It’s likely that among the readers of this article there will be many who collect something. Whether it’s rare early LEDs or first-year-of-manufacture microprocessors, you’ll scour the internet to find them, and eagerly await mystery packages from the other side of the world.
There’s a tale emerging from Australia featuring just such a collector, whose collection now has him facing a jail sentence for importing plutonium. The story however is not so clear-cut, featuring a media frenzy and over-reaction from the authorities worthy of Gatwick Airport. [Explosions&Fire] has a rather long video unpacking the events, which we’ve placed below the break.
Emmanuel Lidden is an element collector, someone who tries to assemble an entire Periodic Table in their collection. He ordered a range of elements from an American element collectors’ supply website, including samples of plutonium and thorium. He seems to have been unaware he was committing any crime, with the microscopic samples available from legitimate websites with no warnings attached. The case becomes murkier as the Australian authorities flagged the thorium sample and instructed the courier not to deliver it, which they did anyway. Then a raid of the type you’d expect for the terrorists who stole the plutonium in Back To The Future was launched, along with that Gatwick-esque media frenzy.
We’re inclined to agree that the penalty likely to be meted out to him for buying a sliver of a Soviet smoke detector embedded in a Lucite cube seems overly steep, but at the same time his obvious naivety over dealing in radioactive materials marks him as perhaps more than a little foolhardy. It’s something over which to ponder though, have we managed to amass anything illegal disguised as outdated devices? Have you? Perhaps it’s something to discuss in the comments.
I collect mercury tilt switches. I don’t think they’re illegal…
Also wet contact mercury relays…
It might not be very ROHS of you, but as long as you don’t live in a forest cabin and take interest in algebra and cryptography I guess it’s fine ;)
There’s a good reason you’re not allowed to take them on an aircraft. Mercury does a real number on aluminium.
While this is true and it’s pretty interesting to watch, it’s also surprisingly hard to get the mercury through the aluminum oxide skin to bare elemental aluminum.
Ah well, Australia is not called the Nanny State for nothing.
It seems a lot like this guy was flagged by an automated system that no one involved wants to talk about and when it turned out to be a nothing-burger, they had to come up with a post-hoc justification for such an obviously overblown response. I hope they don’t dig their heels in and screw this guy over. Tom makes the point very well in his video that the press has been as irresponsible in their reporting as the authorities were in their enforcement.
There’s nothing as illegal as embarrassing the authorities, especially if it’s due to their own utter incompetence.
Or perhaps don’t. Keep in mind that they’re doing terrorist raids on this guy FTA maybe think twice about whatever comment you’re considering making here.
Important to note is that the amount of plutonium he bought is extremely small. The plutonium source is from an old soviet smoke detector, which used plutonium in the way common smoke detectors used americium.
It is mixed with a glaze in milli- or microgram amounts (i didn’t catch that), and then baked onto a ceramic pellet or something. It is not a solid chunk of plutonium or something.
It’s not at all about safety, or about danger in any way.
In other words: if Americium was treated just like plutonium is, he could’ve gotten in the same trouble for buying a smoke detector.
In many places, there is a big legal difference between “buying a smoke detector” and “buying a source ripped out of a smoke detector”.
which is stupid, and we should point and laugh at people who live in those places.
Is it stupid?
There’s not a lot of plutonium in these sources, but when it’s refined you also don’t need a lot of plutonium to go super-critical. The physical processing for creating a nuclear device is not difficult especially when you already know you have the right material.
@Shannon: Not a lot? You need about 9-10kg of the stuff, depending on the isotope! How many smoke detectors would you need to procure, to collect at least 9kg? 100,000? 1,000,000? How much reactive element IS there actually in one such pellet. Surely a lot less than one gram.
And for all we know, the smoke detectors contain plutonium-242. And then you need at least 75kg. Or 11kg and a nuclear reprocessing plant.
You can get the critical mass of plut-239 down to 5kg or so with appropriate weapon design. Each of these detectors has a few 10’s of micrograms of relatively pure 239. So you need of the order of 50 million of them for a bomb. Probably more than were ever produced. So pointing and laughing is appropriate.
The “Atomic Boy Scout” did just that, he collected smoke detectors, clocks and lantern.
Back then they were a bit more radioactive. Do smoke detectors still have Americium or are they all optical these days?
The existing detectors in my house started emitting a barely audible triple beep when they hit 20 years old. That is some anal retentive firmware. I harvested the alpha emitter capsules to add to the parts drawer. Who knows when I might want to build a random number generator with one?
The replacements all look to be optical.
Not exactly harmless.
The smoke detector source he imported has about 1 mg of Pu. It comes from a plutonium batch that was left in the reactor that was breeding it too long. It has more than the allowable amount of Pu-240 and 241 in it for weapon use without very expensive and cumbersome isotope separation. The bulk of it ( about 72% ) is Pu-239.
https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/analysis-of-soviet-smoke-detector-plutonium/
That said the LD/50 of plutonium is 10mg. 1mg is enough to make someone very very sick. I worked a site where they would cut skin out of you if you got a splinter of it in you.
Where did 1mg come from, are you assuming that it is from
https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/analysis-of-soviet-smoke-detector-plutonium?
That smoke detector source is vastly different from the one being presented in the video which is here: https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale
The estimated mg amount for the element cube is 0.035 micrograms, which is pretty much nothing
According to the video 40is micrograms is likely.
A decade or two back I was watching an episode of 60 Minutes when I recognized something. The story was about this guy who tried to side step export controls on “nuclear triggers” to Pakistan.
