Building your own personal nuclear reactor

I've heard of people who got in trouble with their landlords for holding loud parties or violating the no-pets clause in their leases, but a 31-year-old Swedish guy named Richard Handl may be the first apartment dweller in history to have problems because he tried to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen. According to Handl's blog, Richard's Reactor, he began a project to build a breeder reactor and produce small amounts of fissionable uranium 233 and plutonium 239 "just for fun and to see if it's possible to split atoms at home."

According to this article in The Local, a Swedish news site, Handl, who's been interested in nuclear physics since he was a teenager, spent about $950 acquiring the various stuff to build his miniature DIY nuclear plant. As he notes in his blog, the ingenious autodidact was able to obtain a small amount of americium (Am-241) by dismantling smoke detectors and scored some radium (Ra-226) by buying the luminous hands for clocks on eBay. ("It's not so expensive, about $12 for $5 pieces," he writes.) Thorium oxide turned out to be available from the electrodes from Coleman gas lanterns, the sort that less imaginative souls use for reading in their tents on camping trips. He built a crude neutron gun by inserting a small glass pipe inside a plastic pill bottle and covering it with lead.

Handl isn't the first hobbyist to dabble in nuclear engineering. Back in the mid-1990s, as this Harper's magazine article by Ken Silverstein details, a teenager in Michigan tried to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed as a Boy Scout merit badge project. (At one point, the youth actually obtained a sample of barium sulfate from a helpful local hospital, which he then processed to produce highly dangerous purified radium solution.) In Handl's blog, he links to this informative instructional video that he found on YouTube.

Handl's research was not without mishaps. In one blog post, entitled "The Meltdown", he describes a stove-top accident:

But I tried to cook Americium, Radium and Beryllium in 96% sulphuric-acid, to easier get them blended. But the whole thing exploded upp [sic] in the air...

Of cource [sic] I thrown away my pills at the left side, and I didn't drink the juice-syryp [sic] in the right.

But Handl's experimentation came to a screeching halt after he sent an email to Sweden's Radiation Safety Authority, asking them to review his plans and verify that what he was doing was legal. That may have been a mistake, since according to this press release from the authority, it's illegal to dismantle smoke detectors in Sweden without the agency's approval. As Handl subsequently recounted in his blog:

They took all my radioactive stuff, but I was released after a hearing. But I am still suspekt [sic] for crime against the radiation safety law…I was ordered by the police to get out of the building with my hands up, then three men came, with Geiger counters and searched me. Then I was placed in a police-car, when Radiation Safety Authory [sic] went into my apartment with very advanced measure-tools.

So, my project is canceled!

Though it's hard not to admire Handl's enterprise and ingenuity, I'm kind of glad that the powers that be shut him down before he got into something that might have been dangerous. But I also can't help but wonder if he had a good idea, even if he perhaps went about it in the wrong way. Remember that there was a time, back when "atom power" was considered not just the wave of the future but fashionable as well, that visionaries believed that the atom would be harnessed not just at big power plants, but on a small scale as well, to meet the energy needs of individual households. A 1955 New York Times article, reprinted in the Milwaukee Journal, recounts a speech by Robert E. Ferry, general manager of the Institution of Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, in which he predicted that home atomic reactors "about twice the size of an automobile battery" someday would heat and cool Americans' homes at a fraction of the cost of electricity from coal power plants, and melt the snow from their sidewalks as well.

Back then, Ferry was convinced that home nuclear reactors would be on the market by 1961 at the latest. That never happened, but it didn't stop techno-dreamers from periodically revisiting the idea as the answer for our energy woes. In 2008, for example, Physorg.com reported that small underground nuclear reactors "no bigger than a hot tub," based upon a design by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, might soon provide power for as many as 20,000 homes apiece. Here's a 2010 Businessweek article on commercialization of the technology. A 2010 Chicago Reader article describes plans by Lattice Energy, a Chicago-based company, to make low-energy nuclear reactors the size of microwave ovens.

But our friend in Sweden isn't the only one who isn't waiting for personal reactors to hit the market. But a lot of them are focusing on building fusion reactors, which are much safer than fission because they don't require the use of radioactive materials. There's even a Web community, Fusor.net, for DIY fusion reactor buffs. Here's a fascinating blog and video in which fusion enthusiast Carl Greninger, who in his day job works at Microsoft, demonstrates a small fusion reactor he's built in his basement, fashioned partially from repurposed equipment that he bought on eBay.

While Greninger built his fusion reactor mostly to help local high-school students learn about science, other DIY fusion reactor builders have even loftier ambitions. They see themselves as part of a hive mind that may ultimately accomplish what credentialed scientists and well-funded research institutions so far have not managed to do -- develop a practical, efficient method for producing electrical power from fusion. As a FAQ on the website explains:

Fusion may sound like an exotic, "impossible" feat. But the fact is people like you are achieving the "impossible" on an almost daily basis. It is only a matter of time before somebody stumbles on the breakthrough that we are all hoping for.

Now, that -- in comparison to what our friend in Sweden was doing -- actually sounds to me like a pretty good idea. At the very least, these tinkerers are part of a growing DIY science movement, in which self-taught amateurs -- many of them creative people in other fields -- are dabbling in biology and physics and resurrecting the centuries-old spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods, in which Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin roamed wherever their curiosity took them. And the best-case scenario is the development of a micro-sized fusion reactor that could power individual homes, providing a solution to our greenhouse emissions problem and our energy needs in one fell swoop.