Thursday, August 4, 2011

Today in Terrible Ideas: Home Fission

Posted By on Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 12:00 PM

I applaud the home science hobbyist, trying to understand the universe on his own, outside the bounds of fancy universities and their safety standards, but perhaps when you're blogging about a mini-meltdown, that might be a sign that you've gone too far:

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.

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