. And it goes on, oh yeah, it's very hard to get plutonium. Like any other forbidden fruit, it existence draws interest. Blah blah blah. The halflife of 24,000 years. Uh, this is plutonium 239. Um, and it's moderately radioactive. Anyway, the description continues on to say that this is a smoke detector made in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. And this is uh, you know, a commercial use for the plutonium. The Soviet Union was producing a lot of plutonium. America had all their plutonium locked down tight, whereas Russia was producing enough that some commercial applications came out from it. For American smoke detectors, they didn't use plutonium. They used amorissium, the American element. Um, and that's what most of the Western world has continued to do. This is an old smoke detector. I say old because for the last 10 years or so in Australia, they've all been non-raactive. They've been uh, you know, photo what are they called? Photo electric. So, I took this from my grandma's house. So hopefully um, she doesn't do too much risky cooking while I have her smoke detector. This has 37 kilobals of amorissium. So a similar device made in the 1960s instead of using amorissium used plutonium. There is not much amorisium in this smoke detector. That's why people could use them as smoke detectors and have them in their house. That's why I can hold it here. It is not very much amarissium.

The numbers are hard. The numbers the radiation numbers are difficult. What 37 kilob becker? What does that mean? Let's you know let's convert it a little bit. 37 kilobarles to cury. Let's work in cury. Uh one micro cury. 37 kilobarles is one microcury. Okay. Convenient. Sure. That's probably why they've done it. So this uses one microcury of amorissium. How many grams of amarissium is that? One microcury. Uh what? Amorisium 241. Amorisium 241 is the isotope. 29 mg. Oh, that's one cury. Okay. Oh, no, no. Okay. I hate this stupid AI thing, but one micro cury of amarissium 241. 0. 33 microgram of amorissium oxide. So. 3 micrograms of amarissium in the smoke detector, which um is reasonably old. So, some of it would have decayed. It's not risky really. I I've got to break in to get the source, which I'm not going to do. But even if I did that, it's just a bit of metal. It's not a big deal. It releases alpha particles. So, here we have exactly the same thing. It's just a part of a smoke detector from the 1960s uh in the Soviet Union that uses plutonium. So, assuming he bought one of these samples, which we don't know how many samples he bought, but let's assume he bought one sample because I think he's just buying one of every element. If he buys one of these samples, how many grams of plutonium did he import? Well, the description tells us. It says we're talking approximately 35 billionth of a gram. Sounds puny, right? And yet that incy tiny amount of plutonium smaller than a moat of dust is shedding mass at the rate of blah blah seconds per hour, blah blah. What you're looking at is a radioactive source on a vintage detector. So they've taken a bit of plutonium oxide in the glaze and they've baked that onto the porcelain. So it's not one tiny 35 nanog section. It's embedded in a glaze. So it's sealed and then it's again it's sealed in the acrylic. The description goes on and says spend an inch of plastic every side. The plutonium laced plug is fully shielded from those rays even if pried out of this cube which we very much discourage you from doing. This spindle would be harmless unless swallowed. So, we have the website saying it's an incredibly small amount of solid. It's not dangerous. It's you can barely detect the radiation coming off this. Okay, so we get to our first little bit of bizarre things that I'm mad about. The website quotes the amount of plutonium, a fairly important number when you're buying plutonium samples, as 35 billionth of a gram, which should be 35 nanog. This number is incorrect. That is not how much plutonium is in that sample. sample actually contains a thousand times more plutonium than advertised, which you know might not be a big deal, but this object is potentially going to end up causing someone to go to jail for 10 years. So, you think it would be important that you get the right amount of plutonium in the plutonium sample, right? So, how does this stuff up happen? Well, first of all, we know 35 billionth of a gram is too low. We can work out using the activity of plutonium how much radiation that puts out. And there's only what a couple of nano curies. That's too low. That's a stupidly low number. You can't run a smoke detector on what is effectively no radiation at all. And if we use once again the bloody wayback machine, we go back to the earlier days where they had some previous plutonium samples. They look identical. They've got the identical picture. However, these ones are priced at $5,000. And the description is mostly the same except at the bottom where it says uh we only have a total of four, which is probably why they're priced at $5,000. It also says once sold, the chance of restocking them is pretty much zero. However, they do obviously restock them a bit later after they're have been sold out with these newer ones, which is what our boy in Sydney bought. And those were only $400. But the picture is still the same. We're kind of roughly assuming that they're the same item. Uh even though there's a huge price difference. The important thing is also that this $5,000 one says not that it has 35 billionth of a gram, but it has 40 micrograms. 40 micrograms is a number that makes sense because that works out to be about 2 micro curies, which is very similar to how much is in the modern smoke detector, which is one micro cury. If we have a

