How To Make a Home-Made Nuclear Reactor to Save Money On Your Electricity Bills

(Please Note: This article is parody, of course. Don’t do any of the instructions you’ve just read. Best never to listen to me. Never. Ever. I am not a wise man.)

Materials you’ll need:

Scissors, Glue, Tinfoil, and around 75–100 Pencils:

It’s astounding what you can make with some home crafting supplies, patience, and around 30 rads of gamma rays.

Three thousand two hundred and seventy-nine (3, 279) Home Smoke Detectors:

Do not store near open flames.

Around a dozen (12) cans of Play-Doh (tm) brand play-dough:

It’s like your childhood! Kind of. Well, not really.

One (1) Lead Vest “borrowed” from a hospital’s X-Ray unit or your dentist.

You’ll need good cardio conditioning for this plan to work. Those vests are dang heavy.

Step One: Cut the tinfoil sheets into thin, long rectangles about one (1) centimeters wide by (8) centimeters long. Prepare about four dozen or so.

Old tinfoil sheets with baked-on pork roast residue works in a pinch, too.

Step Two: Remove the wood coverings of the pencils and grind the graphite rods by hand. Grind into fine particles.

Grind like your electrical bill savings depend on it. You’ll have more money to buy, oh I don’t know, more Funko Pops or some crap.

Step Three: Combine the graphite powder with the Play-Doh (tm). By weight, add 3 parts graphite to 1 part Play-Doh (tm).

Reminds me of my first cooking project in grade nine Home Economics class. The resultant cake I baked looked like a mound of caramelized goat phlegm. Tasted like it, too. I got an “F-”.

Step Four: Shape the graphite dough into small two centimeter sized cubes. Wrap a tinfoil rectangle around each. Make around forty-eight (48) cubes.

Are ya cubin’, son?

Step Five: Locate and remove the tiny amount of radioactive Americium from your approximately three thousand two hundred and seventy-nine (3, 279) smoke alarms.

This is the fun part.

(Helpful Hint: Large apartment buildings are often the best locations to find smoke alarms. Merely sneak into such buildings and, with a broom handle, run down the hallways while knocking the alarms off the ceilings. If anyone asks what you’re doing, inform them you are the fire alarm inspector and that you forgot your ladder.)

“Honey, what’s that repeated THWACKING noise coming from the building’s hallway?” — The residents of apartment 317, probably.

Step Six: Combine the Americium bits into a sphere approximately the size of a baseball. Remember to wear the lead vest you acquired from the health service you chose to grossly abuse.

If it’s a glower, it’s a go-er!

(Helpful Hint: To store your Americium ball in between experiments, wrap the lead vest around the sphere and place it in your bathtub. Then find a new place where you can bathe.)

Caution! Improper storage of the radioactive sphere may result in:

  • House pets experiencing spontaneous combustion.
  • Large sores appearing on your roommate who inadvertently took a long shower in your now-radioactive bathtub.
  • Emergence of super-powers, if by “super-powers” we mean “super-melanoma”.

Step Seven: Stack the graphite and Play-Dough(tm) cubes, each wrapped in tinfoil, around the ball of radioactive Americium in a square pattern.

So beautiful. So deadly. So cost-effective.

Step Eight: If properly constructed, the high intensity radiation particles from the Americium sphere will bounce off the sides of the graphite-Play-Doh cubes stacked around it while slamming into one another, generating nuclear power! Just plug in any of your electrical appliances into the cube and you’re well on the road to saving money on your energy bills. Congratulations! You’ve just made your first DIY nuclear reactor!

Does this toast taste like gamma particles to you?

What You Can Do With Your Home-Made Nuclear Reactor:

  • Use the hot top of your reactor as an oven element to cook food in a frying pan, on a grill, or a wok. Now you can enjoy bacon that only took you .003 seconds to cook!
  • In the winter, your nuclear reactor will heat your home to a cheery 113 degrees Celsius!
  • The radiation created by your home nuclear reactor is perfect to sterilize your dishes and cookware of any and all germs. Other house-hold items you can sterilize are towels, pets, and the mailman.

Bonus "Fun" Tip:

How to Turn Your Home-Made Nuclear Reactor into a Thermonuclear Bomb to Get Rid of Unwanted Neighbors and, Hell, the Whole Neighborhood:

  • Place your home-made nuclear reactor in your microwave.
  • Set microwave cooking temperature to “High” and the timer for five minutes. Hit start button on microwave.
  • Run.

That’ll show your neighbour Larry what happens when people don’t return a borrowed Weed Whacker.

Next Week’s Home Project: Turning a Thousand Cheap Laser Key Pointers into a Super-Villain Death Laser!