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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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