you know an old Russian smoke detector that used two microcuries that makes sense. So 40 micrograms of plutonium makes sense. What seems to have happened is that the person writing this description has thought that one microgram is a billionth of a gram. So rather than writing it out as 35 or 40 micrograms, they've written billionth of a gram. But a billionth of a gram is a nanog. So, if you read the description for the item that you've bought and it says 35 billionth of a gram plutonium, but there's actually 35 to 40 micrograms of plutonium, it's a,000 times more plutonium than the thing that you've ordered. Another interesting tidbit is from the old plutonium cubes, so the ones that were $5,000. There was only four of them. And it says right at the bottom, under US law, ownership of radioactive material from smoke detectors is not regulated. So their website is kind of saying you're allowed to have these but export requires permits which we do not have. For this reason we can't ship this item to international customers. This note is not on the newer plutonium cubes which means one of two things. Either they shouldn't have shipped it internationally but they did anyway or they have got the permits to export uh you know radioactive materials. They can deliver it fine, but then the person who is accepting it is then the got the crime. Right? It's they've either got the permits or they don't. But either way, the person buying it in Australia doesn't have the permits. So why did they ship an item to a person who doesn't have the permits? Cuz I don't think they I doubt that they have the permits to export plutonium. So why did they ship them internationally? Was it a mistake? I don't know. But anyway, that brings us back to our guy. When did he buy him? what's going on and why did his whole street get raided? Come on. From an article released late last year, we see that a boy in Sydney made 10 orders from the website from this luticeria science beginning in May 2022. The website says collecting elements is a fun way to learn about chemistry. Does he get stopped? No. Authorities became aware of the import after Lidden's 11th order in June 2023. This article is written in a way that makes you think that there have been 11 orders of plutonium that I'm almost certain is not the case. First of all, the plutonium is out of stock fairly uh early on into his buying timeline, but also he's an element collector. You don't buy like 10 of one element. He's saving up money. He's buying the odd element at a time. And we know this as well because his 11th order doesn't contain plutonium. In fact, the thing that alerts authorities is that it contains thorium. Now, thorium is also a radioactive element. Look, it's not probably not a big sample of thorium. Are you meant to have these? No one really knows. So, this order contains mercury and thorium. And I think rightfully so, it triggers Border Force to say, "Hey, we don't know if this guy is meant to have this package. " So they tell the shipping provider UPS to not ship the package to the guy. This is where Australian border force enter the picture. Everything beyond this point is unreasonable. Radiation limits are you know are hard and these things are embedded in acrylic cubes. It's not clear especially outside the package if this is over the limit of what he's meant to have. And to be honest I don't know. I'm pretty sure it's legal for him to have this. And also because he hasn't been charged cuz later on when he's in court, he only gets charged with one crime, which is the importation of plutonium. He doesn't get charged with anything to do with the radiation. So the thorium sample is probably fine. In fact, we can actually probably pin down which uh thorium sample he bought because there's one thorium page where it has this warning about oh maybe um you know check if the radiation laws in your country allow this to be shipped to you but uh that was only added after this whole thing went down in early 2023. This warning wasn't on there. So they've sheepishly added a warning just to this thorium page. Australian Border Force getting involved at the first instance and saying, "Don't deliver this package because we're not sure it's radioactive or not or it's above the legal limits. We don't really know what's in it. " UPS deliver the package anyway. I don't know. They say it's a mistake. I don't know if that makes Australian Border Force incompetent. Australian Border Force like they have a lot going on, you know. They do a good job of protecting the country from a lot of imports. you know things like asbestous and you know there's a lot of things coming through the borders. It is surprising that they've

