Reminds me of a story my partner told me about a ‘science geek’ in her year at school.
He brought loose mercury in with him to science class. As he showed the teacher, the teacher apparently evacuated the classroom. The kid got a good talking to apparently.
Not sure what happened to the mercury.
That’s wild. In my year 6 class the science teacher poured loose mercury onto a cutting mat, and rolled it around a bit. There’s so little danger in mercury if you don’t physically touch it. And don’t have long term exposure.
In my primary school science class, they poured mercury into our hands and we each had a turn playing with it for a while.
I also just remembered I had this toy maze thing where you had a blob of mercury that you needed to get to the centre like those ball-bearing mazes. Yep, a child left unattended with a blob of mercury and nothing but a layer of simple clear plastic stopping the kid from drinking the stuff.
Hahaha, what a legend! Practical teachers were always my favourite.
Yeah, i didn’t go into too much detail because i can’t really remember the story, so i don’t know if there was a legit problem, or the teacher was just reacting to the potential. I have this vague memory about him rolling it around the palm of his hand, but i don’t trust my memory on that detail.
What a fool, should have played it smart and bought a nuclear submarine instead!
Thank god appropriate resources are being dedicated to punishing this guy properly. Can you imagine the absolute mayhem he could unleash if eh managed to collect all the elements? /s
Pretty sure I watched a show as a kid where someone collected all the elements and then used them to take down the evil ruler.
Maybe Emmanuel Lidden is the Avatar?
I think you mean Captain Planet.
I mean this isn’t someone trying to import in nickel or any other element. He was shipping highly radioactive and toxic material around. It’s typically frowned on to expose people to radiation for the sake of you completing a collection.
Blah blah blah
We have bigger problems to deal with than this guy.
Don’t we all have a teeny bit of uranium in our homes in smoke detectors? Or was that some urban myth I’m remembering?
Not an urban myth, but a combination of slightly incorrect and very out of date. “Ionisation” smoke alarms typically contain Americium-241, which is radioactive just like uranium is (that’s the slightly incorrect).
But ionisation smoke alarms are illegal to install in Queensland (probably other states too, I just didn’t check), and haven’t been recommended since at least 2006 (that’s the very out of date). Instead, these days, smoke alarms are typically photoelectric.
The court heard that Lidden had ordered the items from a US-based science website and they had been delivered to his parents’ home.
Did he try to buy something off United Nuclear maybe?
https://unitednuclear.com/uranium-ore-c-2_4/uranium-ore-fragments-p-782.html
Edit: Read the headline 4 times and somehow missed “plutonium” bah
Fuck’s sake, leave the guy alone!
