I am not a nuclear physicist and I haven't read the paper, but given that there were no observations of sun-like stars going Nova and that anything humans can do can also probably occur naturally just by chance, the odds of this being workable given the current technology are too low to worry about. Though maybe a bit higher than of the LHC creating an earth-swallowing black hole. But still at the Pascal's mugger level.
An obvious rejoinder to this is that while a Boeing 747 could assemble itself naturally by chance, the fact that we don't see any 747's occurring naturally isn't evidence for their impossibility. Therefore doesn't your point about no sun-like stars going nova only carry weight if we assume that there is other intelligent life in the observable universe?
As a side note, I read somewhere that John von Neumann once had an epiphany in which he imagined that supernovas were the final acts of civilizations that had learned to harness the power of nuclear fusion....
Bolonkin & Friedlander (2013) argues that it might be possible for "a dying dictator" to blow up the Sun, and thus destroy all life on Earth:
Warning: the paper is published in an obscure journal by publisher #206 on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013, and I was unable to find confirmation of the authors' claimed credentials from any reputable sources with 5 minutes of Googling. It also has two spelling errors in the abstract. (It has no citations on Google scholar, but I wouldn't expect it to have any since it was only released in July 2013.)
I haven't read the paper, and I'd love to see someone fluent in astrophysics comment on its contents.
My guess is that this is not a risk at all or, as with proposed high-energy physics disasters, the risk is extremely low-probability but physically conceivable (though perhaps not by methods imagined by Bolonkin & Friedlander).