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Nah. Not comic-book. Micheal Bay-style. I think the guy wanted to blow shit up.
State-sponsored username
Sweden is the country where one of the biggest universities can get away with building a nuclear reactor in a basement under the subject of "doing something with atoms". So I'm not that surprised about this.
In the quiet of the night, the Neocount of Merentha mused: How long does evolution take, among the damned?
Compulsive Researcher
Note that the danger from this sort of thing is generally not from anything even vaguely resembling a nuclear weapon, but rather from the enthusiastic experimenter messing up the containment (or, indeed, not even bothering with containment in the first place) and spreading lots of delicious radioactive dust around the place.
For example, the Wikipedia article on the "Radioactive Boy Scout" states that the previously mentioned 90-day sentence for attempting to steal smoke detectors from his apartment building for the radioactive material in 2007 would be delayed by six months while he was treated for radiation exposure (likely from his previous experiment, to be honest- I don't think a few smoke detectors would have had enough to do serious damage that fast). His reactor-in-a-shed had earlier been disassembled and dug up by the EPA and buried as low-level radioactive waste, "low-level" in this case meaning "only a little unpleasant, but you still wouldn't want to stand near it for days on end".
Breathing in the radioactive dust is particularly unpleasant, as while alpha radiation can barely even penetrate the skin, it's the most damaging type if it manages to get inside the body. Breathing in an alpha emitter thus results in it sitting in your lungs and tearing up the area around it something fierce.
A sample of pure, or nearly pure, U-238 ("depleted uranium") is only just barely radioactive, but is still toxic for basically the same reason lead is toxic; it's a heavy metal. It also has a tendency to spontaneously burst into flames if you powder it fine enough (pyrophoricity
).
edited 4th Aug '11 12:37:43 PM by Shinziril
Well, that still sounds rather nasty. Doesn't that count as reckless endangerment of his neighbors? (Clearly I know nothing of Swedish law, but if you could get a mild reaction out of US law, it would be that.)
NOT THE BEES
The country? Fuck, I'm sitting in a Qdoba less than ten blocks from a reactor that helped catch a serial killer.
You won't find that shit on Law & Order.
Sweden takes a very liberal stance when it comes to comic book supervillainy.
And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)