HOA Votes to Ban Backyard Nuclear Reactors After Third 'Minor Criticality Event' This Quarter

The Shady Pines Homeowners Association has unanimously voted to amend its bylaws to explicitly prohibit backyard nuclear reactors, a measure that board president Doris Containment described as 'regrettably necessary given recent events in the cul-de-sac.' The amendment, Section 14.7(b), states: 'No residential property within Shady Pines shall house, operate, or display any device capable of sustaining a nuclear fission chain reaction, including but not limited to breeder reactors, pressurized water reactors, and whatever Gary in Unit 47 built out of smoke detectors.' The bylaw was prompted by three 'minor criticality events' reported at Unit 47 since January, each of which triggered a brief blue flash visible from the street and a temporary spike in background radiation that neighboring resident Linda Shielding described as 'enough to fog my camera film, and I've had it with Gary.' Gary Neutron, a retired electrical engineer, has maintained that his backyard project is 'a perfectly safe subcritical assembly for educational purposes' and that the criticality events were 'controlled, intentional, and barely supercritical.' 'The HOA has rules about fence height, mailbox color, and the specific shade of beige permissible for exterior paint,' Neutron said at the hearing. 'But there was nothing — nothing — in the bylaws about nuclear reactors. I checked.' The NRC has been notified. An inspector arrived Friday and described the device as 'impressively engineered but catastrophically ill-advised.' Neutron has been ordered to decommission the reactor and restore the backyard to its original condition, which he estimates will take 'six weeks and a hazmat team.' The HOA has also added provisions banning particle accelerators, centrifuge cascades, and 'any device requiring a criticality alarm.'