If cyclotrons are outlawed, only outlaws will have cyclotrons.
Cyclotrons don’t split atoms: people do.
You can have my cyclotron when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
This is my rifle, this is my cyclotron. One is for shooting, one is for… what rhymes with cyclotron?
You’re making too much of a few little personality quarks. Just look at this:
I don’t see the problem. All the man wants is a couple of gigawatts, his own atom smasher, and all the local children. “Welcome to Neverland Laboratories. No, that doesn’t sound right. How about just calling it the WonkaTron? No, not now that Depp’s made it all creepy… if I could come up with some fool’s gold I can call it Pyrites of the Caribbean – nah, that’s not funny…”
I do like the imagery conjured by that attorney - Tesche - when he called it a back-alley cyclotron. It brings to mind a sinister picture, of men and women lined up in bad light, in trenchcoats with the collars turned up, avoiding each others’ eyes, waiting for an illicit injection of [18F]-2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose from a shared needle and a midnight PET scan in the back of a dirty garage. Tesche probably has decent health insurance.
“Orange”. 
Ahhh shit, now I gotta redo all my Christmas shopping again.
DING DING DING! We have a winnuh! People thought I was crazy when I suggested that folks would be panicked by the thought of a “dirty bomb” made with radium. Of course, it’d take a metric assload of the stuff to get lethal doses, but you wouldn’t need that. You’d just need enough of the stuff to get geiger counters ticking a little more than usual to get the tin foilers/IDers/Apollohoaxers, etc., etc., etc. frothing at the mouth about how they’re all going to die. The media picks up on it, and runs with it, without ever bothering to talk with someone who actually knows about the stuff (because academic types aren’t nearly as interesting as dead bodies).
This all boils down to people who don’t have a clue as to what a cyclotron is or what it does instinctively panicking, rather than reaching for a book or going to a website to read up on the stuff before they open their yapper.
A device that involve radiation!?! Good Og!
Dateline: Today. EYE SOCKET, Montana.
The town council has voted 6-1 to suspend publication of a new physics research paper by local high school instructor Edgar Phillips which would allegedly revise our current figures for the mass of the Earth.
“The paper is harmless,” alleges Phillips. “Our traditional figures for the mass of the Earth have been miscalculated, resulting in minor errors in calculations deriving from that figure. The new figure is slightly higher and much more precise.”
But the council is unmoved. “Making the Earth bigger would result in more gravity everywhere,” said councilman Tom Dingbat. “With all that extra gravity our cows might fall over. That’s just what the terrorists would do.”
Adds Dingbat, “We can’t let the terrorists win.”
Councilwoman Lou Greedpockets was quoted in the minutes as asking where the new pieces of the bigger Earth would be located, and if any would be within his district. Accusations of gerrymandering flew, causing the town council to continue its deliberations in private.
The lone dissenting member of the town council was Carmela Ruiz-Alonso, who attempted to convince her colleagues that this dangerous new larger Earth would cause no harm to livestock, but the council was wise enough not to listen.
“That’s what you’d expect from someone who moved here from New Mexico,” said Dingbat. “You can’t trust them. Turn your back on Mexico for two minutes and suddenly the Earth is big enough for a New Mexico. How many Mexicos do they think we need?”
I liked this:
heh.
Great Og! What’s next, a nuclear densometer? Heaven forfend. Tesche is not just a lawyer, he’s also a city assemblyman. They’re all freaking wackos.
C’mon Chefguy 'fess up, you’re the one with the evil Cyclotron right??? Tell me you don’t live Near Alaska Club east.
No?? Whew! I’m safe.
Maybe I’m not getting the joke, but the reason Swank himself has given for wanting to operate the cyclotron is to produce radioactive material. Now I know radioactive material doesn’t go bang but it’s not the kind of thing you want to have lying around the neighbourhood. And the other issue neighbours have raised is the amount of electricity the cyclotron will draw. These don’t seem to be unreasonable or irrational concerns to me.