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The Boy and his Breeder Reactor
scubacuda writes "Here is an interesting tale about a Boy Scout who went a little too far in trying to achieve a merit badge in Atomic Energy. From smoke alarms, lantern components, the paint from radio clocks, and a little help from the Nuclear Regulator Commission, David Hahn attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed. Regarding his excessive radioactive exposure, Hahn says, "I don't believe I took more than five years off my life."" While this is an oldish story (1998) it is not the pathetic self congratulatory lame princeton story.
for the CLIT !
The
SUCK MY C.L.I.T.
I remember reading this in the readers digest a few years ago.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
It hurts and stuff -- propz to all AC FP'ers like myself!
I had to try just once!
...this was posted in the hardware category.
Why would Slashdot put this as news when it happened years ago and most of us remember it? I mean I'd be all for this story if it was new - but a magazine from 1998? What happened? Find a Harper's while at the doctor's office? Next up: a Slashdot story on the WTC bombing.
What, exactly, is 'CLIT'?
(I know I'm going to regret asking.)
Famed actor was found dead today at his Studio City CA home of a drug overdose. ***Breaking***
Welcome to last week
There's several references to it everywhere, here's another.
This kid didn't learn to obey the rules of
Military Intelligence
tcd004
Harper's Magazine Nov, 1998 The radioactive boy scout: when a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor. (case of David Hahn who managed to secure materials and equipment from businesses and information from government officials to develop an atomic energy radiation project for his Boy Scout merit-badge) Author/s: Ken Silverstein When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that's exactly what chemistry is: Finding out about things--finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing! --The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, the kind of place where people live precisely because it is more than 25 miles outside of Detroit and all the complications attendant on that city. The kind of place where money buys a bit more land, perhaps a second bathroom, and so reassures residents that they're safely in the bosom of the middle class. Every element of Golf Manor invokes one form of security or another, beginning with the name of the subdivision itself--taken from the 18 hole course at its entrance--and the community in which it is nestled, Commerce Township. The houses and trees are both old and varied enough to make Golf Manor feel more like a neighborhood than a subdivision, and the few features that do convey subdivision--a sign at the entrance saying "We have many children but none to spare. Please drive carefully"--have a certain Back to the Future charm. Most Golf Manor residents remain there until they die, and then they are replaced by young couples with kids. In short, it is the kind of place where, on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the corner is a Mister Softee ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day. Ask Dottie Pease. As she turned down Pinto Drive, Pease saw eleven men swarming across her carefully manicured lawn. Their attention seemed to be focused on the back yard of the house next door, specifically on a large wooden potting shed that abutted the chain-link fence dividing her property from her neighbor's. Three of the men had donned ventilated moon suits and were proceeding to dismantle the potting shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces of wood into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs. Pease had never noticed anything out of the ordinary at the house next door. A middle-aged couple, Michael Polasek and Patty Hahn, lived there. On some weekends, they were joined by Patty's teenage son, David. As she huddled with a group of nervous neighbors, though, Pease heard one resident claim to have awoken late one night to see the potting shed emitting an eerie glow. "I was pretty disturbed," Pease recalls. "I went inside and called my husband. I said, `Da-a-ve, there are men in funny suits walking around out here. You've got to do something.'" What the men in the funny suits found was that the potting shed was dangerously irradiated and that the area's 40,000 residents could be at risk. Publicly, the men in white promised the residents of Golf Manor that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the Environmental Protection Agency briefly invaded their neighborhood. When asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project. It seems remarkable that David's story hasn't already wended its way through all forms of journalism and become the stuff of legend, but at the time the EPA refused to give out David's name, and although a few local reporters learned it, neither he nor any family members agreed to be interviewed. Even the federal and state officials who oversaw the cleanup learned only a small part of what took place in the potting shed at Golf Manor because David, fearing legal repercussions, told them almost nothing about his experiments. Then in 1996, Jay Gourley, a correspondent with the Natural Resources News Service in Washington, D.C., came across a tiny newspaper item about the case and contacted David Hahn. Gourley later passed on his research to me, and I subsequently interviewed the story's protagonists, including David--now a twenty-two-year-old sailor stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. I met with David in the hope of making sense not only of his experiments but of him. The archetypal American suburban boy learns how to hit a fadeaway jump shot, change a car's oil, perform some minor carpentry feats. If he's a Boy Scout he masters the art of starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and if he's a typical adolescent pyro, he transforms tennis-ball cans into cannons. David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium. I had seen childhood photographs of David in which he looked perfectly normal, even angelic, with blond hair and hazel-green eyes, and, as he grew older, gangly limbs and a peach-fuzz mustache. Still, when I went to meet him in Norfolk, I was anticipating some physical manifestation of brilliance or obsession. An Einstein or a Kaczynski. But all I saw was a beefier version of the clean-cut kid in the pictures. David's manner was oddly dispassionate, though polite, until we began to discuss his nuclear adventures. Then, for five hours, lighting and grinding out cigarettes for emphasis, David enthused about laboring in his backyard laboratory. He told me how he used coffee filters and pickle jars to handle deadly substances such as radium and nitric acid, and he sheepishly divulged the various cover stories and aliases he employed to obtain the radioactive materials. A shy and withdrawn teenager, David had confided in only a few friends about his project and never allowed anyone to witness his experiments. His breeder-reactor project was a means--albeit an unorthodox one--of escaping the trauma of adolescence. "I was very emotional as a kid," he told me, "and those experiments gave me a way to get away from that. They gave me some respect." You--Scientist! --The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, Chapter 10 In The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes notes that the psychological profiles of pioneering American physicists are remarkably similar. Frequently the eldest son of an emotionally remote, professional man, he--almost all were men--was a voracious reader during childhood, tended to feel lonely, and was shy and aloof from classmates. David's parents, Ken and Patty Hahn, divorced when he was a toddler. Ken is an automotive engineer for General Motors, as is his second wife, Kathy Missig, whom he married soon after the divorce. David lived with his father and stepmother in a small split-level home in suburban Clinton Township, about thirty miles north of Detroit. Ken Hahn worked extraordinarily long hours for GM. With close-cropped hair and a proclivity for short-sleeved dress shirts, Ken radiates a coolness that, combined with his constant preoccupation, must have been confounding to a child. When asked about his undemonstrative nature, Ken attributes it to his German ancestry. Yet for all his starchiness, it was Kathy who was David's chief disciplinarian. David spent weekends and holidays with his mother and her boyfriend, Michael Polasek, an amiable but hard-drinking retired forklift operator at GM. Golf Manor is demographically similar to Clinton Township, but the two households could not have been more different emotionally. Patty Hahn committed suicide in the house a few years ago, but Michael still lives there surrounded by pictures of her. ("She was a beautiful person," he says. "She was my whole life.") He keeps five cats and a spotless household, and looks like a member of Sha Na Na. Despite the fact that David was shuffled between households, his early years were seemingly ordinary. He played baseball and soccer, joined the Boy Scouts, and spent endless hours exploring with his friends. An abrupt change came at the age of ten, when Kathy's father, also an engineer for GM, gave David The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. The book promised to open doors to a brave new world--"Chemistry means the difference between poverty and starvation and the abundant life," it stated with unwavering optimism--and offered instructions on how to set up a home laboratory and conduct experiments ranging from simple evaporation and filtration to making rayon and alcohol. David swiftly became immersed and by age twelve was digesting his father's college chemistry textbooks without difficulty. When he spent the night at Golf Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the livingroom floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In his father's house, David set up a laboratory in his small bedroom, where the shelves are still lined with books such as Prudent Practices for Handling Hazardous Chemicals in Laboratories and The Story of Atomic Energy. He bought beakers, Bunsen burners, test tubes, and other items commonly found in a child's chemistry set. David, though, was not conducting the typical adolescent experiments. By fourteen, an age at which most boys with a penchant for chemistry are conducting rudimentary gunpowder experiments, David had fabricated nitroglycerine. David's parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom--the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out--Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement. Which was fine with David. Science allowed him to distance himself from his parents, to create and destroy things, to break the rules, and to escape into something he was a success at, while sublimating a teenager's sense of failure, anger, and embarrassment into some really big explosions. David held a series of after-school jobs at fast-food joints, grocery stores, and furniture warehouses, but work was merely a means of financing his experiments. Never an enthusiastic student and always a horrific speller, David fell behind in school. During his junior year at Chippewa Valley High School--at a time when he was secretly conducting nuclear experiments in his back yard--David nearly failed state math and reading tests required for graduation (though he aced the test in science). Ken Gherardini, who taught David conceptual physics, remembers him as an excellent pupil on the rare occasions when he was interested in classwork but otherwise indifferent to his studies. "His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the periodic table," Gherardini told me with a laugh during an interview at Chippewa Valley before his 8:20 A.M. class. "I don't know about you, but my dream at that age was to buy a car." David's scientific preoccupation left less and less time for friends, though throughout much of high school he did have a girlfriend, Heather Beaudette, three years his junior. Heather says he was sweet and caring (she once returned from a weeklong trip to Florida to find a pile of lengthy love letters) but not always the perfect date. Heather's mom, Donna Bunnell, puts it this way: "He was a nice kid and always presentable, but [in the days before her second wedding] we had to tell him not to talk to anybody. He could eat and drink but, for God's sake, don't talk to the guests about the food's chemical composition." Not even his scout troop was spared David's scientific enthusiasm. He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning. One summer at scout camp, David's fellow campers blew a hole in the communal tent when they accidentally ignited the stockpile of powdered magnesium he had brought to make fireworks. Another year, David was expelled from camp when--while most of his friends were sneaking into the nearby Girl Scouts' camp--he stole a number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his experiments. "Our summer vacation was screwed up when we got a call telling us to pick David up early from camp," his stepmother recalls with a sigh. Up to this point the most illicit of David's concoctions were fireworks and moonshine. But convinced that David's experiments and increasingly erratic behavior were signs that he was making and selling drugs, Ken and Kathy began to spot-check the public library, where David told them he studied. In variably, David would be there as promised, surrounded by a huge pile of chemistry books. But Ken and Kathy were not assuaged, and, worried that he would level their home, they prohibited David from being there alone, locking him out when they were away, even on quick errands, and setting a time for their return so that he could get back in. Kathy began routinely searching David's room and disposing of any chemicals and equipment she found hidden under the bed and deep within the closet. David was not deterred. One night as Ken and Kathy were sitting in the living room watching TV, the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it. He was rushed to the hospital to have his eyes flushed, but even months later David had to make regular trips to an ophthalmologist to have pieces of the plastic phosphorus container plucked carefully from his eyes. Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted his base of operations to his mother's potting shed in Golf Manor. Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that "what he told me went right over my head." One thing still sticks out, though. David's potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. "He'd say, `One of these days we're gonna run out of oil.' He wanted to do something about that." The force hidden in the atom will be turned into light and heat and power for everyday uses. Chemists of the future, working with their brother-scientists, the physicists, will find new ways of harnessing and using the atoms of numerous elements--some of them unknown to the scientists of today. Do you want to share in the making of that astonishing and promising future? --The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments Like Michael, few people whom David confided in understood what he was doing. Ken Hahn, who had taken chemistry courses in college, could follow some of what David told him but thought he was exaggerating for attention. "I never saw him turn green or glow in the dark," he says. "I was probably too easy on him." It probably didn't feel that way to David. Although Ken is immensely proud of David's experiments now that they have a certain notoriety, at the time they represented a breakdown in discipline. As fathers are wont to do, Ken felt the solution lay in a goal that he didn't himself achieve as a child--Eagle Scout. As teenagers are wont to do, David subverted that goal. In addition to showing "scout spirit," Eagle Scouts must earn twenty-one merit badges. Eleven are mandatory, such as First Aid and Citizenship in the Community. The final ten are optional; scouts can choose from dozens of choices ranging from American Business to Woodwork. David elected to earn a merit badge in Atomic Energy. His scoutmaster, Joe Auito, who lives on a rural road an hour or so north of Detroit and who resembles an aging Deadhead rather than the rock-ribbed conservative I'd expected, says he's the only boy to have done so in the history of Clinton Township Troop 371. David's Atomic Energy merit-badge pamphlet was brazenly pro-nuclear, which is no surprise since it was prepared with the help of Westinghouse Electric, the American Nuclear Society, and the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group of utility companies, some of which run nuclear power plants. The pamphlet judiciously states that America is a democracy and "the people decide what the country will do." The pamphlet goes on to suggest, however, that critics of atomic energy were descended from a long line of naysayers and malcontents, warning that "if America decides for or against nuclear power plants based on fear and misunderstanding, that is wrong. We must first know the truth about atomic energy before we can decide to use it or to stop it." David was awarded his Atomic Energy merit badge on May 10, 1991, five months shy of his fifteenth birthday. To earn it he made a drawing showing how nuclear fission occurs, visited a hospital radiology unit to learn about the medical uses of radioisotopes,(1) and built a model reactor using a juice can, coat hangers, soda straws, kitchen matches, and rubber bands. By now, though, David had far grander ambitions. As Auito's wife and troop treasurer, Barbara, recalls: "The typical kid [working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor's office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor." What is a breeder reactor? This simplistic description comes from a publication that David obtained from the Department of Energy (DOE): "Imagine you have a car and begin a long drive. When you start, you have half a tank of gas. When you return home, instead of being nearly empty, your gas tank is full. A breeder reactor is like this magic car. A breeder reactor not only generates electricity, but it also produces new fuel." All reactors, conventional and breeder, rely on a critical pile of a naturally radioactive element--typically uranium-235 or plutonium-239--as the "fuel" for a sustained chain of reactions known as fission. Fission occurs when a neutron combines with the nucleus of a radioisotope, say uranium-235, transforming it into uranium-236. This new isotope is highly unstable and immediately splits in half, forming two smaller nuclei, and releasing a great deal of radiant energy (some of which is heat) and several neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by other uranium-235 atoms to begin the process again. A breeder reactor is configured so that a core of plutonium-239 is surrounded by a "blanket" of uranium-238. When the plutonium gives off neutrons, they are absorbed by the uranium-238 to become uranium-239, which in turn decays by emitting beta rays and is transformed into neptunium-239. Following another stage of "radioactive decay," neptunium becomes plutonium-239, which can replenish the fuel core. The nuclear industry used to tout breeders as the magical solution to the nation's energy needs. The government had opened up two experimental breeders at a test site in Idaho by 1961. Amid great fanfare, in 1963 Detroit Edison opened the Enrico Fermi I power plant, the nation's first and only commercially run breeder reactor. The following decade, Congress appropriated billions of dollars for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee. Hopes ran so high that Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon years, predicted that breeders would be the backbone of an emerging nuclear economy and that plutonium might be "a logical contender to replace gold as the standard of our monetary system." Such optimism proved to be unwarranted. The first Idaho breeder had to be shut down after suffering a partial core meltdown; the second breeder generated electricity but not new fuel. The Fermi plant--located just 60 miles from Clinton Township--was plagued by mechanical problems, accidents, and budget overruns, and produced electricity so expensive that Detroit Edison never even bothered to break down the costs. In 1966, the plant's core suffered a partial meltdown after the cooling system malfunctioned; six years later the plant was shut down permanently. In 1983, when it was estimated that completion costs would deplete much of the federal budget for energy research and development, Congress finally killed the Clinch River program. If he knew of such setbacks, David was in no way deterred by them. His inspiration came from the nuclear pioneers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Antoine Henri Becquerel, the French physicist who, along with Pierre and Marie Curie, received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1903 for discovering radioactivity; Fredic and Irene Joliot-Curie, who received the prize in 1935 for producing the first artificial radioisotope; Sir James Chadwick, who won the Nobel Prize in physics the same year for discovering the neutron; and Enrico Fermi, who created the world's first sustainable nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step leading to the production of atomic energy and atomic bombs.(2) Unlike his predecessors, however, David did not have vast financial support from the state, no laboratory save for a musty potting shed, no proper instruments or safety devices, and, by far his chief impediment, no legal means of obtaining radioactive materials. To get around this last obstacle, David utilized a number of cover stories and concocted identities, plus a Geiger-counter kit he ordered from a mail-order house in Scottsdale, Arizona, which he assembled and mounted to the dashboard of his burgundy Pontiac 6000. David hadn't hit on the idea to try to build a breeder reactor when he began his nuclear experiments at the age of fifteen, but in a step down that path, he was already determined to "irradiate anything" he could. To do that he had to build a "gun" that could bombard isotopes with neutrons. David wrote to a number of groups listed in his merit-badge pamphlet--the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the American Nuclear Society, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Atomic Industrial Forum, the nuclear-power industry's trade group--in hopes of discovering how he might obtain, from both natural and commercial sources, the radioactive raw materials he needed to build his neutron gun and experiment with it. By writing up to twenty letters a day and claiming to be a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School, David says he obtained "tons" of information from those and other groups, though some of it was of only marginal value. The American Nuclear Society sent David a teacher's guide called "Goin' Fission," which featured an Albert Einstein cartoon character: "I'm Albert. Und today, ve are gonna go fission. No, ve don't need any smelly bait and der won't be any fish to clean. I mean fission, not fishin'." Other organizations proved to be far more helpful, and none more than the NRC. Again posing as a physics teacher, David managed to engage the agency's director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, in a scientific discussion by mail. Erb offered David tips on isolating certain radioactive elements, provided a list of isotopes that can sustain a chain reaction, and imparted a piece of information that would soon prove to be vital to David's plans: "Nothing produces neutrons ... as well as beryllium." When David asked Erb about the risks posed by such radioactive materials, the NRC official assured "Professor Hahn" that the "real dangers are very slight," since possession "of any radioactive materials in quantities and forms sufficient to pose any hazard is subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or equivalent) licensing." David says the NRC also sent him pricing data and commercial sources for some of the radioactive wares he wanted to purchase, ostensibly for the benefit of his eager students. "The NRC gave me all the information I needed," he later recalled. "All I had to do was go out and get the materials."
The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff.... But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely, "How difficult are these things to manufacture?"
--George Orwell, "You and the Atom Bomb," 1945
Armed with information from his friends in government and industry, David typed up a list of sources for fourteen radioactive isotopes..Americium-241, he learned from the Boy Scout atomic-energy booklet, could be found in smoke detectors; radium-226, in antique luminous dial clocks; uranium-238 and minute quantities of uranium-235, in a black ore called pitchblende; and thorium-232, in Coleman-style gas lanterns.
To obtain americium-241, David contacted smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a large number of the devices for a school project. One company agreed to sell him about a hundred broken detectors for a dollar apiece. (He also tried to "collect" detectors while at scout camp.) David wasn't sure where the americium-241 was located, so he wrote to BRK Electronics in Aurora, Illinois. A customer-service representative named Beth Weber wrote back to say she'd be happy to help out with "your report." She explained that each detector contains only a tiny amount of americium-241, which is sealed in a gold matrix "to make sure that corrosion does not break it down and release it." Thanks to Weber's tip, David extracted the americium components and then welded them together with a blowtorch.
As it decays, americium-241 emits alpha rays composed of protons and neutrons. David put the lump of americium inside a hollow block of lead with a tiny hole pricked in one side so that alpha rays would stream out. In front of the lead block he placed a sheet of aluminum. Aluminum atoms absorb alpha rays and in the process kick out neutrons. Since neutrons have no charge, and thus cannot be measured by a Geiger counter, David had no way of knowing whether the gun was working until he recalled that paraffin throws off protons when hit by neutrons. David aimed the apparatus at some paraffin, and his Geiger counter registered what he assumed was a proton stream. His neutron gun, crude but effective, was ready.
With neutron gun in hand, David was ready to irradiate. He could have concentrated on transforming previously nonradioactive elements, but in a decision that was both indicative of his personality and instrumental to his later attempt to build a breeder reactor, he wanted to use the gun on radioisotopes to increase the chances of making them fissionable. He thought that uranium-235, which is used in atomic weapons, would provide the "biggest reaction." He scoured hundreds of miles of upper Michigan in his Pontiac looking for "hot rocks" with his Geiger counter, but all he could find was a quarter trunkload of pitchblende on the shores of Lake Huron. Deciding to pursue a more bureaucratic approach, he wrote to a Czechoslovakian firm that sells uranium to commercial and university buyers, whose name was provided, he told me, by the NRC. Claiming to be a professor buying materials for a nuclear-research laboratory, he obtained a few samples of a black ore--either pitchblende or uranium dioxide, both of which contain small amounts of uranium-235 and uranium-238.
David pulverized the ores with a hammer, thinking that he could then use nitric acid to isolate uranium. Unable to find a commercial source for nitric acid--probably because it is used in the manufacture of explosives and thus is tightly controlled--David made his own by heating saltpeter and sodium bisulfate, then bubbling the gas that was released through a container of water, producing nitric acid. He then mixed the acid with the powdered ore and boiled it, ending up with something that "looked like a dirty milk shake." Next he poured the "milk shake" through a coffee filter, hoping that the uranium would pass through the filter. But David miscalculated uranium's solubility, and whatever amount was present was trapped in the filter, making it difficult to purify further.
Frustrated at his inability to isolate sufficient supplies of uranium, David turned his attention to thorium-232, which when bombarded with neutrons produces uranium-233, a man-made fissionable element (and, although he might not have known it then, one that can be substituted for plutonium in breeder reactors). Discovered in 1828 and named after the Norse god Thor, thorium has a very high melting point, and is thus used in the manufacture of airplane engine parts that reach extremely high temperatures. David knew from his merit-badge pamphlet that the "mantle" used in commercial gas lanterns--the part that looks like a doll's stocking and conducts the flame--is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. He bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of ash.
David still had to isolate the thorium-232 from the ash. Fortunately, he remembered reading in one of his dad's chemistry books that lithium is prone to binding with oxygen--meaning, in this context, that it would rob thorium dioxide of its oxygen content and leave a cleaner form of thorium. David purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and extracted the element by cutting the batteries in half with a pair of wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium dioxide together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. Eureka! David's method purified thorium to at least 9,000 times the level found in nature and 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.
At this point, David could have used his americium neutron gun to transform thorium-232 into fissionable uranium-233. But the americium he had was not capable of producing enough neutrons, so he began preparing radium for an improved irradiating gun.
Radium was used in paint that rendered luminescent the faces of clocks and automobile and airplane instrument panels until the late 1960s, when it was discovered that many clock painters, who routinely licked their brushes to make a fine point, died of cancer. David began visiting junkyards and antiques stores in search of radium-coated dashboard panels or clocks. Once he found such an item, he'd chip paint from the instruments and collect it in pill vials. 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. She would. David bought the clock for $10. Inside he discovered a vial of radium paint left behind by a worker either accidentally or as a courtesy so that the clock's owner could touch up the dial when it began to fade. David was so overjoyed that he dropped by the boutique later that night to leave a note for Gloria, telling her that if she received another "luminus [sic] clock" to contact him immediately. "I will pay any some [sic] of money to obtain one."
To concentrate the radium, David secured a sample of barium sulfate from the X-ray ward at a local hospital (staff there handed over the substance because they remembered him from his merit-badge project) and heated it until it liquefied. After mixing the barium sulfate with the radium paint chips, he strained the brew through a coffee filter into a beaker that began to glow. This time, David had judged the solubility of the two substances correctly; the radium solution passed through to the beaker. He then dehydrated the solution into crystalline salts, which he could pack into the cavity of another lead block to build a new gun.
Whether David fully realized it or not, by handling purified radium he was truly putting himself in danger. Nevertheless, he now proceeded to acquire another neutron emitter to replace the aluminum used in his previous neutron gun. Faithful to Erb's instructions, he secured a strip of beryllium (which is a much richer source of neutrons than aluminum) from the chemistry department at Macomb Community College--a friend who attended the school swiped it for him--and placed it in front of the lead block that held the radium. His cute little americium gun was now a more powerful radium gun. David began to bombard his thorium and uranium powders in the hopes of producing at least some fissionable atoms. He measured the results with his Geiger counter, but while the thorium seemed to grow more radioactive, the uranium remained a disappointment.
Once again, "Professor Hahn" sprang into action, writing his old friend Erb at the NRC to discuss the problem. The NRC had the answer. David's neutrons were too "fast" for the uranium).(3) He would have to slow them down using a filter of water, deuterium, or tritium. Water would have sufficed, but David likes a challenge. Consulting his list of commercially available radioactive sources, he discovered that tritium, a radioactive material used to boost the power of nuclear weapons, is found in glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights, which David promptly bought from sporting-goods stores and mail-order catalogues. He removed the tritium contained in a waxy substance inside the sights, and then, using a variety of pseudonyms, returned the sights to the store or manufacturer for repair--each time collecting another tiny quantity of tritium. When he had enough, David smeared the waxy substance over the beryllium strip and targeted the gun at uranium powder. He carefully monitored the results with his Geiger counter over several weeks, and it appeared that the powder was growing more radioactive by the day.
Now seventeen, David hit on the idea of building a model breeder reactor. He knew that without a critical pile of at least thirty pounds of enriched uranium he had no chance of initiating a sustained chain reaction, but he was determined to get as far as he could by trying to get his various radioisotopes to interact with one another. That way, he now says, "no matter what happened there would be something changing into something--some kind of action going on there." His blueprint was a schematic of a checkerboard breeder reactor he'd seen in one of his father's college textbooks. Ignoring any thought of safety, 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.
David monitored his "breeder reactor" at the Golf Manor laboratory with his Geiger counter. "It was radioactive as heck," he says. "The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of assembly. I know I transformed some radioactive materials. 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."
Finally, David, whose safety precautions had thus far consisted of wearing a makeshift lead poncho and throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes following a session in the potting shed, began to realize that, sustained reaction or not, he could be putting himself and others in danger. (One tip-off was when the radiation was detectable through concrete.) Jim Miller, a nuclear-savvy high-school friend in whom David had confided, warned him that real reactors use control rods to regulate nuclear reactions. Miller recommended cobalt, which absorbs neutrons but does not itself become fissionable. "Reactors get hot, it's just a fact," Miller, a nervous, skinny twenty-two-year-old, said during an interview at a Burger King in Clinton Township where he worked as a cook. David purchased a set of cobalt drill bits at a local hardware store and inserted them between the thorium and uranium cubes. But the cobalt wasn't sufficient. When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors down from his mom's house, David decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets in a shoebox that he hid in his mother's house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac 6000.
WASTE DISPOSAL. If you can dump your waste directly into the kitchen drain (NOT into the sink), you are all right. If not, collect it in a plastic pail to be thrown out when you're finished.
--The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments
At 2:40 A.M. on August 31, 1994, the Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been spotted in a residential neighborhood, apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was waiting to meet a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car. When they opened the trunk they discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape for good measure. The trunk also contained over fifty foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, lantern mantles, mercury switches, a clock face, ores, fireworks, vacuum tubes, and assorted chemicals and acids.The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David warned them was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.
For reasons that are hard to fathom, Sergeant Joseph Mertes, one of the arresting officers, ordered a car containing what he noted in his report was "a potential improvised explosive device" to be towed to police headquarters. "It probably shouldn't have been done, but we thought that the car had been used in the commission of a crime," Police Chief Al Ernst now says sheepishly. "When I came in at 6:30 in the morning it was already there."
The police called in the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad to examine the Pontiac and the State Department of Public Health (DPH) to supply radiological assistance. The good news, the two teams discovered, was that David's toolbox was not an atomic bomb. The bad news was that David's trunk did contain radioactive materials, including concentrations of thorium--"not found in nature, at least not in Michigan"--and americium. That discovery automatically triggered the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state officials soon were embroiled in tense phone consultations with the DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC.
With the police, David was largely uncooperative and taciturn. He provided his father's address but didn't mention his mother's house or his potting-shed laboratory. It wasn't until Thanksgiving Day that Dave Minnaar, a DPH radiological expert, finally interviewed David. David told Minnaar that he had been trying to make thorium in a form he could use to produce energy and that he hoped "his successes would help him earn his Eagle Scout status." David also finally admitted to having a backyard laboratory.
On November 29, state radiological experts surveyed the potting shed. They found aluminum pie pans, jars of acids, Pyrex cups, milk crates, and other materials strewn about, much of it contaminated with what subsequent official reports would call "excessive levels" of radioactive material, especially americium-241 and thorium-232. How high? A vegetable can, for example, registered at 50,000 counts per minute--about 1,000 times higher than normal levels of background radiation. But although Minnaar's troops didn't know it at the time, they conducted their survey long after David's mother, alerted by Ken and Kathy and petrified that the government would take her home away as a result of her son's experiments, had ransacked the shed and discarded most of what she found, including his neutron gun, the radium, pellets of thorium that were far more radioactive than what the health officials found, and several quarts of radioactive powder. "The funny thing is," David now says, "they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff."
After determining that no radioactive materials had leaked outside the shed, state authorities sealed it and petitioned the federal government for help. The NRC licenses nuclear plants and research facilities and deals with any nuclear accidents that take place at those sites. David, of course, was not an NRC-licensed operation, so it was determined that the EPA, which responds to emergencies involving lost or abandoned atomic materials, should be contacted for assistance. In a memo to the EPA's Emergency Response and Enforcement Branch, the Department of Public Health noted that the materials discovered in David's lab were regulated under the Federal Atomic Energy Act and that the "extent of the radioactive material contamination within a private citizen's property beg for a controlled remediation that is beyond our authority or resources to oversee."
EPA officials arrived in Golf Manor on January 25, 1995--five months after David had been stopped by the police--to conduct their own survey of the shed. Their "action memo" noted that conditions at the site "present an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health or welfare or the environment," and that there was "actual or potential exposure to nearby human populations, animals, or food chain...." The memo further stated that adverse conditions such as heavy wind, rain, or fire could cause the "contaminants to migrate or be released."
A Superfund cleanup took place between June 26 and 28 at a cost of about $60,000. After the moon-suited workers dismantled the potting shed with electric saws, they loaded the remains into thirty-nine sealed barrels placed aboard a semitrailer bound for Envirocare, a dump facility located in the middle of the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were entombed along with tons of low-level radioactive debris from the government's atomic-bomb factories, plutonium-production facilities, and contaminated industrial sites. According to the official assessment, there was no noticeable damage to flora or fauna in the back yard in Golf Manor, but 40,000 nearby residents could have been put at risk during David's years of experimentation due to the dangers posed by the release of radioactive dust and radiation.
Last May, I made the 90-mile drive from Detroit to Lansing, where Dave Minnaar works in a dreary building that houses several state environmental agencies. Because Patty Hahn had cleaned out the shed before Minnaar's men arrived on the scene, he never knew that David had built neutron guns or that he had obtained radium. Nor did he understand, until I told him, that the cubes of thorium powder found by police at the time of David's arrest were the building blocks for a model breeder reactor. "These are conditions that regulatory agencies never envision," says Minnaar. "It's simply presumed that the average person wouldn't have the technology or materials required to experiment in these areas."
"The real danger ... lies in the radioactive properties of these elements. [Some] migrate to the bone marrow, where their radiation interferes with the production of red blood cells. Less than one-millionth of a gram can be fatal."
--from David's notes
David went into a serious depression after the federal authorities shut down his laboratory. Years of painstaking work had been thrown in the garbage or buried beneath the sands of Utah. Students at Chippewa Valley had taken to calling him "Radioactive Boy," and when his girlfriend, Heather, sent David Valentine's balloons at his high school, they were seized by the principal, who apparently feared they had been inflated with chemical gases David needed to continue his experiments. In a final indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit-badge activities had endangered the community.
In the fall of 1995, Ken and Kathy demanded that David enroll in Macomb Community College. He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his classes and spent much of the day in bed or driving in circles around their block. Finally, Ken and Kathy gave him an ultimatum: Join the armed forces or move out of the house. They called the local recruiting office, which sent a representative to their house or called nearly every day until David finally gave in. After completing boot camp last year, he was stationed on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.
Alas, David's duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, David stays up studying topics that interest him--currently steroids, melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer. Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a relatively small, enclosed space is most worrisome of all. Back in 1995, the EPA arranged for David to undergo a full examination at the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant. David, fearful of what he might learn, refused. Now, though, he's looking ahead. "I wanted to make a scratch in life," he explains when I ask him about his early years of nuclear research. "I've still got time. I don't believe I took more than five years off of my life."
(1) Individual atoms of an element have the same number of protons in their nuclei. This "atomic number" determines the element's chemical properties and position in the periodic table. The number of neutrons within atoms of the same elements can vary, however. Known as isotopes, these variations have unique physical properties because the number of neutrons affects the atom's mass. Most elements have at least two naturally occurring, stable isotopes. But isotopes of heavier elements (those with more protons) are often unstable. Called radioisotopes, and often artificially produced, these nuclei undergo some form of radioactive decay--alpha, beta, or gamma--to become more stable. In alpha decay, the nucleus loses two protons and two neutrons, thus transforming into another element two atomic numbers below it on the periodic table. In beta decay, either a neutron is converted into a proton, and the atomic number rises, or the opposite occurs, pushing the atomic number down. Gamma radiation--in which energy is emitted but no transformation occurs--can accompany alpha or beta decay (where the atomic number falls) or can occur on its own. Americium-241, for example, is a radioisotope of americium. Its atomic number is 95, its atomic mass number is 241, and it becomes neptunium-237 through alpha decay.
(2) Another role model, similar to David in temperament, was the Englishman Francis William Aston. He invented the mass spectrograph in 1920, which he used to identify more than 200 isotopes. As a child, writes Richard Rhodes, Aston "made picric-acid bombs from soda-bottle cartridges and designed and launched huge tissue-paper fire balloons...."
(3) Manhattan Project scientists discovered that some neutrons can move at speeds of about 17 million miles per hour. If they are slowed down or "moderated," to about 5,000 miles per hour, they have a better chance of being absorbed by another atom.
Ken Silverstein's last article for Harper's Magazine, "The Boeing Formation," appeared in the May 1997 issue. He lives in Washington, D.C.
...could he split a beer atom?
Jesus christ. Can't anyone at slashdot do a quick search before posting a story? Slashdot ran this story AGES ago.
Must be a *real* slow news day if Slashdot has to resort to picking up stories from ~4 years ago... Didn't Slashdot cover this when it *was* news?
Bah. At this rate Slashdot's becoming nothing more than one of those horribly outdated joke sites which contains nothing but the same old tired jokes you got forwarded in email when the internet was this "new thing."
I'm the ghost of Baldwin Powell, and I'm gay. Thank you. You too, yes you too. Thank you. Please hold your fingers up like this V. Thak you. Thank you. Yes, kiss ur fellow cubs now. Thank you.
Umm, if I remember properly isn't this an 'urban legend' like the jet powered chevy impala? I thought that this was just an urban legend that people told...
Man, talk about terrible parents. They locked him out of the house because they thought he was making drugs? No wonder he wanted to a-bomb the neighborhood.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
More proof that CmdrTaco and the rest of the people that manage this overblown BLOG-site collectively DO live in a Cave in West Virginia.
/. has begun it's downhill slide with this "news item"
Give us a break and post something relevant, like new news on Beowulf clusters matching the performance of Cray T3E Supercomputers?
It's official -
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
This same basic story was posted about a year ago. Hell, the dude who did it even made a post. Come on people.... Drink more coffee so your memory will be retained for more then an hour.
Jolt also works.
Harper's Magazine Nov, 1998 The radioactive boy scout: when a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor. (case of David Hahn who managed to secure materials and equipment from businesses and information from government officials to develop an atomic energy radiation project for his Boy Scout merit-badge) Author/s: Ken Silverstein When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that's exactly what chemistry is: Finding out about things--finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing! --The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, the kind of place where people live precisely because it is more than 25 miles outside of Detroit and all the complications attendant on that city. The kind of place where money buys a bit more land, perhaps a second bathroom, and so reassures residents that they're safely in the bosom of the middle class. Every element of Golf Manor invokes one form of security or another, beginning with the name of the subdivision itself--taken from the 18 hole course at its entrance--and the community in which it is nestled, Commerce Township. The houses and trees are both old and varied enough to make Golf Manor feel more like a neighborhood than a subdivision, and the few features that do convey subdivision--a sign at the entrance saying "We have many children but none to spare. Please drive carefully"--have a certain Back to the Future charm. Most Golf Manor residents remain there until they die, and then they are replaced by young couples with kids. In short, it is the kind of place where, on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the corner is a Mister Softee ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day. Ask Dottie Pease. As she turned down Pinto Drive, Pease saw eleven men swarming across her carefully manicured lawn. Their attention seemed to be focused on the back yard of the house next door, specifically on a large wooden potting shed that abutted the chain-link fence dividing her property from her neighbor's. Three of the men had donned ventilated moon suits and were proceeding to dismantle the potting shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces of wood into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs. Pease had never noticed anything out of the ordinary at the house next door. A middle-aged couple, Michael Polasek and Patty Hahn, lived there. On some weekends, they were joined by Patty's teenage son, David. As she huddled with a group of nervous neighbors, though, Pease heard one resident claim to have awoken late one night to see the potting shed emitting an eerie glow. "I was pretty disturbed," Pease recalls. "I went inside and called my husband. I said, `Da-a-ve, there are men in funny suits walking around out here. You've got to do something.'" What the men in the funny suits found was that the potting shed was dangerously irradiated and that the area's 40,000 residents could be at risk. Publicly, the men in white promised the residents of Golf Manor that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the Environmental Protection Agency briefly invaded their neighborhood. When asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project. It seems remarkable that David's story hasn't already wended its way through all forms of journalism and become the stuff of legend, but at the time the EPA refused to give out David's name, and although a few local reporters learned it, neither he nor any family members agreed to be interviewed. Even the federal and state officials who oversaw the cleanup learned only a small part of what took place in the potting shed at Golf Manor because David, fearing legal repercussions, told them almost nothing about his experiments. Then in 1996, Jay Gourley, a correspondent with the Natural Resources News Service in Washington, D.C., came across a tiny newspaper item about the case and contacted David Hahn. Gourley later passed on his research to me, and I subsequently interviewed the story's protagonists, including David--now a twenty-two-year-old sailor stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. I met with David in the hope of making sense not only of his experiments but of him. The archetypal American suburban boy learns how to hit a fadeaway jump shot, change a car's oil, perform some minor carpentry feats. If he's a Boy Scout he masters the art of starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and if he's a typical adolescent pyro, he transforms tennis-ball cans into cannons. David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium. I had seen childhood photographs of David in which he looked perfectly normal, even angelic, with blond hair and hazel-green eyes, and, as he grew older, gangly limbs and a peach-fuzz mustache. Still, when I went to meet him in Norfolk, I was anticipating some physical manifestation of brilliance or obsession. An Einstein or a Kaczynski. But all I saw was a beefier version of the clean-cut kid in the pictures. David's manner was oddly dispassionate, though polite, until we began to discuss his nuclear adventures. Then, for five hours, lighting and grinding out cigarettes for emphasis, David enthused about laboring in his backyard laboratory. He told me how he used coffee filters and pickle jars to handle deadly substances such as radium and nitric acid, and he sheepishly divulged the various cover stories and aliases he employed to obtain the radioactive materials. A shy and withdrawn teenager, David had confided in only a few friends about his project and never allowed anyone to witness his experiments. His breeder-reactor project was a means--albeit an unorthodox one--of escaping the trauma of adolescence. "I was very emotional as a kid," he told me, "and those experiments gave me a way to get away from that. They gave me some respect." You--Scientist! --The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, Chapter 10 In The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes notes that the psychological profiles of pioneering American physicists are remarkably similar. Frequently the eldest son of an emotionally remote, professional man, he--almost all were men--was a voracious reader during childhood, tended to feel lonely, and was shy and aloof from classmates. David's parents, Ken and Patty Hahn, divorced when he was a toddler. Ken is an automotive engineer for General Motors, as is his second wife, Kathy Missig, whom he married soon after the divorce. David lived with his father and stepmother in a small split-level home in suburban Clinton Township, about thirty miles north of Detroit. Ken Hahn worked extraordinarily long hours for GM. With close-cropped hair and a proclivity for short-sleeved dress shirts, Ken radiates a coolness that, combined with his constant preoccupation, must have been confounding to a child. When asked about his undemonstrative nature, Ken attributes it to his German ancestry. Yet for all his starchiness, it was Kathy who was David's chief disciplinarian. David spent weekends and holidays with his mother and her boyfriend, Michael Polasek, an amiable but hard-drinking retired forklift operator at GM. Golf Manor is demographically similar to Clinton Township, but the two households could not have been more different emotionally. Patty Hahn committed suicide in the house a few years ago, but Michael still lives there surrounded by pictures of her. ("She was a beautiful person," he says. "She was my whole life.") He keeps five cats and a spotless household, and looks like a member of Sha Na Na. Despite the fact that David was shuffled between households, his early years were seemingly ordinary. He played baseball and soccer, joined the Boy Scouts, and spent endless hours exploring with his friends. An abrupt change came at the age of ten, when Kathy's father, also an engineer for GM, gave David The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. The book promised to open doors to a brave new world--"Chemistry means the difference between poverty and starvation and the abundant life," it stated with unwavering optimism--and offered instructions on how to set up a home laboratory and conduct experiments ranging from simple evaporation and filtration to making rayon and alcohol. David swiftly became immersed and by age twelve was digesting his father's college chemistry textbooks without difficulty. When he spent the night at Golf Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the livingroom floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In his father's house, David set up a laboratory in his small bedroom, where the shelves are still lined with books such as Prudent Practices for Handling Hazardous Chemicals in Laboratories and The Story of Atomic Energy. He bought beakers, Bunsen burners, test tubes, and other items commonly found in a child's chemistry set. David, though, was not conducting the typical adolescent experiments. By fourteen, an age at which most boys with a penchant for chemistry are conducting rudimentary gunpowder experiments, David had fabricated nitroglycerine. David's parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom--the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out--Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement. Which was fine with David. Science allowed him to distance himself from his parents, to create and destroy things, to break the rules, and to escape into something he was a success at, while sublimating a teenager's sense of failure, anger, and embarrassment into some really big explosions. David held a series of after-school jobs at fast-food joints, grocery stores, and furniture warehouses, but work was merely a means of financing his experiments. Never an enthusiastic student and always a horrific speller, David fell behind in school. During his junior year at Chippewa Valley High School--at a time when he was secretly conducting nuclear experiments in his back yard--David nearly failed state math and reading tests required for graduation (though he aced the test in science). Ken Gherardini, who taught David conceptual physics, remembers him as an excellent pupil on the rare occasions when he was interested in classwork but otherwise indifferent to his studies. "His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the periodic table," Gherardini told me with a laugh during an interview at Chippewa Valley before his 8:20 A.M. class. "I don't know about you, but my dream at that age was to buy a car." David's scientific preoccupation left less and less time for friends, though throughout much of high school he did have a girlfriend, Heather Beaudette, three years his junior. Heather says he was sweet and caring (she once returned from a weeklong trip to Florida to find a pile of lengthy love letters) but not always the perfect date. Heather's mom, Donna Bunnell, puts it this way: "He was a nice kid and always presentable, but [in the days before her second wedding] we had to tell him not to talk to anybody. He could eat and drink but, for God's sake, don't talk to the guests about the food's chemical composition." Not even his scout troop was spared David's scientific enthusiasm. He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning. One summer at scout camp, David's fellow campers blew a hole in the communal tent when they accidentally ignited the stockpile of powdered magnesium he had brought to make fireworks. Another year, David was expelled from camp when--while most of his friends were sneaking into the nearby Girl Scouts' camp--he stole a number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his experiments. "Our summer vacation was screwed up when we got a call telling us to pick David up early from camp," his stepmother recalls with a sigh. Up to this point the most illicit of David's concoctions were fireworks and moonshine. But convinced that David's experiments and increasingly erratic behavior were signs that he was making and selling drugs, Ken and Kathy began to spot-check the public library, where David told them he studied. In variably, David would be there as promised, surrounded by a huge pile of chemistry books. But Ken and Kathy were not assuaged, and, worried that he would level their home, they prohibited David from being there alone, locking him out when they were away, even on quick errands, and setting a time for their return so that he could get back in. Kathy began routinely searching David's room and disposing of any chemicals and equipment she found hidden under the bed and deep within the closet. David was not deterred. One night as Ken and Kathy were sitting in the living room watching TV, the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it. He was rushed to the hospital to have his eyes flushed, but even months later David had to make regular trips to an ophthalmologist to have pieces of the plastic phosphorus container plucked carefully from his eyes. Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted his base of operations to his mother's potting shed in Golf Manor. Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that "what he told me went right over my head." One thing still sticks out, though. David's potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. "He'd say, `One of these days we're gonna run out of oil.' He wanted to do something about that." The force hidden in the atom will be turned into light and heat and power for everyday uses. Chemists of the future, working with their brother-scientists, the physicists, will find new ways of harnessing and using the atoms of numerous elements--some of them unknown to the scientists of today. Do you want to share in the making of that astonishing and promising future? --The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments Like Michael, few people whom David confided in understood what he was doing. Ken Hahn, who had taken chemistry courses in college, could follow some of what David told him but thought he was exaggerating for attention. "I never saw him turn green or glow in the dark," he says. "I was probably too easy on him." It probably didn't feel that way to David. Although Ken is immensely proud of David's experiments now that they have a certain notoriety, at the time they represented a breakdown in discipline. As fathers are wont to do, Ken felt the solution lay in a goal that he didn't himself achieve as a child--Eagle Scout. As teenagers are wont to do, David subverted that goal. In addition to showing "scout spirit," Eagle Scouts must earn twenty-one merit badges. Eleven are mandatory, such as First Aid and Citizenship in the Community. The final ten are optional; scouts can choose from dozens of choices ranging from American Business to Woodwork. David elected to earn a merit badge in Atomic Energy. His scoutmaster, Joe Auito, who lives on a rural road an hour or so north of Detroit and who resembles an aging Deadhead rather than the rock-ribbed conservative I'd expected, says he's the only boy to have done so in the history of Clinton Township Troop 371. David's Atomic Energy merit-badge pamphlet was brazenly pro-nuclear, which is no surprise since it was prepared with the help of Westinghouse Electric, the American Nuclear Society, and the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group of utility companies, some of which run nuclear power plants. The pamphlet judiciously states that America is a democracy and "the people decide what the country will do." The pamphlet goes on to suggest, however, that critics of atomic energy were descended from a long line of naysayers and malcontents, warning that "if America decides for or against nuclear power plants based on fear and misunderstanding, that is wrong. We must first know the truth about atomic energy before we can decide to use it or to stop it." David was awarded his Atomic Energy merit badge on May 10, 1991, five months shy of his fifteenth birthday. To earn it he made a drawing showing how nuclear fission occurs, visited a hospital radiology unit to learn about the medical uses of radioisotopes,(1) and built a model reactor using a juice can, coat hangers, soda straws, kitchen matches, and rubber bands. By now, though, David had far grander ambitions. As Auito's wife and troop treasurer, Barbara, recalls: "The typical kid [working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor's office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor." What is a breeder reactor? This simplistic description comes from a publication that David obtained from the Department of Energy (DOE): "Imagine you have a car and begin a long drive. When you start, you have half a tank of gas. When you return home, instead of being nearly empty, your gas tank is full. A breeder reactor is like this magic car. A breeder reactor not only generates electricity, but it also produces new fuel." All reactors, conventional and breeder, rely on a critical pile of a naturally radioactive element--typically uranium-235 or plutonium-239--as the "fuel" for a sustained chain of reactions known as fission. Fission occurs when a neutron combines with the nucleus of a radioisotope, say uranium-235, transforming it into uranium-236. This new isotope is highly unstable and immediately splits in half, forming two smaller nuclei, and releasing a great deal of radiant energy (some of which is heat) and several neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by other uranium-235 atoms to begin the process again. A breeder reactor is configured so that a core of plutonium-239 is surrounded by a "blanket" of uranium-238. When the plutonium gives off neutrons, they are absorbed by the uranium-238 to become uranium-239, which in turn decays by emitting beta rays and is transformed into neptunium-239. Following another stage of "radioactive decay," neptunium becomes plutonium-239, which can replenish the fuel core. The nuclear industry used to tout breeders as the magical solution to the nation's energy needs. The government had opened up two experimental breeders at a test site in Idaho by 1961. Amid great fanfare, in 1963 Detroit Edison opened the Enrico Fermi I power plant, the nation's first and only commercially run breeder reactor. The following decade, Congress appropriated billions of dollars for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee. Hopes ran so high that Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon years, predicted that breeders would be the backbone of an emerging nuclear economy and that plutonium might be "a logical contender to replace gold as the standard of our monetary system." Such optimism proved to be unwarranted. The first Idaho breeder had to be shut down after suffering a partial core meltdown; the second breeder generated electricity but not new fuel. The Fermi plant--located just 60 miles from Clinton Township--was plagued by mechanical problems, accidents, and budget overruns, and produced electricity so expensive that Detroit Edison never even bothered to break down the costs. In 1966, the plant's core suffered a partial meltdown after the cooling system malfunctioned; six years later the plant was shut down permanently. In 1983, when it was estimated that completion costs would deplete much of the federal budget for energy research and development, Congress finally killed the Clinch River program. If he knew of such setbacks, David was in no way deterred by them. His inspiration came from the nuclear pioneers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Antoine Henri Becquerel, the French physicist who, along with Pierre and Marie Curie, received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1903 for discovering radioactivity; Fredic and Irene Joliot-Curie, who received the prize in 1935 for producing the first artificial radioisotope; Sir James Chadwick, who won the Nobel Prize in physics the same year for discovering the neutron; and Enrico Fermi, who created the world's first sustainable nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step leading to the production of atomic energy and atomic bombs.(2) Unlike his predecessors, however, David did not have vast financial support from the state, no laboratory save for a musty potting shed, no proper instruments or safety devices, and, by far his chief impediment, no legal means of obtaining radioactive materials. To get around this last obstacle, David utilized a number of cover stories and concocted identities, plus a Geiger-counter kit he ordered from a mail-order house in Scottsdale, Arizona, which he assembled and mounted to the dashboard of his burgundy Pontiac 6000. David hadn't hit on the idea to try to build a breeder reactor when he began his nuclear experiments at the age of fifteen, but in a step down that path, he was already determined to "irradiate anything" he could. To do that he had to build a "gun" that could bombard isotopes with neutrons. David wrote to a number of groups listed in his merit-badge pamphlet--the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the American Nuclear Society, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Atomic Industrial Forum, the nuclear-power industry's trade group--in hopes of discovering how he might obtain, from both natural and commercial sources, the radioactive raw materials he needed to build his neutron gun and experiment with it. By writing up to twenty letters a day and claiming to be a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School, David says he obtained "tons" of information from those and other groups, though some of it was of only marginal value. The American Nuclear Society sent David a teacher's guide called "Goin' Fission," which featured an Albert Einstein cartoon character: "I'm Albert. Und today, ve are gonna go fission. No, ve don't need any smelly bait and der won't be any fish to clean. I mean fission, not fishin'." Other organizations proved to be far more helpful, and none more than the NRC. Again posing as a physics teacher, David managed to engage the agency's director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, in a scientific discussion by mail. Erb offered David tips on isolating certain radioactive elements, provided a list of isotopes that can sustain a chain reaction, and imparted a piece of information that would soon prove to be vital to David's plans: "Nothing produces neutrons ... as well as beryllium." When David asked Erb about the risks posed by such radioactive materials, the NRC official assured "Professor Hahn" that the "real
dangers are very slight," since possession "of any radioactive materials in quantities and forms sufficient to pose any hazard is subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or equivalent) licensing."
David says the NRC also sent him pricing data and commercial sources for some of the radioactive wares he wanted to purchase, ostensibly for the benefit of his eager students. "The NRC gave me all
the information I needed," he later recalled. "All I had to do was go out and get the materials." The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and
neutrons doing their stuff.... But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely, "How difficult are these things to manufacture?"
--George Orwell, "You and the Atom Bomb," 1945 Armed with information from his friends in government and industry, David typed up a list of sources for fourteen radioactive
isotopes..Americium-241, he learned from the Boy Scout atomic-energy booklet, could be found in smoke detectors; radium-226, in antique luminous dial clocks; uranium-238 and minute quantities of
uranium-235, in a black ore called pitchblende; and thorium-232, in Coleman-style gas lanterns. To obtain americium-241, David contacted smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a
large number of the devices for a school project. One company agreed to sell him about a hundred broken detectors for a dollar apiece. (He also tried to "collect" detectors while at scout camp.) David
wasn't sure where the americium-241 was located, so he wrote to BRK Electronics in Aurora, Illinois. A customer-service representative named Beth Weber wrote back to say she'd be happy to help
out with "your report." She explained that each detector contains only a tiny amount of americium-241, which is sealed in a gold matrix "to make sure that corrosion does not break it down and release
it." Thanks to Weber's tip, David extracted the americium components and then welded them together with a blowtorch. As it decays, americium-241 emits alpha rays composed of protons and
neutrons. David put the lump of americium inside a hollow block of lead with a tiny hole pricked in one side so that alpha rays would stream out. In front of the lead block he placed a sheet of aluminum.
Aluminum atoms absorb alpha rays and in the process kick out neutrons. Since neutrons have no charge, and thus cannot be measured by a Geiger counter, David had no way of knowing whether the
gun was working until he recalled that paraffin throws off protons when hit by neutrons. David aimed the apparatus at some paraffin, and his Geiger counter registered what he assumed was a proton
stream. His neutron gun, crude but effective, was ready. With neutron gun in hand, David was ready to irradiate. He could have concentrated on transforming previously nonradioactive elements, but in a
decision that was both indicative of his personality and instrumental to his later attempt to build a breeder reactor, he wanted to use the gun on radioisotopes to increase the chances of making them
fissionable. He thought that uranium-235, which is used in atomic weapons, would provide the "biggest reaction." He scoured hundreds of miles of upper Michigan in his Pontiac looking for "hot rocks"
with his Geiger counter, but all he could find was a quarter trunkload of pitchblende on the shores of Lake Huron. Deciding to pursue a more bureaucratic approach, he wrote to a Czechoslovakian firm
that sells uranium to commercial and university buyers, whose name was provided, he told me, by the NRC. Claiming to be a professor buying materials for a nuclear-research laboratory, he obtained a
few samples of a black ore--either pitchblende or uranium dioxide, both of which contain small amounts of uranium-235 and uranium-238. David pulverized the ores with a hammer, thinking that he could
then use nitric acid to isolate uranium. Unable to find a commercial source for nitric acid--probably because it is used in the manufacture of explosives and thus is tightly controlled--David made his own
by heating saltpeter and sodium bisulfate, then bubbling the gas that was released through a container of water, producing nitric acid. He then mixed the acid with the powdered ore and boiled it, ending
up with something that "looked like a dirty milk shake." Next he poured the "milk shake" through a coffee filter, hoping that the uranium would pass through the filter. But David miscalculated uranium's
solubility, and whatever amount was present was trapped in the filter, making it difficult to purify further. Frustrated at his inability to isolate sufficient supplies of uranium, David turned his attention to
thorium-232, which when bombarded with neutrons produces uranium-233, a man-made fissionable element (and, although he might not have known it then, one that can be substituted for plutonium in
breeder reactors). Discovered in 1828 and named after the Norse god Thor, thorium has a very high melting point, and is thus used in the manufacture of airplane engine parts that reach extremely high
temperatures. David knew from his merit-badge pamphlet that the "mantle" used in commercial gas lanterns--the part that looks like a doll's stocking and conducts the flame--is coated with a compound
containing thorium-232. He bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of ash. David still had to isolate the thorium-232 from the ash.
Fortunately, he remembered reading in one of his dad's chemistry books that lithium is prone to binding with oxygen--meaning, in this context, that it would rob thorium dioxide of its oxygen content and
leave a cleaner form of thorium. David purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and extracted the element by cutting the batteries in half with a pair of wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium
dioxide together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. Eureka! David's method purified thorium to at least 9,000 times the level found in nature and 170 times the level that
requires NRC licensing. At this point, David could have used his americium neutron gun to transform thorium-232 into fissionable uranium-233. But the americium he had was not capable of producing
enough neutrons, so he began preparing radium for an improved irradiating gun. Radium was used in paint that rendered luminescent the faces of clocks and automobile and airplane instrument panels
until the late 1960s, when it was discovered that many clock painters, who routinely licked their brushes to make a fine point, died of cancer. David began visiting junkyards and antiques stores in search
of radium-coated dashboard panels or clocks. Once he found such an item, he'd chip paint from the instruments and collect it in pill vials. 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. She would. David bought the clock
for $10. Inside he discovered a vial of radium paint left behind by a worker either accidentally or as a courtesy so that the clock's owner could touch up the dial when it began to fade. David was so
overjoyed that he dropped by the boutique later that night to leave a note for Gloria, telling her that if she received another "luminus [sic] clock" to contact him immediately. "I will pay any some [sic] of
money to obtain one." To concentrate the radium, David secured a sample of barium sulfate from the X-ray ward at a local hospital (staff there handed over the substance because they remembered him
from his merit-badge project) and heated it until it liquefied. After mixing the barium sulfate with the radium paint chips, he strained the brew through a coffee filter into a beaker that began to glow. This
time, David had judged the solubility of the two substances correctly; the radium solution passed through to the beaker. He then dehydrated the solution into crystalline salts, which he could pack into the
cavity of another lead block to build a new gun. Whether David fully realized it or not, by handling purified radium he was truly putting himself in danger. Nevertheless, he now proceeded to acquire
another neutron emitter to replace the aluminum used in his previous neutron gun. Faithful to Erb's instructions, he secured a strip of beryllium (which is a much richer source of neutrons than aluminum)
from the chemistry department at Macomb Community College--a friend who attended the school swiped it for him--and placed it in front of the lead block that held the radium. His cute little americium
gun was now a more powerful radium gun. David began to bombard his thorium and uranium powders in the hopes of producing at least some fissionable atoms. He measured the results with his Geiger
counter, but while the thorium seemed to grow more radioactive, the uranium remained a disappointment. Once again, "Professor Hahn" sprang into action, writing his old friend Erb at the NRC to
discuss the problem. The NRC had the answer. David's neutrons were too "fast" for the uranium).(3) He would have to slow them down using a filter of water, deuterium, or tritium. Water would have
sufficed, but David likes a challenge. Consulting his list of commercially available radioactive sources, he discovered that tritium, a radioactive material used to boost the power of nuclear weapons, is
found in glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights, which David promptly bought from sporting-goods stores and mail-order catalogues. He removed the tritium contained in a waxy substance inside the
sights, and then, using a variety of pseudonyms, returned the sights to the store or manufacturer for repair--each time collecting another tiny quantity of tritium. When he had enough, David smeared the
waxy substance over the beryllium strip and targeted the gun at uranium powder. He carefully monitored the results with his Geiger counter over several weeks, and it appeared that the powder was
growing more radioactive by the day. Now seventeen, David hit on the idea of building a model breeder reactor. He knew that without a critical pile of at least thirty pounds of enriched uranium he had no
chance of initiating a sustained chain reaction, but he was determined to get as far as he could by trying to get his various radioisotopes to interact with one another. That way, he now says, "no matter
what happened there would be something changing into something--some kind of action going on there." His blueprint was a schematic of a checkerboard breeder reactor he'd seen in one of his father's
college textbooks. Ignoring any thought of safety, 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. David monitored his "breeder reactor" at the Golf Manor laboratory with his Geiger counter. "It was radioactive as heck," he says. "The level of radiation after a few weeks
was far greater than it was at the time of assembly. I know I transformed some radioactive materials. 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." Finally, David, whose safety precautions had thus far consisted of wearing a makeshift lead poncho and throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes following a
session in the potting shed, began to realize that, sustained reaction or not, he could be putting himself and others in danger. (One tip-off was when the radiation was detectable through concrete.) Jim
Miller, a nuclear-savvy high-school friend in whom David had confided, warned him that real reactors use control rods to regulate nuclear reactions. Miller recommended cobalt, which absorbs neutrons
but does not itself become fissionable. "Reactors get hot, it's just a fact," Miller, a nervous, skinny twenty-two-year-old, said during an interview at a Burger King in Clinton Township where he worked
as a cook. David purchased a set of cobalt drill bits at a local hardware store and inserted them between the thorium and uranium cubes. But the cobalt wasn't sufficient. When his Geiger counter began
picking up radiation five doors down from his mom's house, David decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets in a
shoebox that he hid in his mother's house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac 6000. WASTE DISPOSAL. If you can
dump your waste directly into the kitchen drain (NOT into the sink), you are all right. If not, collect it in a plastic pail to be thrown out when you're finished. --The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments
At 2:40 A.M. on August 31, 1994, the Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been spotted in a residential neighborhood, apparently stealing tires from a car. When
the police arrived, David told them he was waiting to meet a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car. When they opened the trunk they discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed
with duct tape for good measure. The trunk also contained over fifty foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, lantern mantles, mercury switches, a clock
face, ores, fireworks, vacuum tubes, and assorted chemicals and acids.The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David warned them was radioactive and which they feared was an
atomic bomb. For reasons that are hard to fathom, Sergeant Joseph Mertes, one of the arresting officers, ordered a car containing what he noted in his report was "a potential improvised explosive
device" to be towed to police headquarters. "It probably shouldn't have been done, but we thought that the car had been used in the commission of a crime," Police Chief Al Ernst now says sheepishly.
"When I came in at 6:30 in the morning it was already there." The police called in the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad to examine the Pontiac and the State Department of Public Health (DPH) to
supply radiological assistance. The good news, the two teams discovered, was that David's toolbox was not an atomic bomb. The bad news was that David's trunk did contain radioactive materials,
including concentrations of thorium--"not found in nature, at least not in Michigan"--and americium. That discovery automatically triggered the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state
officials soon were embroiled in tense phone consultations with the DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC. With the police, David was largely uncooperative and taciturn. He provided his father's address but didn't
mention his mother's house or his potting-shed laboratory. It wasn't until Thanksgiving Day that Dave Minnaar, a DPH radiological expert, finally interviewed David. David told Minnaar that he had been
trying to make thorium in a form he could use to produce energy and that he hoped "his successes would help him earn his Eagle Scout status." David also finally admitted to having a backyard
laboratory. On November 29, state radiological experts surveyed the potting shed. They found aluminum pie pans, jars of acids, Pyrex cups, milk crates, and other materials strewn about, much of it
contaminated with what subsequent official reports would call "excessive levels" of radioactive material, especially americium-241 and thorium-232. How high? A vegetable can, for example, registered
at 50,000 counts per minute--about 1,000 times higher than normal levels of background radiation. But although Minnaar's troops didn't know it at the time, they conducted their survey long after David's
mother, alerted by Ken and Kathy and petrified that the government would take her home away as a result of her son's experiments, had ransacked the shed and discarded most of what she found,
including his neutron gun, the radium, pellets of thorium that were far more radioactive than what the health officials found, and several quarts of radioactive powder. "The funny thing is," David now
says, "they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff." After determining that no radioactive materials had leaked outside the shed, state authorities sealed it and petitioned the federal
government for help. The NRC licenses nuclear plants and research facilities and deals with any nuclear accidents that take place at those sites. David, of course, was not an NRC-licensed operation, so
it was determined that the EPA, which responds to emergencies involving lost or abandoned atomic materials, should be contacted for assistance. In a memo to the EPA's Emergency Response and
Enforcement Branch, the Department of Public Health noted that the materials discovered in David's lab were regulated under the Federal Atomic Energy Act and that the "extent of the radioactive
material contamination within a private citizen's property beg for a controlled remediation that is beyond our authority or resources to oversee." EPA officials arrived in Golf Manor on January 25,
1995--five months after David had been stopped by the police--to conduct their own survey of the shed. Their "action memo" noted that conditions at the site "present an imminent and substantial
endangerment to public health or welfare or the environment," and that there was "actual or potential exposure to nearby human populations, animals, or food chain...." The memo further stated that
adverse conditions such as heavy wind, rain, or fire could cause the "contaminants to migrate or be released." A Superfund cleanup took place between June 26 and 28 at a cost of about $60,000. After
the moon-suited workers dismantled the potting shed with electric saws, they loaded the remains into thirty-nine sealed barrels placed aboard a semitrailer bound for Envirocare, a dump facility located
in the middle of the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were entombed along with tons of low-level radioactive debris from the government's atomic-bomb factories,
plutonium-production facilities, and contaminated industrial sites. According to the official assessment, there was no noticeable damage to flora or fauna in the back yard in Golf Manor, but 40,000 nearby
residents could have been put at risk during David's years of experimentation due to the dangers posed by the release of radioactive dust and radiation. Last May, I made the 90-mile drive from Detroit to
Lansing, where Dave Minnaar works in a dreary building that houses several state environmental agencies. Because Patty Hahn had cleaned out the shed before Minnaar's men arrived on the scene, he
never knew that David had built neutron guns or that he had obtained radium. Nor did he understand, until I told him, that the cubes of thorium powder found by police at the time of David's arrest were
the building blocks for a model breeder reactor. "These are conditions that regulatory agencies never envision," says Minnaar. "It's simply presumed that the average person wouldn't have the
technology or materials required to experiment in these areas." "The real danger ... lies in the radioactive properties of these elements. [Some] migrate to the bone marrow, where their radiation
interferes with the production of red blood cells. Less than one-millionth of a gram can be fatal." --from David's notes David went into a serious depression after the federal authorities shut down his
laboratory. Years of painstaking work had been thrown in the garbage or buried beneath the sands of Utah. Students at Chippewa Valley had taken to calling him "Radioactive Boy," and when his
girlfriend, Heather, sent David Valentine's balloons at his high school, they were seized by the principal, who apparently feared they had been inflated with chemical gases David needed to continue his
experiments. In a final indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit-badge activities had endangered the
community. In the fall of 1995, Ken and Kathy demanded that David enroll in Macomb Community College. He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his classes and spent much of the day in bed or
driving in circles around their block. Finally, Ken and Kathy gave him an ultimatum: Join the armed forces or move out of the house. They called the local recruiting office, which sent a representative to
their house or called nearly every day until David finally gave in. After completing boot camp last year, he was stationed on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft carrier. Alas, David's duties, as a
lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, David stays up studying topics that interest him--currently steroids, melanin, genetic
codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to
radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and
organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer. Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a relatively small, enclosed space is most worrisome of all. Back in
1995, the EPA arranged for David to undergo a full examination at the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant. David, fearful of what he might learn, refused. Now, though, he's looking ahead. "I wanted to
make a scratch in life," he explains when I ask him about his early years of nuclear research. "I've still got time. I don't believe I took more than five years off of my life." (1) Individual atoms of an
element have the same number of protons in their nuclei. This "atomic number" determines the element's chemical properties and position in the periodic table. The number of neutrons within atoms of
the same elements can vary, however. Known as isotopes, these variations have unique physical properties because the number of neutrons affects the atom's mass. Most elements have at least two
naturally occurring, stable isotopes. But isotopes of heavier elements (those with more protons) are often unstable. Called radioisotopes, and often artificially produced, these nuclei undergo some form of
radioactive decay--alpha, beta, or gamma--to become more stable. In alpha decay, the nucleus loses two protons and two neutrons, thus transforming into another element two atomic numbers below it
on the periodic table. In beta decay, either a neutron is converted into a proton, and the atomic number rises, or the opposite occurs, pushing the atomic number down. Gamma radiation--in which energy
is emitted but no transformation occurs--can accompany alpha or beta decay (where the atomic number falls) or can occur on its own. Americium-241, for example, is a radioisotope of americium. Its
atomic number is 95, its atomic mass number is 241, and it becomes neptunium-237 through alpha decay. (2) Another role model, similar to David in temperament, was the Englishman Francis William
Aston. He invented the mass spectrograph in 1920, which he used to identify more than 200 isotopes. As a child, writes Richard Rhodes, Aston "made picric-acid bombs from soda-bottle cartridges and
designed and launched huge tissue-paper fire balloons...." (3) Manhattan Project scientists discovered that some neutrons can move at speeds of about 17 million miles per hour. If they are slowed down
or "moderated," to about 5,000 miles per hour, they have a better chance of being absorbed by another atom. Ken Silverstein's last article for Harper's Magazine, "The Boeing Formation," appeared in
the May 1997 issue. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Harper's didn't run the story until it was old news, at least for those of us in Michigan, where it was "local news"!
After I caught up on this story (admittedly, I had completely forgotten about it when I moved over to the Metro Detroit area, until I picked it up in a magazine while waiting for an appointment somewhere) 3 years ago, I was working about 2 miles from where this all happened.. drove by there for kicks. Didn't seem like anybody/thing was glowing. lol
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I saw the title, and thought that a college student had successful cloned something in his backyard shed. That being said, I off to do that in my garage... then I can be get a story on slashdot.
----
First make Spot glow in the dark, next clone him...
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
It's certainly an interesting story. In spite of being an incredibly stupid thing to do, the kid definitely earned his geek merit badge with his little stunt. "You installed Linux on your PS2? Hey, that's great - I built a breeder reactor out of old watches."
Still, it's an old story. Maybe it's just a slow news day, but how is this particularly newsworthy?
"I don't believe it took more than 5 years off my life. The amount of years it took off the lives of my offspring, however, is yet to be seen..."
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Africa Needs to be Nuked, They ARE the terrorist threat.
This was posted here about a year ago
It would of been, but my new super 37337 2.5.23 linux kernel crashed! I had to reboot and wait for the kernel to load, X to load, Gnome to load, Mozilla to load, Slashdot to load over a serial modem and don't forget the 20 second rule.
Conclusion, linux sucks at fps!
yeah, didn't he say he was in the navy now and banned from working with nuclear subs, bombs etc becuase he's already received over the maximum safe dosage for a human being in their lifetime?
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Seriously, why are we posting this 4 *year* old story? And the editors even know it is 4 years old!
I don't suppose a story about Mozilla vs. Microsoft on CNN would be more useful than this old, useless story?
2002-06-17 17:43:06 Writeup on Mozilla vs. Microsoft (articles,mozilla) (rejected)
Hmmm...I guess not. Oh well. Old stories for all!
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
A Scout is:
Trustworthy,
Loyal,
Helpful,
Friendly,
Courteous,
Kind,
Obedient,
Cheerful,
Thrifty,
Brave,
Clean,
and Reverent.
I think the only thing they could fault him for is "Clean," but I'd give him bonus points for "Thrifty." Makes me proud to be a Boy Scout.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/0 3/0026226
South Africa, by itself, has very probably killed more people in the course of its "secret" warfare on its neighbors during the 1970s than the PLO, Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof gang, Carlos, Cuba and Libya taken together. In a single raid on the Namibian refugee camp of Kassinga on May 4, 1978, South African forces killed over 600 people, a large proportion women and children. Many hundreds have been killed in Angola in search and destroy operations aimed at "the deliberate killing and terrorizing of Angolan civilians in any area where SWAPO might find support or help." The ruthlessness of these operations, with the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, the burning down of all houses, the destruction of mission hospitals, staggers the imagination, although once again the Free Press has kept this largely under cover, preferring to concentrate on Soviet maneuvers on the Polish borders rather than actual invasions of African states by the apartheid regime.
Much of this destruction was carried out by hundreds of mercenaries, although regular South African forces have also been involved. According to one defector, who became "disgusted and tired of killing civilians."
"Our main job is to take an area and clear it. We sweep through it and we kill everything in front of us, cattle, goats, people, everything. We are out to stop SWAPO and so we stop them getting into the villages for food and water. But half the time the locals don't know what's going on. We're just fucking them up and it gets out of hand. Some of the guys get a bit carried away.
[He describes an operation in southern Angola during which two children appeared and started to run.] "... They'd taken their clothes off to show they weren't armed. We shot this young girl. She must have been about five. And we shot her father. We shot about nine in all.
I don't know how, but somehow this girl's mother and her sister didn't get shot. Well, we left them there and carried on with our patrol. She followed us: This mother and her little kid. She followed us all day, just walked along about 100 meters behind us. She didn't cry or say anything. This freaked me out."
Other defectors, some of them former white mercenaries from Rhodesia, have confirmed these accounts of merciless killing of civilians and scorched earth policies that have caused massive destruction in southern Angola. The Angolan government itself estimates that just during the 18 month period ending in December 1980, the South Africans mounted 13 major air and land assaults as well as numerous small-scale attacks.
Similar South African operations have been carried out on a hit-and-run basis in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Their purpose has been clear. South Africa intends to continue its wholly illegal occupation of Namibia, as a buffer and plunder state, and its murderous attacks on the black front-line states are partly to destroy SWAPO bases and sources of assistance, partly to injure and weaken countries on its border and on the border of Namibia that would be likely to aid Namibian independence. As is noted in a Wall Street Journal report,
South Africa waits, scuttling peace initiatives like the all-party conference in Geneva last winter and waging a generally low-level guerrilla war that costs it little- given Namibia's diamond, uranium and copper wealth- and gives its troops some counterinsurgency training in the bargain.
This Journal report also calls attention to the great "encourage meet" given South Africa's escalated violence against Angola by the new anti-terrorist Reagan administration-indirectly in its obvious toleration/sanction of the Israeli bombing raid on Iraq in the new anti-Libyan campaign, and more directly in Washington's warmth and understanding of the "context" that may be impelling the apartheid regime to occupy Namibia illegally and to kill black Africans without restraint.
The Reagan administration's role in the (recent) sharp escalation of South African terrorism can hardly be overstated. Only the Free Press and the most supine or reactionary leaders of the Free World could fail to see that code words like "realism," "understanding of the problems," "context," and "quiet diplomacy" mean that "we are behind you all the way; understand that any criticisms we make are strictly PR, to allow our allies to pretend that we object to your assaults on your neighbors (or your own black majority). " Even before Reagan, U.S. business had found South Africa profitable and therefore good, and our military-intelligence apparatus has long had the warmest relations with BOSS; but under liberal administrations, and even under Nixon and Ford, the loss of national prestige from open alliance with apartheid and Namibian aggression had a constraining effect. With the extreme right now exercising significant power in Washington (sharing it with the traditional conservative business interests), the bars are down-the formerly muted alliances with South African racism and Third World fascists have now become open and warm.
The mass media have played a strategic role in covering up the massive transnational violence of the apartheid regime. First and foremost, they have suppressed the facts. These are available and can be found in black African, radical, underground, and, to a lesser extent, liberal-left European publications. Extensive and horrifying details were given in the British Guardian series, cited above, based on on-the-spot reporting and interviews with a number of South African mercenary defectors. This series has not been reprinted in the United States, summaries have not been made available, and similar on-the-spot coverage in Angola is not provided. As in the case of East Timor following its invasion by our client state Indonesia, the Free Press does not go to the victims-government or refugees-it gets its information from the propaganda services of the invader. In connection with this open invasion of Angola, the New York Times has carried two front page and two second page articles based on South African handouts, describing "captured Soviet advisers," the view of the war as seen from South Africa, and a portrayal of the loot captured by the South Africans. Nothing from the end of the Angolan victims.
What makes the "Soviet adviser" gambit doubly dishonest is that the Cubans and Russians are in Angola mainly because South Africa's incursions and support of Savimbi pose a serious threat to the Angolan regime. The Wall Street Journal account cited earlier points out that
Both publicly and in private talks with western governments, Angola insists it would order the Cubans to withdraw if it were assured of an end to South African raids. Conversely, it warns that further attacks could force it to reach out even further to the Soviets, who seek political gain in the turbulence and instability of southern Africa.
This highlights once again the monumental hypocrisy of the west in its pretense at concern over terrorism, with its apologetics for preferred terror in terms of a Soviet presence! The preferred terror is also not only large scale and extremely ugly, it is in support of aggression in Namibia and protection of the cruel system of apartheid in South Africa itself.
Quoate 1: Finally, David, whose safety precautions had thus far consisted of wearing a makeshift lead poncho and throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes following a session in the potting shed
...
Quote 2: the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it.
Quote 3: David pulverized the ores with a hammer, thinking that he could then use nitric acid to isolate uranium. [...] David made his own [nitric acid] by heating saltpeter and sodium bisulfate, then bubbling the gas that was released through a container of water, producing nitric acid. He then mixed the acid with the powdered ore and boiled it, ending up with something that "looked like a dirty milk shake."
Quote 4: Another year, David was expelled from camp when [...] he stole a number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his experiments.
This kid is a walking advertisement for the Darwin Awards
-Sean
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
are a leading indicator of its impending demise.
Stay tuned for a story along the same lines
as
Kuro5hin Closing
Yesterday at Wal-mart I saw a suspicious-looking guy wearing a"Death to America" T-shirt buying up all the smoke detectors. I just assumed he was overzealous about fire safety.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I originally read this in the Reader's Digest three years ago. I've been looking for the article ever since.
In lieu of recent happenings, perhaps, it would be best not to mention the fact that I had wanted a nuclear reactor too.
Oh... wait... there is the door.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Slow news day chrisd/scubacuda?
It's official - /. has begun it's downhill slide with this "news item"
Note to moderators: This should be "+5 droll", or "+5 sarcastic", or even "+5 troll". Since none of those are available, I guess "+5 funny" will do.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Someone forgot to search slashdot before posting.
01/06/03
The NSA/FBI/CIA/JASA are watching you. they're logging all your traffic and soon they'll be at your home to arrest you for charges relating to 9/11, THE AC'S are the true terrorist threat!
is it even true? i always thought it was a joke...
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
was a friend of this guy (and in his Boy Scout troop). He helped him procure a few materials (especially the sprinkler pieces).
It's seriously an old story, but it is nice to know that this guy is helping out the Navy with their reactors.
Seriously, who better to monitor these mothers than a guy who can make a backup on his own?
Is this guy related to Otto Hahn .. nobel prize winner that discovered fission.
Seems a sort of coincidence.
-Johan
While this is an oldish story (1998) it is not the pathetic self congratulatory lame princeton story.
What I would like to know is (a) why the Princeton story is pathetic and lame and (b) how we are supposed to evaluate such a claim with nothing but a link to Amazon.com.
As far as I can tell, the Harper's story is pretty smarmy. Note all the claims that he was a "normal" kid by all appearances (as if that matters) ... but all the time he was playing with evil nucular materials! Bwahahahahaha!
Blech.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Someone with a science background can fill in the details that I've missed, but from my understanding, the first atomic pile that actually producted nuclear fission in any large form was setup in a squash court at some university. Basically then put uranium bricks in a corner of the court, put in some other bricks to act as the moderator and they produced the first working nuc. It just goes to show you, american's shouldn't be worried about Osama bin Laden and his followers halfway around the world, they should be worried about High School students working in their basements..
-?-
The ADS on $la$hdot and the O$DN ANNOY ME.
.net adverts! Why the FUCK are you letting the devil advertise with you. Oh now I remember, open sores have no way to make money so they ask big companies to support them!
Ones that annoyme most,
$hit forge adverts, no one want's to risk developing critcal applications with you so fuck off!
AnimeFu/Megatokyo adverts! Japanime sucks, so does slashdot!
Microsoft Visual Studio
Conclusion. Don't tolerate it! Don't subscribe to $la$hdot. Instead go and install Junk buster and say no to shitty adverts! The ones found here are worser than the pr0n sites!
Well at least the timelines are getting longer than 2 days :-)
Think of all that wasted time he could have been masturbating...
Umm, if I remember properly isn't this an 'urban legend' like the jet powered chevy impala?
Actually the story of the jet powered chevy isn't an urban legend -- it really happened. Fox had a clip of the attempt on one of their "World's ..." shows. Some moron simply fastened two makeshift wings onto the sides of his car and equipped it with a jet engine. He was planning to jump over a river using a ramp. Well, when the car left the edge of the ramp and began the "jump" the wings fell off immediately and the car starting doing an end-over-end flip.
I remember laughing my ass off at that clip. It just looked so stupid. You could tell the moron had no clue what he was doing. Even when the announcer said the guy died in the attempt, it was still impossible to stop laughing. I guess maybe I'm a sicko or something...
GMD
watch this
I thought it was Cabal of Logged In Trolls?
Gives it more of an elitist quality.
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
this is very old. I discovered this story last year, apparently from a couple of links from some other /. article...
I remember reading this story years ago & it was the first thing that popped into my head when the news of the 'dirty bomber' came out. This kid managed to piece together a decent amount of radioactive material. Since the real point of a dirty bomb is fear, the actual amount of material doen't have to be that great to achieve the desired effect ie. closing down a large section of a major metropolitan area for cleanup & causing mass panic. If a boy scout can gather this much material, then any dedicated individual can.
"I don't believe I took more than five years off my life..."
...Unfortunately those were the years I was planning on having sex...damnit!
This
If I was a corporation (or a government lab) I would be clamoring to hire this kid. He's smart, he's motivated, he has more ingenuity than 20 average people combined, and he obviously has great science skills. Put him in a lab with whatever supplies he needs, and just sit back and let him invents stuff.
Actually, he was an evil kid playing with normal nuclear materials! Damn journalists always get it wrong.
/. about a year ago.
Oh, and this is an old story. It even made it to
I think the story was just an urban legend. For a geiger counter to be reading that high from across the street, the radiation near the source would have to be pretty intense.
My blog: Click here
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/0 3/0026226
Hello editors? Are we awake?
The same story was posted a year ago on slashdot.
Knock, knock, anybody in there?
The BSA is a Church for Boys. Even the Supreme Court said as much when they (rightly) said they can discriminate. I don't disagree with that one bit.
Howevever, all other TAX EXEMPT CHRURCHES aren't given special access to military installations, 1000s of acres of land, and the ablility to hire LOBBIESTS in WASHINGTON.
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
And at the time I remeber the consensus was that he hadn't made any kind of reactor at all, all he had actualy managed to do was isolate a bunch of radioactive junk and produce a pile of low grade radioactive waste. No fission reaction had been accomplished, nothing useful had been done. Not much had been learned, except that if you quietly bang around in your shed no one will pay much attention until you blow something up or get busted by the cops.
That and work on his own personal Darwin award
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
TOmorrow I'm gonna submit a story about how Linux kernal 2.0 was finally released... :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Yeah, he did din't he.....
----
wTf
Where the hell have you been? Slashdot began its downhill slide years ago, when they picked up John Katz and Taco and his buddies started making money off the site. This "news item" marks the rock-bottom point of the slide. They posted this story a year ago, and it was old news then...
"Beowulf clusters matching the performance of Cray T3E Supercomputers?"
Sorry, but I find making a reactor out of old smoke detectors to be far more interesting than Beowulf clusters. Not all of us blow a load over processor cycles.
"Derp de derp."
I'm pretty sure there's even been a movie made about this kid's work (HBO?).
j.
However I'm surprised that the "Powers That Be" haven't killed this story since it has step by step directions on how to make uranium-233.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"This same basic story was posted about a year ago."
I wasn't a Slashdot visitor a year ago. I found the story mildly entertaining.
Stop acting like posting a story means another story doesn't get posted.
"Derp de derp."
I wonder if that kid trying to build his own nuclear reactor knew that nuclear fission can occur if you put metal in the microwave. It's a longshot, like one in 500,000, but you might make the whole block go boom!
How ya like dat?
And they wonder where terrorists get plutonium...
My complaint about John Ashcroft
May I be cynical for a bit? I hope you don't mind,
but with Ashcroft's latest barrage of
malodorous notions, I can't resist the urge to make a
few cynical comments. To get right
down to it, some of the facts I'm about
to present may seem shocking. This
they certainly are. However, it's time that a few
facts had a chance to slip through the fusillade of hype.
What's my problem, then? Allow me to present it
in the form of a question: Where are the people
who are willing to stand up and acknowledge
that Ashcroft, in his infinite wisdom, has decided
to destroy the natural beauty of our parks and forests?
On the surface, it would seem to have something to do
with the way that his whole approach is repugnant.
But upon further investigation, one will find that
by allowing Ashcroft to put mephitic thoughts in our
children's minds, we are allowing him to play puppet master.
As for the lies and exaggerations, Ashcroft's
epigrams are rife with contradictions
and difficulties; they're entirely maladroit,
meet no objective criteria, and are unsuited
for a supposedly educated population.
And as if that weren't enough, if Ashcroft is going to
obstruct important things, then he should at least have
the self-respect to remind himself of a few things: First, a
true enemy is better than a false friend. And
second, many people respond to his debauched vituperations
in much the same way that they respond to television
dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but
they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything
about them. That's why I insist we pronounce the truth
and renounce the lies.
Even people who consider themselves scornful
foolhardy-types generally agree that Ashcroft's slurs
symbolize lawlessness, violence, and misguided rebellion
-- extreme liberty for a few, even if the rest of us
lose more than a little freedom. One might conclude
that Ashcroft is incapable of writing a letter without using
such phrases as "crapulous pop psychologists", "loquacious
exhibitionists", "oppressive personae non gratae", or
some combination thereof. Alternatively, one might conclude
that Ashcroft has a different view of reality from the rest of us.
In either case, if you're not part of the solution,
then you're part of the problem. His historical record of
fickle pleas is clearer than the muddled pronouncements
of his apple-polishers for a variety of reasons. For
instance, the worst sorts of inconsiderate Neanderthals there
are must be treated with political justice, not with
civil justice, as they are sincerely not real citizens. Let me
rephrase that: I wonder if he really believes the
things he says. He knows they're not true, doesn't he?
A complete answer to that question would
take more space than I can afford, so I'll have to give
you a simplified answer. For starters, if
we let him cause riots in the streets, then greed,
corruption, and tribalism will characterize the government.
Oppressive measures will be directed against citizens.
And lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of the
media and educational institutions.
Even Ashcroft's bedfellows couldn't deal with the full impact of
Ashcroft's refrains. That's why they created "Ashcroft-ism," which is
just a garrulous excuse to force square
pegs into round holes. He plans to drag everything
that is truly great into the gutter. He has instructed
his votaries not to discuss this or even admit to his
plan's existence. Obviously, Ashcroft knows he has
something to hide. Most of you reading this letter
have your hearts in the right place. Now
follow your hearts with actions. I have traveled the length and
breadth of this country and talked with the best people. I can
therefore assure you that Ashcroft's artifices cannot stand on
their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate
artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Ashcroft's
warnings can give us deeper insights into the nature of
reality. We can and we must protect ourselves by any means
necessary against the unrestrained bestiality
of stupid, quasi-macabre paper-pushers. And that's the honest truth.
When reading the comments for this story, I saw this quote at the bottom of the page:
"What I tell you three times is true. -- Lewis Carroll"
In light of the redundancy of this news item and its dubious source(s), perhaps this is all a joke?
Blah
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
...cos I never saw it the first time :)
Talk about a mad kid.
Get your own free personal location tracker
"BSA Sponsors Domestic Terrorism"
;P
;)
woulda been more catchy headline
so if little davie can build a reactor what's stopping achmed
Time to eat some Karma.
/. Reading stories in that section will require tolerating some troll activity, but at least it's a way of bypassing some narrow sighted power-triping editors.
I think it's Bullshit that Timothy or some other Tin Medal Dictator rejected the MS vs. Mozilla story. It's worth noting when the major media covers an open source project. Especially when that mdeia outlet in no other than CNN, a division of the company that owns Mozilla.
My only question is how long did it take to reject you story?
I suggest it's time for a rejected stories section on
Slashdot: Open source, not open-minded.
I see some people complaining that this story is old, how is it newsworthy. Well let's put it into context with what is going on in the world today. There is a looming threat of dirty bombs being used in the USA. Previously I wasn't too worried, because although I knew the terrorists were good at making bombs, I had assumed it was fairly tough to generate radioactive material that could make them radioactive.
Then I read a story about a 17-year old kid with not much money and a lot of time generating a heap of radiation.
Now add hundreds of thousands or even millions in funding, [at least slightly] better equipment, and you might want to wake up.
But as that lady riding on a New York subway said in a CNN article I read, "If I were really nervous about these terrorists, I'd probably be underground somewhere."
Ahem.
"And like that
I remember this story a while ago in high school. Specifically because my friends gave me crap about how I was gonna make a nuclear reactor at home for a science project. I Decided against it :), enriching u238 for a science project could get messy, that and the fact that I couldn't get all the materials together on a $20/week allowance.
But this time it was posted just after a story about growing new Thymus organs. Probably not a coincidence...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
This isn't a troll, or flamebait, or anything. It's fact.
The last time this was posted, there were a flurry of links and mentionings of it being fake. Mostly they dealt with the fact that there was no way the amount of materials he supposedly smuggled from antiques would be sufficient to do what he was doing.
It was quickly identified as a fake story, although if news sources keep posting it as fact who knows, people might actually believe it.
Regards,
levine
Maybe the "Powers that Be" aren't quite the dreadful authoritarian monsters that most slashdot posters like to think they are. Nah, that couldn't be true. They're just a bunch of clones of Hitler, right?
The part about the Enrico Fermi I power plant at Detroit Edision is inaccurate. The plant is still alive and functioning today. The costs part are correct however.....
This was already on slashdot a while back, but posted with a different link. It was definitely many months agao, but it's yet another great slashdot repeat posting.
The mozilla story is ancient and well covered here on slashdot. I agree that the article these comments are attached to is also quite old, but this CNN article is really nothing terribly insightful. It's saying the same thing we've heard a thousand times. IE runs the world. Mozilla took a long time. AOL might be able to push mozilla by putting it in their client. I mean, was there one element of new information in there.
at least this re-hashed article is an interesting read. I've read it twice before and I still enjoyed skimming over it again because it's fascinating to see how a kid could build such a thing. It's even more fascinating given the recent context of Al Qaeda, dirty bombs, etc. Had this kid been malevolent enough to take his radioactive toys and wrap it around a pipe bomb, we would have had a nasty mess. Good to refresh our memories on how frighteningly easy it is to do this sort of thing.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
we did already have this story on /. right?
suckers.
"the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it. "
Hmmm i think ill split this atom i found. *gets screwdriver, hammer...*
wap
wap
wap
*KABOOM*
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Slashdot
Leaders in trailing edge technology.
Really, 1998!
Oh yeah they have had it for while... usualy it is awarded for things like wiping your ass with poison oak or pissing on the electric fence. But as I said this kid was only working on getting it
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Come off it... Everything's on it's downhill slide. Name one thing that wasn't better before.
I've seen the links back to the story from last year, but didn't see any posts for David. Can you provide more information?
Good grief!
I can't believe how difficult it can be to find an older article around this place!
- Slashdot -- June 2, 2001. Title: "Duct Tape"
- I remember posting another comment about David Hahn at a much later date, (and asking Pathwalker if he had any recent info) but I can't seem to find it! (Dammit.)
Slashdot's robots.txt file is comprehensively restrictive, so if I feed Google "David Hahn site:slashdot.org", I get nothing.Would you please release (every few months or perhaps annually) a complete archive of Slashdot on CD or DVD? I imagine a simple .tar of the database would be sufficient, as most of your users would be quite capable of handling (and searching) that format. Personally, I think raw articles (no slashboxes, sidebars, etc...) in HTML format would be very useful.
Since CD/DVD production is relatively inexpensive, this could potentially be a non-trivial source of revenue for /.
Alternatively, perhaps Google could be convinced to donate one of their search appliances? Since many of us are quite proficient and familiar with Google's operation, it would make searching our collective memory that much easier.
Further, if a donation from Google is not possible, there are likely many of us who would be willing to donate to a search appliance fund.
Please, PLEASE consider these (and any other!) options to improve Slashdot searching.
Sincerely,
Raetsel.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
FreeBSD split in 1993 from 386BSD and 4.3BSD. OpenBSD split in 1995 from NetBSD. NetBSD split in 1993 from 386BSD and 4.3BSD. So, unless you routinely play around with the kernel source itself, the answer is not much at all. The most noticable thing is that FreeBSD uses bold text when it boots, where OpenBSD uses reversed text. If you want a BSD system to just play around with, FreeBSD would probably be a better choice, but OpenBSD (and espicially NetBSD) support more architectures. For example, I don't think UltraSparc's are supported in FreeBSD yet, but they are in OpenBSD.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Right here
I don't think that David Hahn himself posted in the previous story; some acquaintances/friends from the period did, however, and at least one posted again in this story.
...since he's going to need that new thymus before long.
I saw a pair of guys with shaved heads and black trenchcoats buying some guns at a local Wal*Mart.
Nope. Apparently not.
I'm no nuclear weapons engineer, but everything I've read says dirty bombs,
- Do less damage, to people and things, than a plain old-fashioned bomb filled with nails.
- Can be cleaned up (for contaminated humans, at least) by stripping and washing yourself with a garden hose.
- Cost so much more than a standard terrorist bomb to make, and being less effective (if you discount the hype and resulting fear), that we should hope the terrorists waste their resources on it instead of something more dangerous.
That meme irritates me a bit - it seems to imply that evolution never favors risk-taking. Actually, evolution favors a good balance between risk-taking and fear. If you are paralyzed by fear you won't win any "Darwin Awards" on the internet, but you won't get any rewards from life either.
I think most people who talk about "Darwin Awards" are overlooking the fact that death by excessive risk-taking is not the only kind of death - starvation awaits those who do not take enough risks.
OK, reactor boy is great. Is it better than the JATO car story? I'd call this a genre, but I can only think of these two stories. Then of course there are "geek legends" that are actually true, like the guy who built the roller-coaster in Indiana. Can anybody think of more geek legends, if we can think of enough then there could be a poll.
Note, mere "hacking" doesn't qualify. In order to be a geek legend, you have to be a single person, or perhaps a very small group, you have to be outside the corporate setting, you have to work with a technology that is dangerous and thought to be beyond the scope of what such a group can deal with. For example, concoct a story about a guy who built a submarine in his garage, took it out to sea, and penetrated a carrier battle group. Nobody can verify it because the Navy immediatly classified his plans, moved the model to storage, and ordered him to clam up (under threat of treason charges) for national security reasons because the plans might allow enemies to penetrate carrier groups. If you want to author such a story, feel free to take this idea and flesh it out. Post it to /.. I think we would all enjoy it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Could such an ubergeek acquire one with 5 less years to work with? I suppose he was counting on some of the potting shed spiders to become radioactive and then bite him so he could get buff like Spiderman. Or with enough radiation he himself might mutate enough to reproduce by budding, ala yeast.
And the US Government says that terrorist's don't have the resources to build an atomic device but a 17 year old kid can? Well at least we don't have mass hysteria.
The Anti-Blog
I originally thought that a "breeder reactor" was a Mormon singles ward event.
The middle mind speaks!
A very disturbing image is generated in my mind, which is probably close to the truth:
We have here a story of a youth, estranged from both of his parents by divorce. He shuttles between the two families, each house on the opposite side of Detroit. Neither family seems to care much about his activities or schooling (and failures therein). Neither seems to understand or care about his activities. What they do understand, is that it "had to do with energy"...
He seems to have next to nothing for a social life. Scouts, probably a few friends in school. His girlfriend seems only "someone to be with", to fight the loneliness (hence the ton of letters to her) rather than a real "love affair" (not that I am expecting a romance here or anything, the relationship just seems to be a way to stave off the darkness that surrounds him).
With this kind of a life, most teenagers would, at this point, turn to "standard" forms of destructive behavior - drugs, gangs, violence. But not this guy. He attempts to hold on, going so far as to "appear" for most people outwardly normal, even earning his Eagle Scout badge. He has his darkness, though, and continues to spiral down . This culminates in his building up a highly radioactive "waste pit" in the backyard of one of his parent's house.
Neither family understands why (though it should be plain to see), and the mother tosses the lot of it (and she wasn't even wearing the apron) into the garbage, to eventually get down to the water table, or elsewhere. Still, I have this image of this kid, hallowed eye (to a point), making and stiring up "concoctions" for the point of building a breeder reactor in his backyard, knowing the dangers, taking some precautions (but not enough), and then only dismantling it partially (and storing it in the trunk of his car?!) and hiding the evidence. It makes you wonder what he was really doing to have that cop called on him - waiting for a friend doesn't look like "stealing tires" - so why were they called?
It is a dismal image - I can imagine him failing, and perhaps getting severely angry (perhaps from failing, perhaps from other reasons, with failure "igniting" the anger) - in a small "nervous breakdown" rage smashing things in his "lab" - damn the radiation! Damn the consequences!
But in the end - it seems like it is all about an individual whose family broke apart prematurely in his life, and he is trying to find the pieces.
You know what scares me?
He more than likely is still that scared, struggling youth, only in a mans body. He is an adult now, and he may have some semblance of a real life. But is that still just another cover, his adult Eagle Scout merit badge?
Look at what he is studying now. Look at the type of things he is studying. That's right, it isn't about homebrew nuclear reactors anymore.
It is about biotech now...
I'm no nuclear weapons engineer, but everything I've read says dirty bombs,
- Do less damage, to people and things, than a plain old-fashioned bomb filled with nails.
- Can be cleaned up (for contaminated humans, at least) by stripping and washing yourself with a garden hose.
- Cost so much more than a standard terrorist bomb to make, and being less effective (if you discount the hype and resulting fear), that we should hope the terrorists waste their resources on it instead of something more dangerous.
If you manage to steal any of the spent fuel that's lying around, or even a medium-sized shipment of medical isotopes, you have enough to contaminate a good chunk of the core of a major city. While harder to acquire than a few bags of fertilizer, it's by no means prohibitively hard.
The actual health effects of the contamination would be next to nil. But the goal of terrorism is exactly that - terror. North America is full of people who run around screaming about nuclear reactors which release less radiation than the concrete in their basements. People would go *nuts* if a dirty bomb raised background radiation by *any* detectable amount.
Not even a nerve gas attack would cause that much mayhem. It would be the perfect attack.
Nevermind the fact that lawsuits over alleged health problems from the infinitesimally higher exposure would drag on for decades.
Relax! With his methods, he would never have been able to create any fission chain reaction. Sure, his technic can be used to build a "dirty bomb" - but a nuke never. The hardest trick in making a nuke is extreme difficulty increasing the purity of Radioactive isotopes. And he would be dead long before the purity reached dangerous level (let alone it is very hard - one needs acre sized plants for diffusion or centrifuge and hundreds of megawatts of power and millions of gallons of water)
Some may even recall when this was a story line in Bloom County.
Oliver made a working reactor by scraping the luminescent material off 10,000 watch hands.
btw, i'm typing this on my Banana Junior
Of course, the same basic story was also made into a movie called The Manhattan Project in 1986. One can only speculate where this kid got the idea.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Now, the rumor I heard for how he was caught was the following:
He had to move his experiments somewhere besides that shed, so he filled the trunk of his car with the material. On his way to school, he had to drive over a railroad crossing. Apparently there was some sort of radiation sensor by the track, and it started tripping twice a day, always at the same time.
The other rumor I had heard, was that he had given up, and had given most of the radioactive material to a friend who wanted to keep experimenting shortly before he was raided.
I know I'll probably get moded "off topic" but the truth is it really is on topic.
What we need is a new option in Slashdot user preferences that doesn't show articles that have already been posted to the front page. That way people with a memory don't have to wade through the re-posts that happen frequently enough to be annoying. The most annoying part of it is that most of the time you have to spend a decent amount of time just trying to figure out if its an update on a previously posted topic or just another re-post of the exact same article.
Of course the much simpler way to handle it would be to force Slashdot editors to, at the very least, search the archives for any articles that contain the exact same URL linked to in the potential article. I doubt it would be very hard to code it in as a hard wired feature of slash that just automatically searches the body of all back news pieces. Then it could simply list off any articles that posses the same link making it really easy for an editor to see repeat posts before they make it to the front page. Heck even a manual search of the archives before posting every new article would be enough to catch most re-posts and it wouldn't take much time.
The only problem with the auto search idea is that there are plenty of times where commercial web sites like intel.com get linked to. In this case there could simply be a list of well know URLs (predominantly the base URL for corporations and other large organizations). Any links in a potential article that are included in the list could be excluded from the search.
This, of course, says nothing for the, oh so hard, cut-and-paste of all articles into MS Word (or any similar editor with a spell checker) that should also be mandatory for any web site that calls itself a news source. I find myself straying from the main point of the post now though.
This has been an opinion post sprinkled with a little bit of annoyance that this issue keeps getting ignored by the Slashdot editorial staff no matter how many times it gets mentioned in threads. It was not intended as a troll or as flame-bait.
-GameMaster
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
With all the media hype over "Dirty Bombs" I think this article pretty much best outlined how easy it would be to build one... Right down to the nitric acid.
Spooky.
Teacher: For show and tell today Oliver Wendell Jones is going to show us a model of an atomic bomb.
Oliver: Oh it's not a modle it's real.
Teacher: Where did you get the radioactive material?
Oliver: I scraped the glow in the dark material off of 10,000 watch hands.
Teacher: You mean...?
Oliver: Yep... KABOOM!!!
Teacher: OK everyone... fire drill!
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
The Kid's name is Hahn! The same name as Otto Hahn, one of the forerunners of nuclear science. Here's a bio of Hahn.
Big Brother has never been better...
I guess I should submit this as a story/topic and see if people like...Its kinda recursive in a weird sorta way...
..........FULL STOP.
it may not be a tar archive, but if your intrested in raw html, this is as close as it gets: http://slashdot.org/palm/
works well with Avantgo too
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Im sure its around here somewhere...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm a total Clavin, and I say stupid things to girls I like. So technically, I am preventing myself from breeding. I guess it's better than up-chucking on 'em like Stan.
OHHHH! Whatta ya gonna do about it, Stan DARSH!
I'll go home tonight, finish drawing my anime pr0n of Android 18, spank da monkey/drink beer/pass out.
Now that I think about it...I'm more of a Yamcha (pre-wish) than a Clavin. I'm just scared/scarred of chicks.
What's interesting is that guy's name... any relation to Otto Hahn? :)
So he mangaed to move the radiation around
he built what boils down to a radiation/particle gun, the fact that he pointed it at what was debateably uranium is more or less irrelevent had he pointed his geiger counter at a wad of aluminium foil that he was bombarding with assorted radiation he would have seen a similar rise in radiation. At any rate I agree that he did manage to isolate some radioactive elements, but anything else he may have accomplished boils down to making a radioactive mess in the shed.
And if this doesn't show that he is darwin award material I don't know what does. A little knowledge mixed with a bunch of ignorance and ingenuity at an early age.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
I can't believe all the "This is old news! I'm a 1334 /. oldschooler!" posts for this topic. Were you people around 9 months ago when an international organization funded a multi-million dollar massacre? How many thousands of militant US-haters dream about carrying a block of uranium to the roof of a building in Manhattan and blowing themselves up? If a kid could irradiate his backyard with a few hundred dollars in supplies, how easy would it be to get such materials in countries that are 50 years behind the US in hazardous materials regulations?
Everyone got their lead suits on?
Woops! He screwed up like the Germans did and did not realize that Carbon contains Boron, a powerful neutron absorber. Or did he?
Miller, a nuclear-savvy high-school friend in whom David had confided, warned him that real reactors use control rods to regulate nuclear reactions. Miller recommended cobalt, which absorbs neutrons but does not itself become fissionable.
Ieeee! Cobalt may suck down neutrons, but it does so by making Cobalt-60, a powerful gamma emitter with a five year half life. Not good, kids better to use borax.
The article over all is sinister and alarmist. While the author bettered himself by reading snippits of the Golder Book of Chemistry, the overall tone is that knowledge and should be controled like materials that can POTENTIALY be abused. The parents were at fault for alowing this to go on and not seeking help at the university, but the contamination produced was not great. Our here might not have realized that he had stepped into illegal or unhealthy concentrations. Overall, as the "garbage go the good stuff", there was very little stuff to he had. Most municpal dumps have radiation detectors for the protection of the public and workers. It's kind of a last step in the control of medical isotopes and what not; if the isotope is not controled by the state/federal regulator; if the isotope is lost by the hospital; if the isotope goes to Mexico and comes back; if the isotope is sold or disposed of and can't be found, the isotpe will make it's way to a dump and be found there. That the local dump did not alarm is reassuring. He could have really hurt himself by ingesting some of his work, and his set up was childish and silly, but it's doubtful he ever possed a real threat to his neighbors.
The sad part is that his tallents were not channeled properly, that he never was convinced of the need to study other foundation material like math, that today he is a simple sailor. It's good for the Navy to have such a bright fellow, but bad for the rest of us. At age 21, it's not too late for this man to be educated and made useful. He has more curiosity and energy than most people. Go back to school, David.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This story is SOOOOO old. I read about it two years ago while working at a reactor facility... We came to the mutual conclusion that having the know-how to do something like this sure as hell doesn't mean that you SHOULD. The thing that really struck me was that while this kid obviously had an understanding of some of the involved physics, was there no alarm in the back of his head? I mean, you're building a NUCLEAR REACTOR. Did the health risks even occur to him?
Hm...I have this one. Here is a page with info and the requirements (and, interestingly, a link to this same article): Atomic Energy.
At first I thought this wouldn't actually fulfill any of the requirements, but another look (it's been awhile) shows that you CAN do a model of a reactor and label all of the parts. The article about him didn't mention anything about labels, and some MB counselors can be real sticklers about the wording of the requirements. Betcha he didn't get any credit for it, or had to go back and label his parts! On the other hand...it didn't say "non-functional model using soup cans, timbles, and elbow macaroni", either. Guess it would have been alright, providing he had his parts and their functions clearly labeled.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
"A Scout is honest, etc." "Honest" is the first one. He was using pseudonyms and claiming to be a professor. And I don't know of any merit badge that this project could possibly fill the requirements for; at least not one that he shouldn't have submitted it for as soon as he had a reaction of any sort, as work on merit badges expires after so many months' time. Moreover, if it was not for a merit badge but for his Eagle Scout project, one's Eagle Scout project is a team leadership project, not a solitary design/construction project. His entire pretense is invalid and his failure to live within the Scout Motto is saddening, especially when all the news reports give constant mention of his Boy Scouting.
This story has personal relevance for me. My brother and I were in the same Boy Scout troup as David Hahn, and went to high school with him. He's two years older than me, I believe, and one year younger than my brother. He briefly served as Senior Patrol Leader; I believe my Totin' Chit (knife certification card) was signed by him.
One of the things I've noticed about all the articles I've read about him, is that they seem to give him credit for too much competence. On more than one occasion he showed up at a scout meeting with his eyebrows missing and his face red and burned from something gone awry. He used to pull me aside and tell me that he had Americanium in his pocket, at which point I would tell him he was probably making himself sterile, which he would shrug off. This is not good science by any means.
He would ask my brother chemistry questions, and (after my brother stopped coming to meetings) he would ask me for advice about chemicals, reactions, nuclear power, etc (I, who was two years his junior and yet to take high school chemistry). We knew about some of his experiments, but in a lot of ways assumed he was exaggerating. And we didn't know the extent to which he had lied and swindled to obtain his supplies. We didn't know until we saw the report about the EPA on the news, cleaning up a backyard shed and thought, "Good God, that must be Dave..."
I've given several interviews with an author who was apparently working on a full length book on Dave at various times as an undergrad, but I don't know if the book ever saw the light of day. Between the EPA incident and his joining the navy, my dad and I ran into him at the local Kroger where he was a stock boy (or something). His skin color was bright orange. He was experimenting with artificial tanning, and babbled on in pseudo-science talk about trying to permanently modify his skin color. ?! And last I heard he was a helmsman on the carrier Enterprise (though that was a few years ago, now).
Several things frustrate me about this whole story:
1) That he still made Eagle Scout. The Board of Review for advancement in Rank is composed of senior leaders of the troop; they are supposed to judge a candidate and, if they aren't satisfied, can refuse him the rank if they find him not meeting character requirements, etc. (what with the lying, cheating, etc, one would think Dave did not). But politics on local and notional board levels has contributed to what I consider dilution of the award in more cases than this (note, I'm not an eagle scout myself, i'm just arguing on principle).
2) What he did was really, really stupid and dangerous. This is not an inspiring tale of a brilliant young man, but a cautionary tale of how a little knowledge and not much common sense can cause lots of trouble.
3)This gets publicity for years, but legitimate science by young people is often overlooked.
Sigh. I'll end my rant now. But I get frustrated everytime I see this story come up yet again.
-Wombat.
too dismayed for a sig.
(Dave, if you're somehow reading this, I'm sorry, but what you did was dumb)
I don't need to read any chem books, just print out this article, and bam! ....
Oh yeah. I forgot to mention, but as my brother pointed out in another comment, we used to call Dave "Glow Boy."
Just thought people might find that amusing, if they hadn't seen it before...
-Wombat.
I remember this because... wait for it
I'm a Tasmanian...
true...
Burma?
Radioactive Products and Other Sources Of Radiation
Amateur Radiation Detection and Experimentation Page
I recall reading about this instance in Reader's Digest. And on slashdot, years ago. I can't believe it's been reposted, some 4 years later.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Amazing, isn't it? Every year teenagers kill themselves with cars, motorbikes, guns, alcohol and drugs, in the first few cases often killing other people in the process. They also develop the smoking habit that will ultimately take years off their lives. Not a big story. Someone accumulates a quantity of radioisotopes and doesn't kill anybody, and this is a big story.
Because, unlike all the other things mentioned, radioactivity is really scary and nasty and dangerous and might get used by terrorists
Or because most people are totally irrational about radioactivity
But yes, I'm prejudiced. Possibly because I was interested in the same things as David but I got encouraged by a sympathetic physics teacher, result a Cambridge science degree. For me this story is about the failure of a useless education system to identify and foster talent, resulting in an underperforming 20 year old who on the face of it had the energy and talent, with a bit of support, to make Harvard.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
This story was on Reader's Digest a couple years ago. It's always fun to reread this once in awhile.
Zane, I must say that sig is JUST WRONG! I ALMOST FRICKIN FELL OUTTA MY DAMN CHAIR. GOOD GOD THAT SCARED THE CRAP OUTTA ME!
The fact that it's 1 in the morning and there weren't any lights on may have had some effect...
At least half of the posters who are calling this guy a dumbass are really saying to thimselves.
>
I read this story somewhere else. I remember having some problems with it. I thought it sounded like an urban legend. Has anyone done any serious fact checking on this one?
You seem to stress on the fact that the guy should have been denied the award just because he stole a few small things and lied?
Give me a break! Tell me, would he have done this if he had direct access to these materials in the first place? I find it disgusting that you'd place more importance to such trivialities of character, rather than his scientific spirit.
In this context, this quote by HL Mencken comes to mind --
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret.... His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
-- H. L. Mencken
The guy has to be more than just admired for the fact that with little or no resources, he's built something that's definitely worth commending.
2) What he did was really, really stupid and dangerous. This is not an inspiring tale of a brilliant young man, but a cautionary tale of how a little knowledge and not much common sense can cause lots of trouble.
Huh? You know something? Any path that does not involve risk ultimately leads to stagnation. It's only the people who take risks, who are unafraid to break through the odds who help humanity progress.
You cannot hope to build a rocket without risking it crashing somewhere. If that's the case, then most of the world's greatest scientists are idiots by your scale.
If I didn't know better, I'd probably say you're jealous of this guy. Come on man! You're supposed to be an astrophysist (atleast that's what I gather from your site), you should know this of all people!!!
All said and done, he's one smart dude. Naive yes, and a little ignorant too, but one of the smarter ones with a creative streak.
http://www.sit.wisc.edu/%7Eups/humor/bomb.html
Scene: 1906, burly men pounding on anvils with massive hammers. "Atom Smashing"
Burns Senior inspects a workers pockets as he leaves:
"AH HA! Atoms! 1...2..3..4...5 SIX of them! Take him away!"
Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old -
Unfortunately I think you're missing/misunderstanding my point in a lot of ways.
;-) .
You said, "You seem to stress on the fact that the guy should have been denied the award just because he stole a few small things and lied?"
Yes indeed. I am stressing that. He stole lots of smoke detectors from a summer camp. He lied a lot. The Eagle Scout Award is not one given for scientific achievment. It's given for completing specific requirements, public service, and maintaining a certain level of character. It's not a, "well, you did an impressive feat, have an award," thing. It's not supposed to be like a honorary Oscar.
Second, if all he did was risk his own health, I would be far less critical. But with the experiments he was doing, he was putting the health of the community in danger (sort of anti-public service). A good scientist needs to have a sense of ethics. Yes, I agree that risk is inherent in new discovery, etc. but there is such a thing as acceptable risk. There's a reason the Space shuttle launches from a thin peninsula. Dave, at least from what I know and have read after the fact, did not even consider what effects his experiments might have on others. This was a serious lapse in judgement. This is why what I say was "really dumb," not to say that what he did didn't take hard work and dedication. But, IMHO, it was seriously misguided.
You also say, You cannot hope to build a rocket without risking it crashing somewhere. If that's the case, then most of the world's greatest scientists are idiots by your scale.
Since when did Stephen Hawking risk anyone's life? Brian Greene? Your statement here is silly, I'm afraid. See above section about acceptable risk. And I find your use of three exclamation points in the section I have not quoted inflamatory
Finally, you say that "When all is said and done, he's one smart dude." I guess this really depends on your definition of 'smart.' He did try to do something impressive, if dangerous, with at least a fair amount of chemistry knowledge at his disposal. I could give him the benefit of the doubt, and say that in conversations I had with him he feigned less knowledge than he had to make me feel like I could help him out, but I don't think that was the case. Maybe he advanced quickly shortly thereafter, and read a lot of books. In any case, there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. And smart people can still do really stupid things.
-Wombat
Does anyone know what happened to David Hahn? Is he still in the US Navy? Did he go back to University?
About the first point, I'd say it's a question of perspective. I think a curious scientist meddling with "risky stuff" contributes a whole lot more to society than any good samaritanish work, or any kind of public service. Atleast that's my opinion, so it's entirely objective.
;-) .
:-P ;-)
:-) Relativity at work, I suppose...
Since when did Stephen Hawking risk anyone's life? Brian Greene?
Huh dude... those are theoretical physicists you're talking about! There is a very big difference working with your hands and working on paper. I do agree that both are important (I do theoretical physics myself) but I feel that we're losing out on people who can work with their hands. Who can actually build good stuff. This guy may not be great, but he's got a streak of initiative which a whole lot of people do not have.
And I find your use of three exclamation points in the section I have not quoted inflamatory
Ahem! I respect intellectuals!
Yes, I do agree that smartness and wisdom are relative terms. And in the end you say that smart people can do really stupid things. You know, a lot of people said that to Jules Verne abt his book "From Earth to the Moon".
And it is some of those stupidities that sometime give us wonderful things
And he almost won too
.
-
I can really really really see the experience and professionalism you're talking about. You're posting this at your $200k a year job? On the company computer?
Yikes.
There must be a bunch of people who dick around with dangerous chemicals etc as kids...
I got into it when I was 12 and ordered plans for making model rocket motors from one of the ads in Boys Life mag. There was an address for a chemical supply house from which I ordered 2 pints of concentrated sulfuric acid, 5lbs powdered potasium nitrate and 1lb powdered magnesium for about $35. I got sulfur powder from agway for $1.50/lb.
With this I made gunpowder, nitric acid, nitrocellulose, and replaced charcoal with Mg powder in the gumpowder formula ( 2 moles Mg for every mole of C in gunpowder recipe ) to make some seriously powerful flash powder that burned my hand enough to send me to the emergency room ( I lighted about a cubic centimeter of the mixture with a wooden match and the flash powder scorched my thumb and wrist )
I expected it to burn but I was suprised by how fast it went up. Once I learned the nature of the stuff ( do not make! it probably is not safe to handle, some mixtures are prone to go off spontaneously ) I made firecrackers by rolling up magazine subscription cards with toilet tissues, fuse and masking tape. These loosely confined firecrackers made 4 foot wide blinding white flashes and loud bangs when lit off.
I did things that would earn me a Darwin Award. But I was not as bad as this kid.
I could have made nitroglycerin ( Boy did I want to! ) but I didn't want to risk having hot acid explode and leave me a Freddy Krueger of a person. I could have made pipe bombs but I stuck to cardboard because there was no shrapnel and so it was safer.
I can't say I used common sense but this guy seems to have been asking for it..
My parents never knew the stuff I did. They knew I'd ordered chemicals, but they thought they were strictly for model rocket motors. Most of the explosions they heard were things I told them might happen. ( once, I tried powering a rocket engine with compressed air and hydrogen made with muriatic acid and charred aluminum cans in a pickle jar ) I wore goggles and the jar was behind cinder blocks and in a hole in the gravel driveway. When I used the sparker to ignite the engine there was still air in the jar and the resulting explosion blew the lid of the jar of acid 50 feet into the air and made the loudest bang I ever produced. I had done this with alcohol vapors and pure oxygen without that happening before...
This was all before the internet was widely available and research hard..
This post has no point accept that I wonder what other ppl have done that deserves a darwin award...
Eat at Joe's.
Many of the details in the article are quite inspired, but could not be carried out in practice. Probably Mr. Hahn embellished his exploits rather liberally. Hey, I would have done the same thing.
"Science allowed him to distance himself from his parents, to create and destroy things, to break the rules, and to escape into something he was a success at, while 'sublimating' a teenager's sense of failure, anger, and embarrassment into some
really big explosions."
To sublimate is to convert a solid Directly to a gas without first going through the liquid phase.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.