I'm sure I have read a Charles Stross novel in which the protagonist does this and becomes the wealthiest person on the planet
Accelerando
> In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps.
"Radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi) in the epicenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour, the testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later, radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants" [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Test_results
Tsar Bomba was detonated at an altitude of 4Km, the shock wave prevented the fireball from reaching the ground and producing a crater, so it produced less fallout.