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Swede: Radioactive materials for kitchen nuke experiment were bought on eBay

A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen has said that he bought some of the radioactive materials he used on eBay.
Image: A webpage from the blog written by Richard Handl documenting his experiments to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen in Angelholm
A webpage from the blog written by Richard Handl, documenting his experiments to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen at his home in Angelholm, is pictured August 4, 2011.Reuters
/ Source: msnbc.com staff and news service reports

A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen has said that he bought some of the radioactive materials he used on eBay.

Richard Handl, from Angelholm in southern Sweden, was trying to split an atom and documented his experiments on a blog called Richard's Reactor.

In an interview Thursday with BBC News, the unemployed 31-year-old said he had "always been interested in nuclear physics."

"I thought I would do an experiment to see if it really works to build a nuclear reactor," he said.

Asked by the BBC interviewer if this was not highly dangerous, Handl replied, "Yes, but I have a Geiger counter to measure the radiation and I have it under control."

The interviewer then suggested he might have been killed if the experiment had worked.

"No, no that's not so dangerous," Handl replied. "If I have succeeded to split an atom, radiation have raised a little bit and then I have canceled the whole thing if the radiation has got too high."

'The Meltdown'
Handl gathered materials mainly from everyday devices like smoke detectors, clock and watch hands and via purchases on the Internet.

He told the BBC he bought these "from eBay and Germany."

His blog details what he describes as "The Meltdown" on his kitchen stove.

"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... ," he wrote on the blog.

A photograph of the aftermath shows some pills and a juice bottle on the stove. "Of cource [sic] I thrown away my pills at the left side, and I didn't drink the juice-syryp [sic] in the right," he wrote.

After the incident, he said he "cleaned up the mess on the cooker and then I bought some more radium and continued the experiment."

"I was just curious to see if it was possible, it is just a hobby," said Handl, who was previously a worker in a ventilation systems factory.

The Radiation Safety Authority said in a statement the authorities raided Handl's apartment on July 20 after hearing that he was handling nuclear materials in an unsafe way.

"There were no raised levels of radiation in the apartment and the neighbors were not exposed to radiation," research chief Leif Moberg said in the statement.

Handl reported the raid laconically on his website, writing "Project canceled!"

He was detained and shortly after freed. "I am still a suspect for crime against the radiation safety law," he said.

Handl told the BBC that he had emailed the authorities to ask about the legality of what he was doing. "They said it was not so OK, it was pretty stupid," he said, adding he was going to concentrate on theories and books in future.

Nuclear fission in a wok?
Kent Hansen, professor emeritus of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the LiveScience website that he thought it unlikely that Handl would have been successful, based on what he knew about the Swede's material and techniques.

"My guess is that this is a tempest in a teapot," he said.

Tom Ewing, a nuclear scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, outside Chicago, agreed.

"As best I can tell … he only possessed minute amounts of radioactive materials: radium from old watch hands (from antique devices purchased on eBay) used in the old days to make dials 'glow' at night, americium used in trace amounts as an ionizing source in ordinary smoke detectors you buy at hardware stores, and depleted uranium (who knows where he obtained this)," Ewing told LiveScience by email.

The LiveScience article went on to describe how nuclear fission could be achieved by putting a ball of Uranium-235 about a foot wide — assuming that could be obtained — in a wok on a stove.

However, Hansen explained why this would not be wise.

"If anyone had that much and tried to bring it together, they would kill themselves," he told LiveScience. "It will fizzle, not make an explosion, but it will produce enough radiation to kill you."