I dug into my parts collection and there it was. An EG&G triggered spark gap. Technically a dual use item as it does have application outside things that go boom.
Purchased, as near as I can recall, at the Sandia Labs salvage yard in the 70’s. They had these 3 pound bags full of unused electronic parts for 50 cents/pound…
Then of course there is the recent NPRM from the State Department having the effect of adding some of my model/amateur rocket collection to the export controlled list.
30 years ago an HP signal generator was on the export controlled list, and treated like a munition. I know because I imported one :)
Reportedly it could generate signals that were “accepted” by front line fighter aircraft.
When a rocket locks on to a fighter jet, it’s radar signature changes from “search mode” to “locked on and tracking”. I thought it would be hilarious to make a small radio transmitter that transmit this “locked on” signal at an interesting place, for example in a NATO exercise.
But there is no way I’m actually attempting to build such a transmitter.
You thought… it would be “hilarious” to broadcast a signal pretending to be a SAM.. during a NATO exercise?
I don’t know who would get to deal with you first – the armed forces, or the relevant communications agency of the country.
Genuine question – how did you see this panning out for you?
sigh… read the whole post: “But there is no way I’m actually attempting to build such a transmitter.”
That would take SWATing to a whole new level… levelling houses, probably…
I’ve bought gear which was added to those lists at some later date, it’s quite common.
There’s also stories about UK surplus suppliers buying pallets of stuff that shouldn’t have been disposed of either because it’s still current, secret, dual use etc.
The one that comes to mind were sold by a company called Bull Electrical and were laser sights, I think, from Chieftain tanks, which had a high power IR laser diode (in the several watts range) and a low power red laser diode.
Apparently they got a visit from some very serious people demanding to know how they’d got them, who they’d sold them to etc.
Yup.
We had one of the Chieftain range finding lasers from Bull in our workshop back in the early 90s.
I have no idea what happened to it.
Also, I miss Bull Electrical. Visited their shop in Wolverhampton a couple of times. Always a “spare money” resolver.
I remember seeing those. Very glad I never actually ordered one of those now even though it was tempting at the time.
Well at least he was not a gear head ordering some “Polonium spark plugs” as used in the model T-Ford.
Also known as lead spark plugs, since after 75 years there’s less than a 1 in 10^30 chance there’s even a single atom of polonium left.
I fully agree with you.
But it does not matter if it has zero atoms left. If the box said polonium, and the spark plug had polonium written on it – it would still trigger a reaction if passing through most international borders. You have to imagine the mindset of the people enforcing the rules!
I had a very ditsy friend, who had a small red bag, with a pam-am logo on it, but instead of the words “PAM-AM”, it had “B0MB”. Any time that they flew they forgot that they always had hassle every time previous that they used this bag for hand luggage, yet the size was perfect for hand luggage, so …. Needless to say that every single time that they traveled the security checks were extra long and extremely heavy handed because of that bag and that bag alone.
Or a film photographer buying a Polonium antistatic brush.
IIRC those are still made and available.
Must be some niche application.
Check out his older videos where he does chemical reactions.
His presenting style is…. unique.
I guess the problem is if you buy one little bit, and then another, and another. Kinda like David Hahn who tried building a small reactor. That’s not this case, but you need to be careful when someone starts accumulating radiation sources. It shouldn’t warrant a crazy response like this, but maybe one guy with a Geiger counter to measure how big of a problem it is. And if it’s a big problem then call the hazmat team. Obviously they embarrassed themselves by overreacting and now have to pretend it’s a big deal.
He was just your typical collector. I mean who isn’t into clocks, lanterns and smoke alarms?
The apparently have a gamma ray spectrometer, likely at the port.
IIRC it can, more or less, identify the source.
Has to see decay products of non-gamma emitters though.
To catch small samples, they are fighting S/N ratio issues.
Government work…False positives are job security.
That isn’t actually a problem. The state shouldn’t be sending their weirdos out to sniff people’s houses. Leave people alone.
I was gifted a Kinder Surprise Egg without realizing they’re outlawed in the US.
A while ago I bought a canister style fuel filter with a replaceable element. After I installed it on my car, somebody started building “filter elements” for this that clearly weren’t intended for filtration; these “elements” wouldn’t filter out a 9 mm ball running from one end of the housing to the other. Apparently someone in the government convinced the original filter manufacturer that it was in their best interest to discontinue the housing.
You can probably still find pictures of the “filter elements” in question with the search string “solvent trap fuel filter”.
Sounds like wild cannon, I prefer silence myself, I hear it’s golden.
You can get a visit from the ATF for buying normal oil filters.
Big fat oil filters, that block sight lines.
‘They’ haven’t started visiting buyer of ‘suspicious’ 1 liter soda bottles, yet.
F’ em.
Take a kid to the range!
Then take them to the reloading isle, and explain exactly what they should not do (while they are still juveniles).
Buy them some D engines (or bigger).
I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of anything illicit in my possession. I have a lot of things, and my forebears didn’t like throwing things away. But yeah, I’ve also inherited at least a few things that are older than the laws regulating them.
these items are literally, provably harmless as long as they remain embedded in the lucite. even if they were not they would probably not be harmful unless you ate them or set them on fire and breathed in the smoke.
@anonymus: Good luck setting on fire a glazed ceramic ;-) it is literally already fully oxidized. you can evaporate it, but not without significant amounts of energy…
A relatively happy ending.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/11/science-nerd-ordered-radioactive-materials-parents-sydney-home-spared-conviction-ntwnfb