identified a package as a threat and said don't deliver it and the package company they delivered it to this guy's res residential address anyway. So Border Force kind of [ __ ] up a little right they've let this package through. Understandably, I think UPS feel a bit bad about this because they've been told by Border Force, "Don't deliver that package. It's probably illegal. " And they delivered it anyway. So, they call up the guy. They call up our boy and they say, "Hi, we delivered this sample to you, but like we weren't meant to. " Litty replied, and he's quoted as saying, well, at least his lawyer and the court document said that he was happy to return it, but UPS would have to come pick it up. And I think that's completely reasonable. If you've been told, "Hey, the thing we delivered to you, we're not sure you're meant to have it. " You say, "Well, you [ __ ] up, so you come pick it up and like, I can't mail it. " Then what? I'm going to commit another crime and mail an illegal thing. And another point is that he hasn't actually been told he's done anything illegal. He's just been told by the shipping company that the shipping company delivered it to him in error even though he ordered it and paid for it and it's still uncertain if it's actually legal for him to own. We get a fantastic stock image of uh uranium grains here and a high geer counter which is really not what our story is about at all. So Lynon's also confused and he's talking to UPS and he says, "How is it possible if you've delivered it if it's prohibited? How have you delivered me a prohibited thing? " So this guy has his 11th order. The 11th order contains thorium and mercury. This is his final order. So we know at some point in the previous orders he has ordered the plutonium. Now we can use a wayback machine to basically place his order. So, the new story tell us that his first order is in May 2022, but this 11th order, the one that gets picked up by Border Force and delivered to him anyway, is made in like mid 2023. When did he buy the plutonium sample? Because he must have had that plutonium sample before the 11th order. So, it was in one of the previous 10 orders. And we can roughly place it because we can see when the plutonium samples come online for sale. And this uh goes on in late 2022, December 2022. And the samples are sold out in January of 2023. They were only available for 2 months. They've sold out. We know he was placing 10 orders between, you know, uh, mid 2022 and mid 2023. So, it's a reasonable assumption to know that this guy has bought the plutonium cube in January 2023. So, where are we? This is uh June 2023. Uh, Australian border force have just been alerted to the thorium package. They tried to stop it, but didn't. Uh, and now I assume have looked into this guy's orders. This guy isn't doing it in secret. He's putting his full government name on. He's ordering them to the same residential address. If they have one order, they can trace back all the other orders. And they've seen all his previous 10 orders that also include that 11th order for the mercury and uh the thorium. And we know now that um the plutonium sample must have been in one of them in around January. So, Border Force know this guy has radioactive samples in a residential address in Sydney. They have three options of how to approach this. First of all is a very measured approach, right? We know now in hindsight that the guy was very amanable to return the samples. He hadn't been told he'd done anything wrong. The website had shipped them all to him. If they were illegal, they would have been intercepted, but they all got delivered to him. Maybe Border Force could have just rung him up, turned up at his house, and said, "Hey, we think you have radioactive samples. Can you return them? What do they look like? What do you have? " Communicate to him. That's option one. Option two is they're aware that this guy has radioactive substance in a residential area. So, they can act on a CBRN threat. So, this is a chemical, radiation, biological, nuclear threat, right? They don't know how much radioactive material he has in the residential ledger area and there are agencies equipped to deal with radiation threats most notably our panzer. So our Panza are the Australian uh radiation protection nuclear. They're our Panza. Okay. Aranza deal with radiation incidents threats, all sorts of things, right? Okay. So they're not really like security, but they deal with like you know lost sources or like medical incidents and that kind of thing. So in a CBRN incident like you might say this could be where a guy has sources they can step in and there's whole guidelines on how they would do that. Um you know the response force uh how the police are meant to respond to that. Third option and the one border force went with is to just do it

