Man Arrested For Trying to Split the Atom at Home

[mew4ever23]

The thing is - the people at the Swedish radiation authority are not being douchebags by calling the police. They were trying to keep this guy from taking out the neighborhood if something went wrong.

I can honestly say I would have done the same thing, were I in their shoes.

 

[MrTub]

Any swedish person wanting to know more, or any brave enough person to use google translate on a forum, there guy himself has written in this thread: https://www.flashback.org/t1612034

Haha that was quite a fun read
Quite odd that he actually had three police uniforms...

Loved this part:

"Nä, men jag delade med mig av min blogg på Facebook, där jag har min jämnårige granne som vän. Han blev lite fundersam o frågade lite."

"Men det var jag själv som anmälde mig till Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten. O de överreagerar ju så... Jag hade t.ex mitt Radium i sovrummet, men de ville bestämmt komma ner o mäta i min lägenhet. Så nästa dag ringer det o så är det polisen som beordrar mig att gå ut ur lägenheten med händerna över huvudet. Folk i skyddsdräkter kommer fram till mig med mätare o scannar hela kroppen! Så jävla tramsigt!"

I loled quite hard

Googled translated:

"Nah, but I shared with you my blog on Facebook, where I have my peers neighbor as a friend. He was a little hesitant o asked little."

"But it was me who reported me to the SSM. Oh they are so over-react ... I had my example Radium in the bedroom, but they did bestämmt come down o measure in my apartment. So the next day calling the o, it's the police who orders me to leave the apartment with his hands over his head. People in protective suits come up to me with o meter scans the entire body! So damn frivolous!"

 

[Blackpapa]

to those who think it is hard to get radioactive material... just search ebay for uranium and bask in the glory of science

The NSA's watching...

 

[ResonanceGames]

From his blog: "An Uranium glass-marble I have. The green color comes from Uranium."

Surely only a genius could speak such truths.

 

[Yegargeburble]

You know what? Congratulation to the Swedish police, because they clearly arrested a supervillain.

Although, the fact he was able to get far enough for a "small meltdown" is pretty damned amazing...

 

[Cid Silverwing]

So maybe he violated some safety regulations. No one died or caught cancer, did they?

This guy should be hired for nuclear research. He may very well break through with cold fusion power.

 

[Zakarath]

What I'd be worried about rather than some nuclear explosion (which is pretty hard to create without packing a lot of explosives around a lot of nuclear material) would be a supercriticality accident. Splitting the atom isn't really all that hard. Just put a fair bit of high-grade uranium together and it's radiation will cause it to begin spontaneously fissioning. It won't explode, but it will spew out lethal levels of radiation. And such accidents have killed people before.

 

[Gilhelmi]

How do you get your hands on materials like that? It's not like you can go down to your local hardware store and ask to see their supply of Radium. Or is that possible in Sweden? Crazy Swedes...

Americium from smoke-detectors, of course not the whole piece is Americium.

The easiest way to get some radioactive material to start with, is to take apart smoke-detectors. Smoke-detectors is now more replaced with the optical variant, but in the ionizing type there is a small amount of Americium (Am-241), an α-emitter with a half-life of 432 years.

The Americium-piece lie on about 37 kBq, 37 000 bequerel. The background-radiation is on about 35 Bq. But for my project you need much, much more. About 100 of smoke-detectors. But later I will try another material, instead of getting so many smoke-detectors

That quote is from his blog. On a BBC interview he said he got much of his material from Ebay. That is right Ebay!!!

Gas lantern mantels for Thoriumoxide, common at any camping store (or even a hardware store).

You would all be very surprised about what is in everyday items that could be used to make the fun.. I mean dangerous stuff that I would never build. [mutters]myself(cough)

 

[Rule Britannia]

Let the guy do what he wants, just until he kills someone or himself.

 

[lunam-kardas]

Wait, where did he get the Uranium? Ebay?

 

[thirion1850]

Guys... splitting an atom doesn't create explosions. Fission requires a little more than just that. :| I doubt it'd create much effectual radiation to begin with. Put this guy in a lab, imo, he wants to do great things, let him.

 

[minimacker]

Aww.. He basically called and checked if it was all right, and then he's going to face 2 years in prison?

At least give this man a parole to work at the Institute of scientific sciences.

 

[minimacker]

...So... What did he do to protect himself from radiation poisoning?

The quantities were so ridiculously low, that the body absorbed and mitigated it.

 

[farscythe]

This is one of those cases where the criminal needs to be hired because if he can do it at home without a proper multi-million dollar lab who knows what else he can do?

agreed.

besides i need him to build a portable reactor i think its the only way to make power armor work for more than an hour or so before running out of juice

(have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how they mite work but keep getting stuck on the running out of fuel/batteries in a suit that weighs more than you do...is gonne be awkward...)

 

[Strazdas]

if he was storing nuclear material of multiple kinds (where did he got some anyway?) and no radiation levels were detected, then he had the proper shielded containers for in, in which case - not dangerous.
well i understand how this can be of dangr to neighboars and why nuclear physics should be left to people who can afford having noone around for couple miles radius. so in the end i got mixed reactions about this guy, but just think if he would have suceeded in making mini-reactor and then we can say good bye to gas and oil based home electricity.

 

[Ashsaver]

Shhh....don't tell anyone!

I have a small nuclear reactor inside my Xbox360!

Portable nuclear reactors are so cool!

 

[Con Carne]

I wonder what kind of charges would be against him if he were in the US.

 

[lolmynamewastaken]

i think i have a new hero...
how cool is he though to be fair, he makes nuclear power at home in his kitchen just to see if he could. okay, so it might have been abit reckless, but penicillin was discovered because flemming couldn't be bothered to clean properly.

 

[esperandote]

Moral, if you're going to do something illegal, don't call the authorities.