7 ms·

Before you jump into "poor guy" mode, please have a look at his blog: http://richardsreactor.blogspot.com/2011/05/110521-meltdown.html http://richardsreactor.b

• steins 15y ago
  Lots of stupidity, no criminal intent. I don't think he should goto jail.
  • alecco 15y ago
    Maybe not jail but at least some community work, perhaps on something like cleaning up industrial waste.
    • athom 15y ago
      Only if someone checks his pockets very thoroughly after each shift.
  • corin_ 15y ago
    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.
    • jonnathanson 15y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangerment 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.
    • lutorm 15y ago
      The "terrible consequences" you speak of are what, exactly?
  • gst 15y ago
    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.
    • modokode 15y ago
      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.
• gamble 15y ago
  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?
  • kragen 15y ago
    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.
  • bandushrew 15y ago
    He contaminated his own cooking area. Surely that is his problem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubbins_Ffirth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubbins_Ffirth It is unreasonable people who improve the world.
    • wgren 15y ago
      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.
      • ordinary 15y ago
        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.
  • dsl 15y ago
    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.
• geuis 15y ago
  I agree. Thanks for the link. My jaw dropped an inch when I saw the photo of his stove.
• jff 15y ago
  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.
• gus_massa 15y ago
  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.