themselves. An exclusion zone was enforced, neighbors evacuated. Some given precautionary health checks. three were taken to St. George's Hospital. And I just looked to my right and I would see roughly about six to seven ambulances, uh, 10 fire trucks and like two federal police cars and men in hazmat suits and um, other shepherd German shepherd dogs with the police. Some residents were told to stay inside. Others were told to evacuate. And did they tell you why? No, they have no idea. No one told me nothing except the fire brigade. What did they say? They said there's some sort of uranium inside his He got uranium from overseas. Border Force is leading the investigation but confirming very little. It's not known how much radioactive material was discovered or its planned use. A good wake up call first thing in the morning. Australian Border Force knocking on your door telling you to leave the house. Now I've said border force do a good job but border force's job is enforcing the border. They should not be conducting raids on radiation incidents in a suburban area. They did a full raid of this guy's house. They shut down the street. They evacuated the other residents. They forced the family into an ambulance and took them all to hospital for a medical checkup. Now, this sounds like they're responding swiftly to a radiation incident. It took them 2 months from that first thorium sample where they first knew about this the radiation samples in that guy's house for them to respond to that radiation. 2 months. They did not conduct that raid until August of 2023. Now, by that time, the man had the plutonium sample for 8 months and the border force had known about it for 2 months. So the question really is, did the Australian border force really believe there was a radiation threat or was it for show? The guy has had a plutonium sample in this address for 8 months at this point. If they really believe there was a radiation incident and they sat around for 2 months getting warrants, getting their bloody jackets on. They are not equipped. Australian border force are not equipped to attend the first line defense of a radiation incident. There are agencies that are equipped to attend radiation scenes. Australian border force are not one of them. Hello. Sorry to interrupt my ranting with uh more ranting, but I've got to get my facts straight. One thing that the news stories about this initial raid don't really get correct or mention a lot of the time is who was involved. And it takes the ABC's new story is the only mention really that uh EPA and our PANS are actually involved in this uh operation. And it is a bit confusing. All right. Apanza are the Australian Nuclear Protection Agency or whatever. And they're nationwide, but they don't really uh do operations on the state level. So, they're not really attending the scene. What uh they have is there sort of an agency below them in each state uh that respond to each scene. So, in New South Wales, that is the EPA. So, the EPA are there kind of on behalf of our Panza or taking advice from our Panza. And the EPA are used to dealing with, you know, nuclear incidents. So they attend the scene. That's very normal. That's good. They should be there. The ABC also mentions that staff and advisers from ANSTO are there, which I think is a little bit irregular, but they're there to take the uh items which border force know that the guy has um I believe they take those items back to Ansto to do their analysis so that border force can get the conviction. So I'm fairly sure that's what ANSTO are there not so much to give advice because they have the EPA on the behalf of our panza there but ANSTO have the resources to help Border Force get the conviction and that is my issue with this whole thing. Border force have such a hard on for getting a conviction that convicting this guy is more important to them than public safety. It's clear because they spent so long setting up this operation and getting warrants. And it's easy to say, "Oh, well, of course they need warrants. They're going to go into this guy's house. " You only need a warrant and all that if you're trying to arrest the guy. If you're actually concerned about public safety and you know there's a nuclear thing in a guy's house and you want to protect the neighborhood, you don't have to wait for a warrant and wait 2 months. you can just go and like cuz from my understanding how this would normally work is EPA in collaboration with Aranza the national body help to identify risks you know survey the area help with decontamination if needed but they're not in their own words a combat agency so they need to be with another agency

