In fact, carefully replicating other people's complicated experiments is what science is about. If you want to pretend that you're being original take up structural knitting or something.
The original comment's context was very useful because it tells us that the article isn't about some crazy and dangerous attempt to build a fission reactor by hoarding radioactive waste (see: scary link from patio11) but about an experiment that has been legitimately accomplished by high school students in the past and which is rather less dangerous (because it doesn't start irradiating nearby objects, like your body, until you throw the switch... and you don't need to leave it turned on much longer than it takes to read a Geiger counter and high-five somebody.)
It was a much smaller community, then. And it was, perhaps more so than today, supportive -- genuinely supportive.
But it was about information. And support was not about obligatory glad-handing or pats on the back. Some of it could be fairly critical, at times. Informatively critical and in the interest of improvement, for the target of criticism and for the community at large. "Constructive" criticism, I guess.
Not that I perceived the comment that started this sub-thread as being critical. (Except perhaps -- if one chose to take it that way -- of what might be a hyped news headline. Not the student.)
I really appreciate the context that comment provides. If I'd known that when I was a student, maybe I would have had another interesting thing to try out.
Lessons from a marriage.
You appeared to see it as negative...fascinating.