Swedish man caught trying to split atoms at home | Hacker News Reader

Swedish man caught trying to split atoms at home

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157 pointsdanso77 comments

As a chemistry major, I've honestly seen stupider things allowed to happen in a supposedly supervised laboratory than what this guy was doing.

Was it wrong that he was doing it in his apartment, putting all the other tenants at risk? Absolutely, but I don't think he should be put in jail, just reprimanded and told where to perform experiments in a safe environment. Who knows, maybe his experiment would have worked w/o all the cigarette smoke and ash.

The only reason I post this comment is because this guy is exhibiting the hacker spirit that we all do, just in a physical science instead of computer science. I would be upset if someone told me not to play with data structures they way they won't let him play with chemicals. (Again, I know its not the same thing in practice but it's the principle.)

When the practice involves potentially killing yourself and poisoning other people, the principle would seem to be not the same.

I totally agree but that would be the in the implementation; the principle is an abstract idea, [1] such as the principles of modern physics.

I know it seems nit-picky but as someone with an interest in chemistry and comp sci, and a degree in both, I can appreciate the curiosity that comes with science. It's what encouraged me to study the science.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/principle

the difference in principle is that some kinds of curiosity are potentially fatal

Your hacking practice involves potentially unleashing viruses and breaking into other systems. Hence, it should be regulated.

Just wait. They just come for the physical sciences first, but things are definitely going in the direction of making programming a restricted activity.

If this guy wants to play with the physical sciences, he could build a potato cannon, electroplate a cup with silver, or hack an Arduino board. Radium is just inherently dangerous.

I would like to know where you get your evidence that we are falling down some slippery slope where restrictions on home experiments in the physical sciences are getting stronger, and that programming is headed towards the same direction.

I don't see why anyone would regulate programming. Mostly, it's harmless, and even useful, and not dangerous. The guy in the article was playing with radium in an unsafe way that could have contaminated the apartment. He had a meltdown on his stove! It never occurred to him that this might be possibly illegal until several months in! Does this look like a guy who actually knows what he's doing when it comes to radioactive stuff--not your cute little computer viruses, you know, that send spam or maybe hijack a few cycles, but the kind of shit that gives people birth defects and cancer?

Sorry, dude, programming just isn't in the same class as nuclear physics. Don't worry, we won't be regulating it the same way.

I would like to know where you get your evidence that we are falling down some slippery slope where restrictions on home experiments in the physical sciences are getting stronger

Stories like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411813

About programming I agree that it's more tenuous, but sites like https://freedom-to-tinker.com/ clearly are talking about something.

I don't see why anyone would regulate programming.

People who say things like this:

"The FBI said that cyber crime is the agency's No. 3 priority but it will likely rise to No. 1 in a few years. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robert White said that criminals always find new ways to exploit victims and businesses, which keeps the U.S. at risk. "Given our connection to the Internet, and our infrastructure and everything being computerized, it also lends itself to possible cyber terrorism..."

Principles don't kill. Practices do.

Before you jump into "poor guy" mode, please have a look at his blog:

http://richardsreactor.blogspot.com/2011/05/110521-meltdown....

I'm all for freedom and the scientific spirit, but this guy was out of control and risking the health of people around him.

Lots of stupidity, no criminal intent. I don't think he should goto jail.

Maybe not jail but at least some community work, perhaps on something like cleaning up industrial waste.

Only if someone checks his pockets very thoroughly after each shift.

Sometimes punishment despite no malicious intent is required. For example I can't imagine many drunk drivers are doing it with the aim of killing people, but I'd rather those people got their license revoked / fined / short prison time than everyone had no incentive not to drive when drunk. And if I were to ever drive drunk and get caught, as much as I would hate whatever punishment came my way, I'd still speak up for the law.

This is such a one-off case that it doesn't need swooping examples quite as much, but the same logic stands - if something can have terrible consequences, to the extent that the government should be preventing it, just telling people "please don't do this" likely isn't enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangerment

I'm not up to speed on the particulars of Swedish law, but I imagine it has similar rules about reckless endangerment. Your DUI example is a good one. But we don't even really need specific examples, because the fact is, certain crimes are still crimes, regardless of whether or not the perpetrator had intent to cause harm. A reckless disregard for the safety of others can produce results every bit as harmful as those stemming from specific criminal intent.

Let's put it this way: anyone savvy enough to obtain radioactive elements and attempt to cause nuclear reactions in his apartment is also smart enough to understand how dangerous those materials are to himself and to those around him.

The "terrible consequences" you speak of are what, exactly?

He lives in Sweden - not the US. So even if he is sentenced to jail it's very likely that most or all of the sentence is suspended on probation.

He has accepted an order of summary punishment, so at most it'll be a fine. It might not even be that, depending on how serious the prosecution will see it.

