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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
by 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 agoIf 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 agoHe 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 agoIt 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 agoSome 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 agoThank 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.
- wisty 15y agoOr possibly, he was only able to lay his hands on very small amounts. Given time, he would have gotten a lot more material.
- tjogin 15y agoHis 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".
- gamble 15y agoRead 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.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThat'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.
- lutorm 15y agoI 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...
- InclinedPlane 15y agoWe 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.