As WUWT readers know, I’m an advocate of do it yourself, amateur science, that what the surfacestations.org project was. This however, in our hypersensitive world, was a recipe for trouble:
Swedish Man Arrested For Building a Nuclear Reactor In His Kitchen
Swedish police have detained a 31-year-old man in Ängelholm in western Sweden who was discovered after he sought advice from authorities on the legality of building a nuclear reactor in a domestic kitchen.
The man began his experiment some six months ago and has reportedly been open about his plans to construct a nuclear reactor in his apartment in the small Swedish coastal town, maintaining a blog of his nuclear adventure.
The man, who explained that his interest in nuclear physics was awakened as a teenager, ordered some radioactive material from overseas and acquired more by taking apart a domestic fire alarm.
Despite the man’s frank and full disclosure of his experiment, his activities only came to the attention of the authorities a couple of weeks ago when he contacted the Swedish Radiation Authority (Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten) to inquire if it was legal to construct a nuclear reactor at home.
It appears that there likely wasn’t any danger from this guy as he did his experiment, and even though he talks about meltdown, it seems he didn’t come anywhere close to having a critical mass for runaway fission. I mean, c’mon, just how much Americium can you get out of a smoke detector?
The guy likely “ordered some radioactive material from overseas…” from this source:
Yep, good ol United Nuclear.
Full disclosure: I have some pitchblende and some radioactive glass marbles somewhere in my collection of stuff. I also have some pure liquid mercury in my collection of thermometers. I guess that makes me a target for a visit from the science police.
Funny thing though, one of my very first blog posts back in 2006 was about Nuclear power in your basement and nobody got arrested from that one.
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Put down the Fiesta dinnerware and step away slowly…
When I was at school, college and university we regularly use radioactive substances, now they are no longer allowed 😮
I also had a glow in the dark watch and various toys all now banned.
Health and safety gone mad, you got a bigger dose of radiation flying.
Now if it was in food then I’d understand (like in my grandparents day).
Aw, come on. This is just citizen science at its best. I imagine the Swedish police would have arrested Karl Benz, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers. And did they do anything about that mad man Alfred Nobel and his tinkering with explosives? Nooooo… selective enforcement, if you ask me.
Re Full disclosure
Recommend that you don’t tell them you have access to an abandoned rackets court
I hope the police don’t overreact when they find out Mother Nature makes her own reactors…
“The Oklo Fossil Fission Reactors” – http://oklo.curtin.edu.au/
Cool stuff, actually. 🙂
Best blog post title ever!
Ahhh shucks! They’re all sold out!
Is this an urban legend or true? The story I heard a very long time ago goes something like: A well funded charity or whatever sent doctors and hospital equipment to the middle of some poor country in South or Central America to set up a clinic. The equipment including some nuclear medical device that contained a powdered radioactive substance. For whatever reason, (revolution? lack of funding? – I can’t recall) the staff left but the equipment stayed, (ransomed?), which was eventually stolen for scrap. The junk man pried open the lead lined container inside the machine, discovered the powder and then sold it to people in his village which contaminated the entire village and radio-poisoned everyone in it including him – to their deaths. The story included people putting the powder on their food because they were told that it came from a hospital and therefore had to have some sort of beneficial medical property. The US government was secretly allowed to move in to clean up the whole disaster and bury the victims at great expense.
I think it was a cool idea, if a little dumb to call in the feds. People need to experiment to understand the world in a visceral way, not just intellectual. I would never have been able to sit still through years of science and mathematics to get an education if I had not experienced first hand what I could make happen.
At least one of the Farnsworth Fusor guys has used the neutrons produced to do activation experiments. And they produce lots of X-rays. They are dangerous. Nature is dangerous, but it is our birthright, in my opinion, to interrogate it. If someone has a couple of kilos of Pu, some intervention is likely necessary, but on a teeny scale, with a little care, lots of cool experiments can and should be done by amateurs, I think.
I *wondered* where he’d got the Americium from…
The headlines in the news are both misleading and inflammatory sense he had nothing but smoke detectors (Am-241) and natural radioactive materials (pitchblende by the way has U-238, U-235, and the Radium decay chain)… and nothing produced nothing by his work. This was a case of over reaction by the Swedish authorities. If he had actually succeeded, he would be in a hospital with Acute Radiation Syndrome or Dead.
Something similar happened in the US in 1994, see David Hahn “the Radioactive Boy Scout”
Apparently the Swedish fellow was nowhere as successful as David… ^_^
When I was a kid, I used to take apart smoke detectors that were being replaced just to get to that little piece in the center. I started this after taking one apart and seeing the nuclear symbol and realizing what was in there. They looked like the end of a pencil eraser with a little piece of yellow metal crimped inside. Eventually I had a Crown Royal sack with about 5 or 6 of them. (I imagined at some point having that entire purple sack filled with these little pellets and building a nuclear something or other out of them). I kept it under my bed.
I mentioned it to my 8th grade physics instructor one day. He thought that wasn’t a very good idea. He asked me about it a week later; I had put the bag in the garbage without mentioning it to anyone. He didn’t think that was too bright either, but was happy I had taken his advice to get it out from under my bed.
