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Duct Tape
CandyMan writes: "The incredible story of the 15-year-old kid who built a nuclear reactor in his mother's toolshed, using common household objects, aluminium foil and duct tape. Sample quote: 'When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place", and began to dissasemble the reactor'." Well, I tried to check this out and see if it was for real, and I found a much longer version of the same article which appears legit, if still rather unbelievable. If any of you irradiate yourselves, you didn't read about it here, okay?
Although I never normally post, I did notice that this thread was really plumbing the depths of stupidity and gullibility, even for Slashdot...
o n. html
So, in my attempt to explain this away:
Americium Oxide was originally sold by the Atomic Energy Commision (now under responsibility of the Department of Energy) of the US for about US$1000 a GRAM. A gram is enough to supply 5,000 smoke detectors with Americium.
Just think about how much fissionable material you need to run a reactor. A uranium fuel pellet is as big as a pencil eraser. Also, these are HEAVY elements, heavier than lead. So one would need a lot more than a gram of Americium, supposing one could collect 5,000 smoke detectors to get it.
If you want to know more, here's the US government information on how to procure various elements:
http://www.ornl.gov/isotopes/
In particular, Americium 241:
http://www.ornl.gov/isotopes/r_am241.html
Here's the link to the sales staff at Los Alamos National Labs:
http://pearl1.lanl.gov/isotopes/order_informati
If you need more info on how much Americium is needed for a smoke detector, check out the Uranium Information Centre of Australia:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip35.htm
Check out the Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia to find out sheer quantities of fuel needed to fuel a reactor for a year:
http://www.anawa.org.au/chain/index.html
Now get your heads out of the clouds and get back to work.
moc.liamtoh@ihsoyotamah
http://www.rushmagazine.com
I went to high school with him, and was in the same scout troop as him (Troop 371).
We were in the same circle of (sometimes self proclaimed) weirdos who were all obsessive about one thing or another, and hung out together.
I remember when he brought in a giger counter, and we checked the food in the east center caf to see if it was radioactive. We had a good laugh when we got a blip from the soft serve ice cream.
Later, when he started carrying around radioactive material in his pockets at school, and showing me what looked like radiation burns, I tried to not hang out with him as much, and switched seats in Anthropology so that I wasn't right next to him.
It was a weird time - I was at MSU when I got the paniced call from him saying that the EPA was currently raiding his house, and wanting to know what catalog he had ordered the smoke detectors from.
The author who did the Harper's article was working on a book late last year - he asked me a few questions about Dave. I wonder when it will come out...
If anyone has any questions about Dave, just reply to this, and I'll answer what I remember...
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Maybe you also don't worry about having genital cancer later in your life either ? I don't know...but I think there just MIGHT be slightly safer methods of population control. Then again....I guess if that sounds like a good idea to you...go ahead. Survival of the fittest, I suppose ;)
While David may have attempted to build a breeder reactor, he certainly didn't succeed. Even if you don't get past the first page of the article you'll notice a synopsis: "When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor."
What really tells are his own words:
"Even though there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent."(page 11 of the Harper's article)
And he was talking about a device he built like this:
"David took the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead casings and, after another round of filing and pulverizing, mixed those isotopes with beryllium and aluminum shavings, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil. What were once the neutron sources for his guns became a makeshift "core" for his reactor. He surrounded this radioactive ball with a "blanket" composed of tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape."
This doesn't approach "building a nuclear reactor" by a long shot.
I've been toying with the idea of making a nucleur powered car as a tinkering project. I'm fairly sure I know how to do most of the design and production but I'd be interested in any suggestions Dave might have on obtaining the needed nucleur material and not killing myself handling it. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
He never made a nuclear reactor....He was TRYING to make a nuclear reactor. Your argument may indicate why he would have failed but it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. That's like saying early attempts to build airplanes were hoaxes because, "that design was flawed and would never have flown"
Jeez, all you have to do around here is spout a few "facts" (5000 units per gram blah blah blah) and you get put up to +5 informative.
*sing* I'm a karma whore and I'm okay....
I work all night and I post all day
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
One of the people mentioned in the story is David Minnaar, who works for the Michigan DEP. He's certainly a real person; see Antique crock turns out to be radioactive and Michigan DEP site with his e-mail address (minnaard@state.mi.us) and phone number (517-335-8197).
Another person mentioned is Donald Erb, mentioned on International Isotope Society Membership List, and can be reached at
U.S. Department of Energy
22404 Goshen School Road
Gaithersburg , MD , 20882-9801
Phone: (301) 253-5530
Fax: (301) 903-5434
So at the minimum they're real people, and can certainly easily confirm or deny the story or its details, unless they refuse to talk about it, which would be a bit silly.
There was a long cross-posted thread in alt.folklore.urban, sci.physics, and sci.skeptic at the beginning of last year about this, Some good posts:
- the young Mr. Hahn did not build a nuclear breeder reactor...
- one about his Geiger counter readings: More likely, he was measuring stuff on his clothes, or perhaps his body...
- Actually, I'm not AT ALL impressed with the young Mr. Hahn's "accomplishments"...
The existence of David Hahn is plausible; that he accomplished anything resembling a nuclear reactor isn't. It takes a lot of math and physics to build a safe nuclear reactor, but it only takes a pile of radioactive material to get radioactive readings. As extracting elements is pretty much the most basic task in chemistry, and it's all the guy had to do, I believe that he could have done it. Calling what he made a nuclear breeder reactor is pure journalistic hoo-hah (or more charitably, gross exaggeration)...actually, the journalist merely implies that's what Hahn did, by using the phrase "breeder reactor" over and over again. A good lesson in the difference between what's actually said and what's implied. He may have had a dangerous nuclear pile, but that's far from a genuine reactor.Remember, this is 19th century chemistry that he was doing, and had the advantage of extracting radioactive materials from already purified sources.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
Sorry for the confusion, LionKimbro. I really should have been more specific. I should have said "lifetime allowable dosage of radiation for a person working in a US Navy nuclear specialty." I'm sure there's a "government recommended maximum civillian dosage," and it's set at a very harmless and generally un-reached number.
Here's a little background on the Navy nuclear field:
The enlisted and officer personnel that actually work on the naval reactor systems (ratings of MM, EM and ET, plus officer billets) go through a special school at Naval Weapons Station Charleston in South Carolina.
As far as exposure goes, I'm not going to get into the exact specifics & numbers. (I'm not sure exactly where 'common knowledge' stops and 'confidential information' starts.) Numbers don't matter in any case, as I don't have exposure readings for Petty Officer Hahn.
The point is: The Navy has chosen a number for the amount of exposure you're allowed. David Hahn exceeded this number before he enlisted. Therefore the Navy will not allow him to work in a situation where he will receive artificial additional exposure. The Navy is not interested in medically retiring him and handing him a disability check because something turned cancerous, all because he went near a reactor... again.
The Navy does understand the risks involved -- and they certainly minimize their exposure as much as they can, both to radiation risks and litigation risks!
Petty Officer Hahn is quite famous here around NWS Charleston. Every Power School class hears about the 'Radioactive Boyscout.' Curious about what he's doing now? He's an 'airdale' -- he works on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Oops.
So, just you remember that kids -- choices you make in your youth can limit your career options further down the road.
I sure think he didn't want quite that result, though.
His reaction to it is interesting. (To paraphrase Reader's Digest):
- David is now in the Navy, where he reads about steroids, melanin, genetic codes, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. He explains "...I wanted to make a scratch in life." As far as his radiation exposure, "I've still got time." He goes on to venture that "I don't believe I took more than 5 years off my life."
Quite the merit badge."...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Hey, gimme an EMP device! That's ll nuke those pesky boom boxes going on all night at maximum volume, robbing you of an honest man's sleep. EMP's are far more practical than old fashioned methods such as water buckets, or manually going down to the basement to switch off their power supply!
Half way down the page it says this story appeared in:
November 1998 issue of Harpers Magazine.
CBS "Morning News"
CBS "Evening News" on October 14, 1998
Reader's Digest March 1999
The Sunday Times January 17, 1999.
I looked in the Sunday times back-issue and couldn't find the article, maybe someone else can....
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/cgi-bin/BackIssue
CBC news archives seem to not go back farther than Dec 98.
Any speech can be functional. Calling functional speech a device doesn't change that it is speech, and is therefore protected.
DeCSS is as much as device as the launch codes for a nuclear missle, or the combo to my gym locker.
In the right context they can perform a function, but they are speech nonetheless. If you want to prohibit the function they perform, make "speech-devices" illegal to use, not to distribute--and realize that making DeCSS illegal to use would lay bare the decimation of constitutionally required fair use that this ban on dissemination disguises.
It's that easy. And that hard.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Yes, once you've built your own atomic device, we at ACME Atomic Products promise no more being picked on!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Yup. Also used on watch faces. The most expensive commercially available substance in the world. Last time I bothered checking, it was 10 grand American per gram. That was 10 or 15 years ago.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
He read a 1970's artice of Electronic's Australia that discussed how to build a home made nuke and the problems you would enocounter. One thing it made clear was how dangerous it was and how in the end itis just finding the right bits. The most dangerous part is smeltering the Uranium into 10lb hemispheres as Uranium does not like bening melted. It gives of fumes and likely to catch fire, or react.
Now, if I remember rigt, it proposed a underground cellar filled with concrete, one hemisphere at the bottom of a shaft, the other at the top if the same shaft. A small explosive forces the sphere's together, which provides the now critical mass and if you've got everything right, a yeild of 25 kilotons.
The point of the article was to show that yes, it is possible. But also the risks as well. You need not to understand the maths, just be careful understand what your doing.
I think the article is in a cira 1979 Electronic Australia. Thence, although I doubt this story is more thanan urban legend, it is still quite possible to build a home nuke if your detirmined enough. Suitcase nukes are definantly not possible.
"Old Rallydrivers never die - they just fail to book in on time"
So let me get this straight. I can find all the information I need to build a nuclear reactor, written at a level a 15 year old boy scout can understand, and that's "OK". But DeCSS is BAD. We can't have that kind of dangerous code out there! We might copy movies.
So once again: Irradiating 40,000 people is OK. Fair Use copies of DVDs are bad.
And we wonder why the world thinks America is fucking nuts.
...does anyone else find it just slightly strange that his name is DAVID HAHN!??
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
Actually, you are quite wrong, because the type of nuclear reactor he made was a subcritical reactor. A subcritical reactor does not need to be of critical mass in order to produce fission. Instead, it relies on the nuclear particles already being emmited from radioactive materials to sustain a low-level rate of fission.
Fission does not require alot of energy at all. In fact, if you understand nuclear physics, you know that the macroscopic cross section for absorbtion in a thermal (low-energy) neutron is much higher than that of a fast (high-energy) neutron.
Many colleges have subcritical reactors. You may want to read up on the concept.
This seems to be fiction invented by a writer who is well-educated in nuclear physics, and who is depending on the fact that his readers aren't.
For example, this paragraph from the story cannot be right:
"It was slow going until one day, driving through Clinton Township to visit his girlfriend, Heather, he noticed that his Geiger counter went wild as he passed Gloria's Resale Boutique/Antique. The proprietor, Gloria Genette, still recalls the day when she was called at home by a store employee who said that a polite young man was anxious to buy an old table clock with a tinted green dial but wondered if she'd come down in price."
This doesn't make sense. Geiger counters are not very sensitive because they depend on the ability of an energetic particle or photon to ionize gas molecules. This takes a lot of energy.
To detect the radiation on the street using a geiger counter, the radiation near where the source was stored would have to be so intense that the workers in the store would become sick.
Read message #173 above, by Kierthos (Kierthos@aol.com):
"And as I recall, the radioactive particles emitted by Uranium are alpha (okay, it's been a long time, so I'm guessing), which can be stopped by a stout pair of pants."
That's true. Beta radiation (fast electrons) doesn't travel far either. Another kind of radiation emitted by radioactive substances is gamma rays. Gamma rays are photons more energetic than X-rays. Gamma rays can penetrate easily. However, consider that the article quote implies that the distance over which the radiation was detected was from inside the store to the street. I'm guessing that would be at least 6 meters, or 20 feet.
Gamma radiation from a radioactive substance is omni-directional. The energy radiates the same way in all directions. As radiation spreads into a volume, its intensity is divided proportional to the square of the distance. This means that someone working in the store would be exposed to a far higher intensity of radiation than would be detectable in the street.
Also, the amount of radium (radioactive material) in luminous clock dials was extremely small. Radium was, and is, extremely expensive, so there never would have been very much in one place. Radium-226, the most common isotope, decays to half its original intensity in 1600 years. So there would never have been a reason to include an extra sample of radium with a clock.
Conclusion: This story is, at least partly, a hoax.
Bush's education improvements were
There is no way that the radioactive materiasl that this student put together could ever have created a sustained nuclear reaction. I read this article very carefully when it came out, and came to the conclusion that a gullible reporter was taken in. Sure, one can obtain some moderately radioactive materials, but that is one hellofa long way from fission. Don't believe everything you read. See http://www.umsl.edu/~chemist/books/halspicks/hal19 98.html#October
Proof once again, that duct-tape has over a million uses. Just avoid using as a condom.
The story... Chicago, at University of Chicago, a group of students creates a nuclear reactor on the football field. The first uncontrolled nuclear reaction ever (1942)...had to be stopped by a guy running up with an ax.
:)
The first nuclear reactor. Oddly, it looks like a toolshed.
History likes repeating itself.
Here is a look at the early Chicago reactors.
We now return to our regularly scheduled drivel.
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Mmm... delicious white marbles...
Damn, having never seen the name of this particular adesive product in written form I assumed it to be spelt "Duck Tape" and was designed for securing ducks whilst performing acts which would normally cause them to attempt rapid escape.
Boy do I feel stupid.
First of all, what the heck would you do if the car got totalled? You'd contaminate dozens of miles of the Interstate, and even if you survived, you'd die an agonizing death from radiation poisoning or cancer.
There are other problems as well. For example, do you intend to power your car just with the energy generated from radioactive decay? If so, I hate to break it to you, but there's not a whole lot to use. It's doubtful that you could use that power to move a car, expecially the large one you would need.
In fact, the only way you could do this would be if you converted an 18-wheeler with trailer. Put a true fission reactor in the trailer, complete with boilers and cooling system, and run wires from the trailer to the truck itself, where you would have a large electric motor. Sinmply converting an old jalopy as a "tinkering project" would not work. Not to mention, for this nuclear-powered 18-wheeler, you'd need a commercial driver's licence.
Of course, the fact that you'd essentiall have a whole 18-wheeler trailer filled with radioactive metals and contaminated water means a couple things. First, you would have to have thick lead wall all over the thing - how a top speed of 30mph sound. The fact you'd have a huge amount of power is irrelevent - the other problems involved with moving that much mass at that much speed (brakes, transmission, etc) are formidable. And frankly, I wouldn't want you driving fast in this behemoth anyway.
Remember what I said about your entire trailer being filled with radioactive-contaminated water? Let me ask you this: How often does your car radiator spring a leak? Not often, true, but it has happened to you, hasn't it? In a nuclear power plant, there are hundreds of people checking every valve and in constant control. Your reactor will have one controller - yourself -and you will be driving while trying to control the reactor.
If you want a bad$%# truck, get a SmarTruck with missile launchers and whatnot.
I'm the stranger...posting to
While you can't do everything on a budget, you generally don't need a lot of equipment in order to do science, even cutting edge science. Policymakers should remember that when they consider trying to restrict the availability of technology or bet that it won't proliferate. You may be able to track and restrict nuclear materials, with occasional problems, but you can't restrict biotech or computers.
The situation is really not unlike software. You may have big companies going out and spending billions on "enterprise software", while nimble smaller players do a better job with open source.