Thursday, August 04, 2011

Don't Try This At Home

I some time wonder how silly (dumb?) people can get.

A man in Sweden was arrested after he contacted authority to see if his "atom splitter" is safe to run.

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.

Only later did he realize it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden's Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.
This is where a little knowledge can be dangerous, or even harmful, physically. It is what happens when crackpots crossed the line between doing things in their heads and actually doing something.

Zz.

2 comments:

Andrej said...

Actually, as life goes, an explosion wouldn't be remembered too long; however, successful scalability and cost-efficiency of his novel fission design would change the world profoundly :-)

ZapperZ said...

There's nothing "novel" about what he was trying.

Uncontrollable fusion/fission reaction is not that difficult in comparison to controlled ones. It is the LATTER than people are putting in a lot of effort and money into.

Zz.