Clioman:

This is AT LEAST as risky as the kid who tried to build a breeder reactor in the family outhouse.

Why are we not putting a stop to it?
==================================

You mean David Hahn?

Wikipedia being what it is, notes that his reactor did not reach critical mass? I assume they meant ‘criticality’.

They do link to the Harpers article that details his experiments:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/1998/11/0059750

The Navy did not select him for NNPS.And you know he tried.

He got arrested again in 2007 for stealing smoke detectors.

All in all, what he did was akin to playing with rat poison. Slow acting, carcinogenic rat poison.

How long till he receives his lifetime achievement Darwin Award?

So the answer is that we are not doing bad. The Navy and the NRC won’t let him near real radioactive sources.