You gotta love those crazy Swedes

Swede Tries to Build Nuke Reactor at Home.

I'm working on a nuclear powered camp stove at the moment but the portable concrete containment vessel is too bulky. I also built a GPS powered by a modified lawnmower engine but it was too heavy. Perhaps my treadmill powered flashlight will be a hit.

Are you a Swede?

I grew up with Swedes. You couldn't spit without hitting at least one Anderson, Larson, Carlson, etc. There were lingonberry syrup pancakes and Jugs of Grogg everywhere

You might try one of these for your GPS:

Not as far-fetched an idea as you might think. I saw a story last night on The Rachel Maddow Show about a guy who built a replica of Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Apparently there is a documentary about him called "Atomic Trucker," since that's what this guy does. One of the men who worked on the actual bomb was amazed at what the guy had done, since its design is still a secret.

One thing the US tries hard to do is keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists, although the Tea Party members in Congress are trying to cut most of the funding for the agency that does this. It's called the National Nuclear Security Agency.
http://nnsa.energy.gov/

Cutting this agency's budget is another really stupid right wing idea.

I love to tinker with stuff, but I don't see the attraction of building a homemade nuke reactor. I've always been more attracted to steam engines, must be hereditary

I suspect the guy that was trying to build the replica of Little Boy might have had friends in Russia

Scary stuff though, I just read this today and I don't really trust GE to keep the lid on it. They'd license the rights to anyone with a billion bucks, and since they are now a "Global Corporation" they have no good reason to worry about how or where it's used, that's not really their concern since it has nothing to do with profits.

"I suspect the guy that was trying to build the replica of Little Boy might have had friends in Russia."

Actually, he's a truck driver from Wisconsin.

Well, long ago I read up on it a bit, and the theory and simple plans are not that hard to understand, and even building one, the mechanics don't look so difficult. The hard part would be getting the last several stages of fuel. Especially that last one. I don't think I'd want to mess with that stuff no matter how much they paid me. Their ain't no suit thick enough for that

But I have to read up on that story. Could have been another Swede, you've really piqued my interest now!

What a whuss live life - skip the containment vessel

When I was a kid I built a nuclear reactor at home, trouble, or maybe an advantage thinking back on it, was that it used paper towel tubes for fuel rods...

Of course we did have a real linear accelerator buried in my friends back yard... times were 1966
Jim

Go to Radioactive Boyscout to read all about a teenager who was nearly successful in building a nuclear reactor in 1996.

MNS

midnight
another use for duct tape...
Jim

If he had had lead duct tape he might have successfully kept his reactor hidden...

MNS

That is quite the story. Poor kid looked like hell in the photo at the end. It's like he was addicted to exposure. Crazy...

Funny thing, I was told, is that when he was in the Navy he was assigned to a nuclear submarine, but wasn't allowed to go anywhere near the engine!

MNS

I've known some navy engine guys. They sleep next to the nuke. Oh sure theres shielding, but nukes are transmuting matter and energy and often as pure energy "appears", it is in an "exotic form" that lasts but an instant - just long enough to go through a guy sleeping next to the nuke, before it changes into something more normal. Anyway those guys are a bit more toasted than the average "bubble head". No I imagine he wasn't allowed near any material, but he may have guarded it.
Its hard to imagine that he did what he did and survived very long. However imagine if he had the intent of creating a "fission device" and instead of making a small beam of neutrons, he had put the material in the middle of a cleverly layered "onion", he could have a much larger "hotter" operation than he did, by maybe a hundred or thousand fold. His intent was to make a breader reactor, and he did - he had uranium absorbing slow neutrons and radiating light and other things and transmuting into other isotopes and elements, perhaps some plutonium and he was about to cross a line with refined radiun when caught, but the point is that he had home enriched fissionable material. It sounds pretty easy to me, however I am skipping all details so the homeland security guys don't come speak at me. The critical point (ha ha pun intended) is that a simple home made breader reactor could work at all. Obtaining raw materials and changing their form into weapons grade material is a daunting process, but then there is a tremendous amount of engineering involved in making a nuke of any kind from that material, but and this is a very big butt we can only wonder what the super computers simulating nuke designs have to say about how the laws of physics change near the "edges" like at 10 million atmospheres of pressure and a billion degrees. Perhaps a pin head sized material or even smaller, perhaps very small bits of material could "fuse" under enough pressure. I mean if you get one electron and one proton to collapse into a netron and a neutrino and a burst of energy, then you are transmuting matter into energy, and one gram of matter transmuted into energy could put the empire state building in orbit.
Jim

Well, that's more common sense than I might have expected from the Navy

Jim, did you read the latest about Dark Matter?

"Various experiments are being carried out in deep mines in Yorkshire, on the Fermi Space Telescope, and in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland to try and detect these elusive particles, or indirect evidence of their effects.

So far, none of these experiments has conclusively spotted them.

Scientists working on the problem have recently expressed dismay at the universally negative results coming from the LHC, and this has led some to consider that the standard model may be wrong. ...

... The LHC is designed to recreate the conditions one millionth of a second after the Big Bang. If WDM is the dominant dark matter, however, the facility will not see a trace of the particles."

"Dang! Looks like we built the wrong kind of machine."

lots of problems with the dark matter idea. Along with the multiple universe concept, these ideas are sort of like religion - ways to fill in the unknowns that sound more reasonable and sellable than "DUH". Problem is we have only the materials that we can detect and work with, that we call "real", to use to build a machine to detect something that we cannot detect and may not exist, or may be unmeasurable for some other reason, like the problems in the Michaelson Morely experiment. That is - the dimensionality of the Universe contracts in the direction of motion.
ho hum
how about warm left over particles?
Do you know the biggest question of all? Why are all of each kind of particle absolutely identical. I mean the rules of universal distribution say that when the fertilizer hits the fan, 1) it is never evenly distributed, and 2) the pieces are never the same size. So if everything did suddenly pop out as they say "void of form" and condensed, why did they all condense into identical pieces? Whay do all electrons and protons weigh the same (have the same mass), the same spin, etc etc as every other trillion trillion trillion of them no matter how old they are or how far they've traveled? Why aren't some chunks larger?
Jim