Never occurred to me that I could use it for anything other than maybe a very limited heat source; maybe build a ‘perpetual motion machine’ to impress friends with.
Anyway, why in the heck would anybody call the government to ask if it’s okay to build a breeder reactor in your kitchen? Might as well ask them if the thermite grenades you built in your garage are okay to ship through the mail. Or ‘does this nuclear warhead make me look fat?’ It guarantees their immediate and malevolent attention. Duh!
Once you’ve committed to a sustained fission reaction, you know you’ve gone rogue. Why try to split hairs? What are you gonna say; “well, Joe down at the power plant said he thought it would be okay.” Yeah, the old “Joe said it was alright defense.” gets you out of dutch every time.
Anyway, my $0.02.
Interesting story though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
That must be it – the story I heard is basically true excepting some ancillary embellishments, twists and the number of dead.
Confirmation that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than get permission.
I have an irradiated dime from the 1964 world’s fair. Mine is in the blue holder shown at the bottom of this page:
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/medalsmementoes/dimes.htm
With a halflife of just a few seconds, I don’t think I’m going to run my IPod on it though.
The fire alarm the story above is talking about is not a smoke alarm. The older emergency signs that stay lit even when the power goes out contain a radioactive battery to power the light. You aren’t supposed to throw them away in the trash.
Now that explains the one-eyed gerbils in the next flat….
That like to play the Banjo…
Bob Kutz says:
August 4, 2011 at 11:22 am
“Or does this nuclear warhead make me look fat?’ ”
Now THAT is damn funny, Bob!!! Just about had my lunch milk squirting out my nose!
Aren’t there people doing high school / garden shed / kitchen worktop validations of the Bussard / Nebel Polywell model of fusion reactor?
One Australian experimenter is claiming electron confinement on his home built device. Can he expect to be raided?
Link here: http://prometheusfusionperfection.com/2011/08/02/sydney-experiment-we-have-electron-confinement/
Science books in the 1950’s had regular articles on how to build your own x-ray machines. The following chapter was usually shorter and was instructions on how to build a lead vest for protection from what you made in chapter 1.
I not sure there is any problem here. My local university has had a pot belly nuclear reactor running since the 1970’s in the basement of the pharmacy building. (a thorium reactor I believe)
And your personal fusion reactor supposed to go on sale in October for about $3500 euros. You can read all about it here:
http://ecatfusion.com/
What is all the fuss about?
Albert K.
Actually, just a few years ago a law forbidding you to even think about improving fission reactors was abolished in Sweden. That peculiar law was the result of an uneasy compromise between the two sides of the 1980 referendum on keeping or ending nuclear power (the outcome is usually referred to as the “third way” – just keep fission until we have those safe fusion reactors that would surely be available in the year 2000).
But to sum this case up: the Swedish radiation authority did not find that the man had exposed others to danger or done anything illegal according to their measurements. They also tracked the way he had acquired the radioactive material and found nothing suspicious. The police officers on site took him in for questioning, but did not actually arrest him. I doubt that he will be charged with any crime from what I’ve read in swedish media.
Creative man!! 🙂
You have to read this as well… and NZ rs has to be embarrased by this guy writing this article. I didnt think it was possible to concentrate so many lies and misrepresentations in one article.This is not an article its more a diagnosis on the writer. Read and gasp!!
“Tellingly, so-called climate “sceptics” refuse to participate in scientific debates: by and large, they do not contribute to the peer-reviewed literature and they do not present their views at scientific conferences”
There is much much more in this article by ” Stephan Lewanowski” Have great fun!! Give him a phone so he can “phone home”.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10742945&ref=rss
James Thomas says:
August 4, 2011 at 11:22 am
Something similar happened in the US in 1994, see David Hahn “the Radioactive Boy Scout”
Apparently the Swedish fellow was nowhere as successful as David… ^_^
Wow, Hahn was arrested again in 2007 for stealing emergency exit signs and treated for radiation poisoning with visible sores on his face in his mug shots. I can’t believe he was still trying. That’s crazy and probably a little sick. Tried to get into the nuclear program in the Navy too.
Oh, and a quick follow up; the ore may be sold out, but the ‘uranium doped’ glass beads are still available; mine should ship today;
http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_76&products_id=482
Question; is it really legal to ship uranium doped glass beads through the mail?
Is it really legal to buy uranium via the internet?
Have I just been swindled out of $17.07?
Are government agents on the way to my house to ask me a few questions?
Just asking, stay tuned for the update.
Perhaps Joe Wilson is being assigned to make the trip. The NYT op/ed will be title “what I didn’t find in Oskaloosa”.
(That’s a bit of sarc/ there, for those of you in Rio Linda)
It takes 9 to 14 kilograms of Americium to make a critical mass. That’s lots and lots of smoke detectors at 0.28 micrograms per device, say about 40 billion, give or take a few.
Gee I thought that a microwave cooks fast enough.
The banning of mercury is what I fine strange. When I was a kid our science teacher put a bit of mercury in a dish on our desks and we could play with it with a stick. When my mother broke a thermometer, which she did at least twice that I remember, my brother and I would play with it, I think we even used our hands.