Honestly, it's a good thing he was stopped. He's contaminated his cooking area with radium and beryllium. Is someone that sloppy really going to strip that room down to studs to decontaminate it, or is he going to leave it to poison the next tenants in his flat?

Thank you for providing a fantastic example of how people overreact when it comes to radiation. They tested the apartment when the police arrested him and found no dangerous levels of radiation, which means he knew to limit the scale of his experiments to what was safe.

Read his blog. He admits to contaminating his stove and the surrounding area with americium, radium, and beryllium. Or just look at the accompanying photograph. This is not a man who knows how to conduct experiments safely.

I'd say that if he didn't actually contaminate his kitchen, it's only because he was too incompetent to carry out the reactions properly.

That's my take too. He was stopped before he got very far. With a sufficient quantity of radium and beryllium he could have done some amazing damage.

I stopped someone driving by my house just now, luckily before he got very far. With that mass and sufficient speed, he could have done some amazing damage...

We seem to have indications that he was planning on continuing to scale up. If a car had been accelerating toward your house and crashed into a concrete barrier instead that might be a better analogy.

Or possibly, he was only able to lay his hands on very small amounts. Given time, he would have gotten a lot more material.

His ambition was to split an atom in his kitchen, not to build a nuclear facility. Nothing about this story suggests he had the ambition to get a hold of "a lot more material".

I think its overreacting in general. Fortunately he didn't realize that by saving his urine he could start making ammonium nitrate and a 55 gallon drum of the same could have leveled the apartment where he was doing his experiments. I sarcastically suggested once that portable toilets should be outlawed as they can collect huge amounts of bomb pre-cursor materials in a very short amount of time at a Rolling Stones concert.

The crusade however may be futile. The fear of the stupid is motivating the ignorant to bind the hands of the curious.

ChuckMcM says:

"...by saving his urine he could start making ammonium nitrate and a 55 gallon drum of the same could have leveled the apartment..."

It would take years to accumulate a 55 gallon drum of ammonium nitrate in such a manner. The techniques you refer to by which nitrates are separated from dung and urine are messy, tedious, smelly and grossly inefficient by today's standards. The neighbors would not put up with it.

As for the portable toilets, methane gas is a more pertinent concern:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-07-15/news/17432890_1_portab...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/25/man-hurt-as-portable-t...

"The neighbors would not put up with it."

Did you see that picture of his kitchen? :-) I think his neighbors were either very tolerant or in that class of 'everyone in this building sticks to their own business and we like it that way.' kind of place.

Loved the link to the methane risk though, reminded me of the poor concert goers that tried to light up a joint under a shared poncho on the grass at Shoreline Ampitheatre before they added piping. Fortunately none of their close were flammable.

beryllium is quite poisonous, not just radioactive.

If the amount of radium were sufficient to be dangerous, they would have detected it when they raided. Beryllium is another matter, I suppose, but it's possible that the amount of beryllium was also safe.

He contaminated his own cooking area.

Surely that is his problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubbins_Ffirth

It is unreasonable people who improve the world.

It was in a rented apartment, so it could soon be someone else's kitchen. Currently he had small amounts of radioactive matter, but what what if had gotten hold of more? Radiation goes through walls, no matter who owns them.

Some radiation goes through walls. That said, I don't know what kind of radiation his experiments would have produced, so your statement may still be correct in the specific case.

I agree. Thanks for the link. My jaw dropped an inch when I saw the photo of his stove.

This man was standing at his stove, smoking, cooking up a mixture of beryllium, radium, and americium in 96% sulfuric acid. And then it blasted up into the air. Oh, but don't worry, he didn't drink the juice or take the pills!

He should know better than this after the first week of 9th grade science.

It was not a nuclear meltdown, it was probably only a chemical "meltdown". He made some mistakes and probably the mix split everywhere and perhaps there was a small fire, but it was not an uncontrolled nuclear reaction (like in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima). He used a nuclear word to describe the mess, to make it sound cool.

But, probably he was accumulating to much radioactive material, and he was not taking proper safety measures in a populated area. So probably it is a good idea to stop him.

It's unfortunate that when he requested more information on the legality of his situation, instead of reaching out to him and informing him he wasn't supposed to have this material and working with him to dispose of it, they sent the police. It seems like an overreaction, especially considering HE reached out to THEM.

That is why you contact a lawyer who usually are under implied confidentiality clauses.

I suppose. But it makes a lot of sense to contact the organization who's job it is is to manage the stuff, rather than tracking down a lawyer who specializes in radioactive materials law.

It makes a lot more sense to contact the organization before you start conducting potentially-dangerous experiments.

hindsight is always 20/20.

Tell that to the people living in adjacent apartments. Tell that to the kids who unknowingly live in the apartment afterwards. He's a dangerous fool.

Not the children!

Seriously, the dude is pretty clearly ill informed about what he was doing. In the end, though, he asked for help from the right place. He didn't do irreparable harm (or any harm period) to anyone. There was no significant amount of radiation found in the apartment.

