the article was very unsatisfying. the main thing I learned was that the government is watching you through its own or through "tips" from your neighbors and will unleash multiple agencies to upset your day or weeks or months. But who needs to be extracting the radioactive materials from smoke detectors? pretty soon they'll probably require every household to register their smoke detectors. it seemed like the whole purpose of the article was to just warn you. In this case, it was a "just kidding"

Add a dash of uranium salt to your salt-shaker for a little extra zing!

Yeah, they made a big deal about this in the local papers until someone pointed out that the actual exposure was less than most people get who have basements in their houses via radon. And the fact that they'd actually have to spend millions of dollars and have specialized equipment to A) extract enough material to be useful and B) actually put it to use.

This was literally a "nothing-to-see-here-folks-move-along" story. These people were morons.

Me too. I didn't think you could really buy uranium on ebay/amazon. Turns out you can.

Now I'm all paranoid and waiting for the feds to knock on my door because of that search LOL

I have some radioactive stuff here -- the green
melted sand from the desert below Trinity, the
first atomic blast. . took it to my manhattan project
site (where I worked) and it measured hi for the
cesium peak associated with fission blasts. -- j

when i read the article i couldn't believe that there was an amount that they could have legally.
what a joke.

Comrade citizens, rejoice!
Your EPA is . . .WORKING!
So smile as you get to work on your taxes.

On the one hand I want to know the names of the apartment dwellers.....When I see a story like this with no names I worry...I mean when we hear about a wrong way drunk driver killing a family of 5 on the way to church and the perps name is not in the article we usually find out that his name is Pedro....or Gonzales...and he is illegal. In this situation I wonder if the name El-Gamal ot Mubarek or something like that.

On the other hand......No crime was comitted...the people involved have a right to privacy. I think my challenge here is that the drunk dirver type story has made me have a complete lack of trust in the press.

My comment was pure sarcasm, yours is closer to the actual truth!!

The most probable explanation was to built a power plant for electricity. Wait haven't we heard that before ............................ ;-)

Shivering in my boots, but not from the idea you proposed as a possible explanation.
I think the administration would be trumpeting their magnificence if they finally did something they could use as an excuse for their ongoing inexcusable unconstitutional actions.

LOL An example of the government at work no matter how you read the article, whether you take the article at face value or read something deeper into it.

What if someone was busted for attempting to build a dirty bomb, but the "authorities" didn't want to panic the herd so they gave a cover story?

So, 10 whole paragraphs for the statists to trumpet how they saw some guy selling weird rocks on eBay, used overwhelming force to invade the neighborhood, had 4 very important and named agencies disrupt the lives of 10's of people and freak them out over less radiation than an x-ray, all with the ultimate and satisfying result of ... "meh".

Yup. Your government in action.