Why doesn’t he go get a degree in something? Plenty of universities let you play with that stuff, even as undergraduates.
First off, he did not build a reactor. That describes a specific piece of nuclear engineering technology that involves being able to create a self-sustaining fission reaction. He was nowhere even close to that.
This is just a case of a kid not knowing what he was doing randomly experimenting with low level radioactive materials. People like to pretend that he was a genius, but he is closer to a Darwin award candidate (for playing with beryllium). He tried to make an Am-241/Be neutron source but he never read up on the efficiency of a neutron source produced by alphas hitting beryllium. It is extremely inefficient (about 70 neutrons per 10^6 alphas). And the efficiency of activating Th-232 isn't high either (with a cross section of only about 7 barns). He never had decent results because each 1 microcurie smoke detector source would emit at maximum about 2.6 neutrons/s in random directions--if it was perfectly installed by an engineer or physicist. You can do the math but even with 50 smoke detectors the probability of activating thorium with one neutron and then being lucky later with another neutron to fission U-233 is a pipe dream even if he let the experiment run for years.
Eventually the government had to come in and remove all of the low level waste he was playing with.
Huh? How does one steal a building?
By the way, there's a Harper's magazine article about this guy's earlier exploits. I read it at the archive.org cached copy here.
From that posted picture, it doesn't look as if Mr. Kahn will be around all that much longer.