to do sort of I guess a bit of the leg work and if other people are involved you know they need other people to deal with that often that's fire and rescue New South Wales in New South Wales. But if it's an actual security threat, that could be um you know, the Australian Federal Police, you know, if we're talking about a terrorist incident. And there's quite a number of uh combat bodies that the EBA says. Australian border force are not one of them because typically involved in a scenario like this. So I would say why a border force there? This is the point I'm getting to. We can see this operation in action in New South Wales. two weeks later. Okay, this is an incident that happened in 2023, August 2023 in New South Wales. Involves the EPA and Fire and Rescue New South Wales. All right, so a couple of builders are building a house. They demolish a wall. They find a garbage bag, a plastic garbage bag labeled uranium. For the second time in two weeks, Sydney has had a radioactivity scare. The latest causing a building at Wara to be evacuated. Last time it was imported nuclear isotopes. Today, the bizarre discovery of uranium ore stashed inside a wall cavity. The old plastic shopping bag marked with a radioactive warning sparking a major contamination scare when discovered by tradies. Turn the bag over. We seen the uh the symbols and that on something's not right here. A hazardous substance with a nuclear active rock pitcher on it. So, we all sort of [ __ ] bricks. Excuse the French. Cutting into a wall at a walara unit block, they found a rock wrapped in a bag handwritten black texture describing carnotite uranium. The trades Googled it. It's a very radioactive substance. So that was a bit of a shock because um we pierced the bag so a bit of dust came out. We inhaled it. The site quickly locked down, declared an exclusion zone, the building evacuated, the workers checked by paramedics, tested us all out, we all cleared. Hopefully, hazardous material crews scanned the rock, but no radiation readings. The situation is safe. It's all been rendered safe. The unit's occupant had brought the rock from South Australia 15 years ago before putting it in the wall. The rock will undergo more scientific analysis, but emergency services say the workers here did exactly the right thing, raising the alarm immediately. And fire and rescue New South Wales turn up um and they secure the area. They put a perimeter around the area, an exclusion zone. They check the people for signs of uh contamination and do the health checkups with the ambulance and the EPA run the scans um confirm that there's actually no uranium in the bag. Um and it's all good. It takes about the day. All the parallels are here from our other incident. The difference is this all happened in the same day and Fire and Rescue New South Wales talked to the media and let them know what was going on. In the case of our raid on this 22-year-old which was so focused on getting a conviction, took an extra 2 months and they just evacuated people outside the exclusion zone, woke them up and just didn't tell them what was going on. They didn't talk to the media. They just like vaguely mentioned some things later on in a press release leading the media to speculate about this guy making dirty bombs. Like it's ridiculous. Australian Border Force, they don't need to be there. Fire and Rescue New South Wales and the EPA completely handled this uranium incident 2 weeks later without an overarching Australian border force thing. If they were genuinely concerned about public health, then the same operation that happened two weeks later could have happened at this address without any border force people there. Um, but then border force, how would they still get their conviction? Well, if the guy was importing and owning illegal things, then they can still get their conviction, right? They don't all have to be there across a radiation incident for them to get this conviction. But it is easy to think that maybe border force contacted the EPA and said, you know, we want you to raid this guy's house and pick up all these things. And the EPA said, well, all that he has is legal. They're all legal to own. They're below the limits. I mean, I don't know for certain because we don't know exactly what he's bought and what quantity, but assuming he has bought these cubes. All of his orders are from the same site. there all these sealed cube sources and all the reports are saying that all the radiation was sealed and contained. So assuming that all he has is a couple of these cubes, none of this is illegal to own. above the radiation limits for each isotope. So maybe Borderfor spent the 2 months working out how to get a warrant to raid this guy and shut down the street if he only had legal isotopes. You know, this bowl is a uranium bowl. It is far more radioactive. I don't know how radioactive it is, but I can tell you straight away it is far more radioactive than any sealed depleted uranium source that this guy would have, assuming he

doesn't have a huge, you know, lump. And it's I would say billions of times more radioactive than this bloody sealed smoke detector nonsense. This is a home use for uranium. The bowl looks lovely. It's radioactive. No one is coming to my house to raid me cuz it's legal for me to own. In the same way as this instead this was uranium glass. It had a bit of uranium metal inside glass. How is that any different? It's not. It's not legally any different. Okay. So, Border Force are so convinced they're going to get a conviction against this 22-year-old that they send all the samples to ANSTO and they have ANSTO involved from the get-go so they can immediately scan the samples and tell them that the radiation is above the legal limits or whatever. and Ansto probably tell Australian Border