Most people on HN are going to see right through politician scare tactics. In this case, it seems completely reasonable for this guy to get a slap on the wrist and probation from use of radioactive materials (that is, if caught with radioactive materials again, he is in for some serious jail time).

Edit:

It is also important to send the right message: dealing with dangerous chemicals and substances is dangerous and should be handled in a controlled environment. However, you should always feel comfortable asking your regulatory agencies what should and should not be done. And intellectual curiosity isn't going to get you thrown in jail.

> However, you should always feel comfortable asking your regulatory agencies what should and should not be done

Presumably the key point is to ask before you do them.

Of course, but it should never be too late to do the right thing. It's better for everyone if people feel safe to contact the people in the know at any point than for them to think that it is too late and that if they just ignore the problem it will go away.

Speaking rather generically, at a certain point, a crime has been committed and a line has been crossed.

Naturally, during sentencing it should be taken into account that someone started acting responsibly and owned up to what they had done, but that doesn't mean they haven't done anything wrong.

THIS. Thus, a dangerous selfish fool.

No, there's no such thing as "serious jail time" in Sweden. You could get away with a few years if you murder someone here. This kind of thing would maximum lead to a few months in jail if even that - even if repeated.

Obligatory, if you are new to the internet; the radioactive boyscout:

http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

Never read that before, but wow. Scary to think what people can accomplish at home with a few books and a bit of social engineering. I'm guessing David was/is a fringe case, but regardless, the parent story here shows it's not as difficult as one might think. The spooky part: David's home was a short 40 minute drive from my own home in Ohio. Ack.

I love how he's doing it in his apartment kitchen. Not his house located in an isolated forest, but an apartment building....

Tritium on his keychain? Ergo placed in his pocket? This guy has no fear of radiation whatsoever.

From memory Tritium or H-3 is relatively safe unless ingested and is not classed as a radiation risk. [0]

[0] "Nuclide Safety Data Sheet Hydrogen-3" Beta radiation won't penetrate dead skin and has approximately 6mm penetration capacity. http://hpschapters.org/northcarolina/NSDS/3HPDF.pdf

The problem is that Tritium is a lightweight gas which makes it very easy to ingest by inhalation.

It's a novelty item, the point is it makes it easy to find in the dark:

http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info...

Seems benign to me, since beta radiation won't penetrate the glass.

Oh! There we go, of course- it's encased in glass. I forgot about that when I was thinking about skin vs beta. Thank you for clearing that up.

how long before a man gets caught flying to the moon?

Not too long: http://dvice.com/archives/2011/06/first-test-of-d.php But they're thoughtful enough to do their launches off in the ocean, where an accident won't kill bystanders.

Poor guy. Someone should give him a chance at a lab or something.

As someone who experimented pretty freely with science at home as a teenager, I'm perturbed by the over-reacting and jumping to conclusions associated with "science-based hacking" shown here. Just because you do things that has the potential to do damage doesn't mean that you have the intent to or that you will. Pretty much anything can do damage if you want it to; just because I have a baseball bat doesn't mean that I will hit someone with it. There are things that really kill people in our society, chiefly cars and guns. Having those are mostly legal, but doing experiments on your stove: dangerous, must be stopped. Some attention to proportion is called for.

http://www.unitednuclear.com/

Does anybody have the link the blog? Seems like it'd be an interesting read.

http://richardsreactor.blogspot.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14403432

never has the expression 'don't try this at home' been more appropriate!

LOL

A century ago they were called revolutionaries, today we call them criminals.

A century ago, we didn't realize that radiation is lethal. They didn't arrest him for making science, they arrested him for having dangerous materials without the proper safety equipment.

Right, I am usually very anti-regulations for most all things. But there are some things that are so obviously a public safety issue that regulation is a no brainier. But it does beg the question, should their be a safe outlet for people like this to pursue their intellectual curiosity without having to pay 100k to a university.

Not trying to be a dick, but I thought you'd want to know http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

This is such a pressing concern that someone registered a domain for it: http://begthequestion.info/

It's more helpful just to say

  s/begs the question/raises the question/

In most cases, that's what is really meant.

Thanks for the info on it, it is a common colloquialism in my region, the US south east. I was using it, in what is described as the modern usage in the link that was provided in one of the other posts. I did not know that it was used as a term to describe a logical fallacy. It's usage in my region could be inferred to mean: It is an important question that should be asked and not that it assets that the sentence to follow is true.

It could be argued that that 100K is the price tag associated with the centuries of learning accumulated; i.e. that is simply what it costs to have yourself suitably trained and prepared to safely pursue your intellectual curiosity, and therefore an unavoidable expense (unless you don't mind moving to e.g. North Korea).

What dangerous materials? They checked the apartment and did not find significant levels of radiation.

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