A bad home hobby
August 6th, 2011 at 2:22 pm by David FarrarAP reports:
A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen said Wednesday he was only doing it as a hobby.
Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material.
The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.
Only later did he realize it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.
May have been wiser to check before you start, whether it is legal to build your own nuclear reactor at home.
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August 6th, 2011 at 2:38 pm
What if he had succeed though in building a miniature one?
Good question and pertinent to debates over energy.
Vote:The DSIR back in the 50′s and 60′swere thinking and working on this but all those brainy guys and engineers got pushed out and we remain the poorer for the idiocy of one Simon Upton and his piss poor approach to research.
August 6th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Closer to home, a Sydney guy, Mark Suppes, is also building a nuclear reactor at home although he is taking the much safer and hygienic route of using his garage rather than his kitchen to perform the experiments.
He is also building a Polywell Fusion reactor rather than mucking about with nuclear fission. Just this week he reported possibly achieving electron confinement for the first time.
Die hard propeller heads can follow every detail on his blog at http://prometheusfusionperfection.com
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
That reminds me of this:
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer/
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
I seem to recall reading about how Richard Feynman built particle accelerators and cyclotrons in a shed when he was a kid. Won a Nobel prize eventually.
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 2:55 pm
This dude needs a copy of a book I have called “Brain surgery for fun and profit”. You can also learn how to crochet a suspension bridge and make ratatouille with real rats along with other home skills. Great book.
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Hmm… DIY gone too far. There’s been a bit of it lately:
Man Conducts Surgery On Self Using Butter Knife
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us-surgery-knife-odd-idUSTRE76Q3OT20110727
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 3:21 pm
Appropriate bumper sticker perhaps: “Gone Fission”.
Maybe his favourite meal was “fission chips”
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Yet more pointless government regulation. This assault on the private sector is why we have electricity shortages.
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 3:40 pm
How dare this man have a non-approved hobby without getting written government permission first!
I know… it’s bad because is nukular…. Next thing people be experimenting with D.N.A…… That means….. G…E…. Which is evil….
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
He did not ask the IWI either
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Reminds me of the story of the “Radioactive Boy Scout”
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 4:38 pm
we should ban all this scientific entrepreneurial progress
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Well I just wasted half an hour of my life looking for online vid of a piece of TV that’s relevant to this. It was a 1970′s American sitcom called Barney Miller: specifically the episode in which the cops confiscate a “device” from an apartment after the landlord complains about strange chemical smells coming from the rooms.
While other police search for the renter of the room the detectives speculate about what it might be. Their suspicions grow wilder, to thinking that it might be an atomic bomb, and they call in the bomb squad and a government “expert”, who all scoff at the notion.
Finally the renter is found and brought into the station where he informs them that he is a physics student and that the device is, in fact, an atomic bomb (lacking “only” the plutonium).
There were two lines that I remember from this. First from the student:
But the kicker was the resident intellectual on the D-squad, Dietrich, who has been out on another case. Upon entering the office he grabs a coffee, wanders over to look at the device on a table and pronounces:
Classic stuff.
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Radioactive materials are perfectly safe if handled properly.
A lot of anti-nuclear hysteria comes from an inability to quantify risk. Stairs provide considerably more risk than a backyard physics experimenter, but you don’t see police raids to confiscate stairs.
Having said that, the Nuclear Boyscout article is a cracking read. Especially if you also read the coda that was published a few years after the initial story (the mugshot is particularly alarming).
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 6:38 pm
s.russell
Feynman didn’t do that, but he had lots of other adventures and wrote a couple of very funny books about them.
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 6:39 pm
Tom, there actually *was* a student who wrote a detailed plan for making an atomic bomb as part of his physics assignment – up to that point he was a D student. He got an A for his trouble, and they classified his paper
Scary thing was he wasn’t that good a student, but was able to design one (and he designed it with terrorism in mind) using a) declassified materials b) his physics training and c) one call to an explosives company that should have set off serious alarm bells! (I mean seriously, why would someone want to create a universally imploding shockwave!)
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Louis Slotin’s wee oops, sorry boys.
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 6:58 pm
This is not a hobby for the kitchen. If you want to split the atom do it in your shed.
Vote:August 6th, 2011 at 7:35 pm
No Inky, thats what the basements for.
Vote:If there is any interference during the test tonight I apologise, I’m firing up the collider tonight.
There might be a mini black hole near Eden Park if I get things wrong.
August 6th, 2011 at 8:05 pm
You’d better defer till 11:00 PM alex.
Just watch that black hole as well, let’s not let that escape.
Have you triple-checked the wurzenfluggle, just to be on the safe side?
Vote:August 7th, 2011 at 8:24 am
As long as he wiped the bench down afterwards.
Vote:August 7th, 2011 at 9:15 am
Was he trying to generate 1.21 Gigawatts
Vote:August 7th, 2011 at 9:43 am
Pia, that’s Jiggawatts, please.
scrubone
To be fair it might not have been the implosion type, it could have been the gun type – not as efficient (or as cool), and not enough for an A in a physics paper I would have thought, but much less complicated…
Vote:August 7th, 2011 at 10:43 am
“What the hell is a jiggawatt? “
Vote:August 7th, 2011 at 11:38 pm
Some guy in America made a nuclear pile in his garage(?) with Americum from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lanterns and radium paint from old clock’s.
Vote: