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?
Thank 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.
Read 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.
I 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...
We 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.
I think its overreacting in general. Fortunately he didn't realize that by saving his urine he could start making ammonium nitrate and a 55 gallon drum of the same could have leveled the apartment where he was doing his experiments. I sarcastically suggested once that portable toilets should be outlawed as they can collect huge amounts of bomb pre-cursor materials in a very short amount of time at a Rolling Stones concert.
The crusade however may be futile. The fear of the stupid is motivating the ignorant to bind the hands of the curious.
"...by saving his urine he could start making ammonium nitrate and a 55 gallon drum of the same could have leveled the apartment..."
It would take years to accumulate a 55 gallon drum of ammonium nitrate in such a manner. The techniques you refer to by which nitrates are separated from dung and urine are messy, tedious, smelly and grossly inefficient by today's standards. The neighbors would not put up with it.
As for the portable toilets, methane gas is a more pertinent concern:
Did you see that picture of his kitchen? :-) I think his neighbors were either very tolerant or in that class of 'everyone in this building sticks to their own business and we like it that way.' kind of place.
Loved the link to the methane risk though, reminded me of the poor concert goers that tried to light up a joint under a shared poncho on the grass at Shoreline Ampitheatre before they added piping. Fortunately none of their close were flammable.
His 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".
If 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.
It 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.
Some 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.