Force. I'm doing a bit of speculating here. I'm sorry, but the fact that he hasn't been charged with any radiation related crimes means that Ansto would have told Border Force that these are not above the legal limit. They're not illegal samples for this guy to have. At least they're not obviously illegal. It's all a little bit questionable. you got to look at isotopes and you know it's not about how much radiation the uranium gives off because it's a sealed source in the acrylic. So you would measure the radiation outside that acrylic and for things like the plutonium uh that's obviously an alpha emitter. I'm not going to say It's an alpha emitter. So most of its radiation is alpha particles which are effectively blocked by this acrylic. So the actual radiation you would detect outside that um cube once again is basically nothing. But Border Force have gone to all this effort to convict this guy. So instead of just letting it go, they pull up this obscure law from 1987 and be like, well um actually even if you can technically own the plutonium and it's legal for you to buy, you can't import it. It's illegal to import it. And of course, importation is Border Forc's thing. Um, so they're like, "We get to charge you on an importation crime. " Yeah. Even if it's illegal for him to own, buy, it's illegal for him to import. But I got to go back inside the house a sec. But I wanted to mention as well assuming this guy like let's say you this is you in this scenario you are buying a plutonium sample in 2023 and you say well maybe there's a chance that I could be the very first person convicted of this obscure nuclear non-prololiferation crime from 1987. So why don't I look at the laws? And if you look at the laws plutonium is mentioned four times in this law document. One of the times it's talking about how plutonium of a certain isotope is excluded from this law which is not relevant because I'm sure the isotopic composition of his isotope is plutonium 239 which is standard reactor grade rather than plutonium 238. Although I do wonder if the prosecutors did do quantitative gamma spectroscopy to actually show this because how do we know that his plutonium was not plutonium 238? He doesn't know. I'm sure nobody knows. But if it was, I mean, it's exempt from this ruling. Anyway, the other two mentions of plutonium are in defining what nuclear material means for this act. So, it's saying that plutonium is classified as nuclear material, same as uranium for the purpose of this act. But the fourth mention of plutonium is in this table here, which tells you, you know, the various levels of crime depending on the mass of plutonium you import. It goes from kilos down to 15 g. So if you looked at this law and it showed you that the lower limit was 15 g, I think it would be reasonable to assume that anything below 15 g wouldn't be in violation of this law, let alone something 500 million times smaller than 15 g. Because remember the guy thought he was buying 35 nanog and 35 nanogs is so much smaller than 15 g. You would look at this law and say there's no way that I would be prosecuted for this law. And I get the Australian Border Force love charging people with crimes for importation. That's their whole thing. But the Department of Public Prosecutions looked at this law, looked at Australian Border Forces, you know, submission or whatever and still went through with it. They did not need to go through with charging of this crime. They could have looked at this and been like, "No, the guy's got 35 nanog, 35 micrograms, 35 mg, whatever. That's below 15 g as the law, but we're not going to charge him. " Like, that's ridiculous. They could have done that, but instead they were like, "No, no, no. We will take this to trial. We will waste everyone's time. Why? What? It doesn't even seem like the law is applicable here in the slightest, both from a common sense and a legal standpoint. I don't know. I

can't read legal documents. How many atoms of plutonium does it need to be? You know, there are atoms of plutonium in this dish from the uranium. I think I can't really remember the chains off the top of my head. It's not that hard to get atoms of plutonium. You can't just have laws that go all the way down to zero like this. Anyway, let's go back inside this house. I got to return this smoke detector to my grandma. Oh my god. I got better do that. This is not because of the amount of plutonium. It's not about the danger of it. It's not dangerous. Doesn't matter that the stuff is radioactive. It's not radioactive enough to be illegal. It's purely because it's plutonium and plutonium is banned because you can make nuclear weapons out of it. Now, how much plutonium do you need to make a nuclear? All right, we're talking about nuclear weapons. You got anything to say? Do you know how much plutonium you need to make a nuclear weapon? This feels like it would be a closely guarded secret, but you can just look it up on the Wikipedia page. The first nuclear tests, you know, fat man, etc. The first plutonium ones use about 6 kilos of plutonium. Modern nuclear weapons, you know, the thousands of so of them that exist worldwide, uh, use about, I don't know, 4 1/2 g of 4 and a half kilogram of plutonium. It's a big mass of plutonium. And the reason you get away with such little plutonium as 4 and a half kilos is because you have a lot of other explosives and nuclear material around the nuclear weapon that when it blows up, it compresses that core of uh plutonium. If you wanted the plutonium itself just to go critical without all that architecture around it, all that highly designed stuff, if you got 10 to 11 kg of plutonium, collected it together, it would blow up. problem is that it's not just any old plutonium you need. You need enriched 239 plutonium. It's called weaponsgrade plutonium for obvious reasons. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about weapons grade plutonium? No. No plutonium. Normal plutonium. Let's call it normal plutonium. Plutonium you would normally make in your nuclear reactor that you had in the Soviet Union in the '60s produces also plutonium 240 and that ruins the nuclear chain reaction you need in a bomb. So you need to remove a lot of that. So normal grades I say normal again it's called reactor grade. It's like a general commercial grade of plutonium. Not that there's that much commercial use of plutonium but it's got about I don't know 18% of the plutonium 240. And you need to reduce that by a lot to get uh weapons grade. And that's not an easy thing to do. If you had enough of these Russian smoke detectors, what there's 35 micrograms. So if you had a million of them, you'd have 3 g. If you had a billion of them, you'd have what, 3 kilos? If you bought 6 billion smoke detectors, could you make a nuclear device? No. Because it still wouldn't be enriched enough. and enriching weapons grade plutonium is fortunately very difficult. Let's be clear, you cannot make a nuclear weapon out of what this man has bought. So why is the Department of Home Affairs punishing this guy? Bro, he lost his job. You took away his cool samples. He knows it's illegal now. You can get to do some public outreach that plutonium is actually illegal. No, you just say that and you say, "Oh, these are the dangers of buying things online that sometimes there's import laws. " And you just let the guy go. You don't need to sentence him to years in a jail for buying things from an elemental collection site that also listed it as a thousand times less plutonium than you thought it was going to be. Whatever. You know what I mean? Don't send this guy to jail. If the sentencing ends up with him going to jail, I honestly have no idea what to say. Who is the Minister for Home Affairs? It's this guy. I get it. You've got this law and you must follow it. Blah blah. Do it. He's been charged. Sentence him to one day of community service. Do some public announcements. Move on. The real issue in all this is how the state how Department of Home Affairs responded to an actual radiation incident and they let border force do it and sit around for months. How did someone from Australia import plutonium and get away with it? He basically got I mean if he hadn't ordered the thorium sample, no one would have known he imported plutonium into a residential area. What? And border force missed it. they

couldn't prevent radiation packages from being delivered to him, so they what handle the investigation themselves. But if you're not taking the radiation thing seriously and you're just evacuating people and uh taking people to hospital for show as some sort of intimidation tactic, that's also unacceptable. You can't That's ridiculous. What for a 22year-old train driver trainy train driver? What that you got to intimidate him. Come for [ __ ] on. Don't answer your phone in the [ __ ] radiation area, mate. Just [ __ ] step outside to take some [ __ ] phone calls. We know you haven't scanned the Was the sample dangerous? No. Was any of the samples dangerous? No, not really. And nor was he charged for any of the samples being illegal or dangerous? Unclear if they're illegal. We should probably work out those laws a little bit better. So the postal companies know what they can and can't do. No one's clear about the radiation laws. They're very difficult. It's difficult thing to police, but like we should probably work that out a little better, Australia. And no, he wasn't going to make a nuclear weapon. And no, he's not responsible. Collectors are not responsible for the market, right? Like, yes, of course people are going to buy this [ __ ] It's [ __ ] cool. Of course, plutonium. What a of course you [ __ ] want plutonium. He didn't create this market. There's some sort of obscure thing that he wants to buy us and everyone [ __ ] wants a bit of plutonium. It's sick. So like, okay. Importing [ __ ] plutonium. Importing use another [ __ ] stock image. Why didn't any of the journalists just Google the thing he bought and put a picture of the thing you bought in the article? I don't know why. I don't know why that's so hard. Why would you put a stock image of uranium ore in an article about a thing that the guy bought when the picture the guy of the thing that the you know what I mean? I'm choking on my own rage here. My god.