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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.
...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.
There's several references to it everywhere, here's another.
This kid didn't learn to obey the rules of
Military Intelligence
tcd004
...could he split a beer atom?
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)
Yup, me too. It's a little old when Reader's Digest gets the jump on Slashdot.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
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.
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.
I searched for several (what I thought were good) keywords before I submitted it. My apologies if it was...
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
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
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!
Yes, it's true... the original Harpers article had photos and I think I remember hearing about it on CNN a while back, too :-)
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.
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
Yeah, he did din't he.....
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 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
Lol!! I heard a mutated version of this story. Instead what happened was they were going to make it a 'rail ride'. They pointed it towards a mining shaft so that they wouldn't lose the car. (The story's very long so my details may be a little muddled..)
When the ignited the rocket, the car drifted off the rails a bit and collided with the entry to the mine, causing some rocks to fall on it. The kids that set this up went home, not sure what to do. They had no idea how to hide the car. (The rocket they used came from a junk yard and their dad woulda been in huge trouble if they traced the JATO rocket to him.)
A day or two later, a huge dust storm covered the area in a thick layer of dust. They drove out to investigate, only to find that pieces of the car were exposed. They backed up and left.
The tracks that they made when they left made it look a little like the car had driven down this road and turned sharply into the side of a mountain. The rails leading to the mine were submersed in dust/dirt, so the investigators cooked up a story that somebody tried to drive across the desert in this thing and wiped out.
I may have gotten a couple of the details flubbed, but here's my source for the story:
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-363/
This is a first hand account of the guy who claims to have been the source of this urban legend. Is it true? Heck I dunno, but it's a fun story to read. It's reasonably believable too.
It's a pity this'll probably get modded down. Afterall, the more we understand about urban legends, the easier it is to fish the truth out of them. Somebody might read the account of the Rocket Powered Chevy Impala and figure out if the 'Breeder Reactor' story is an urban legend.
"Derp de derp."
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
Unless of course you have an AFDB.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Oops! You forgot to mention the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy!
"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
You said:
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...
I reply:
Nope - the facts at the core of this are true (I went to high school with Dave, and was in his scout troop as well). He found a place that was selling crates of smoke detectors that had been left in the rain, and bought hundreds of them to crack open for the radioactive material.
As I recall, I kept calling him "Glow Boy" and telling him that his nuts would fall off if he wasn't careful...
Sigh... others have shown ample evidence that this is legit. We need a "-1 wrong" moderation. I thought about giving you an Overrated, or a Flamebait, or a Troll, but none are right.
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
...since he's going to need that new thymus before long.
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"?
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
Don't you think it's possible that David is withholding some pieces of the puzzle? It seems like he is only admitting to things that are legal or were already known (stealing smoke detectors). Given his huge appetite for nuclear materials, he may have gone a lot further. In any event, antiques were not the only source of nuclear material cited. Of course it could be fake. But I think we should assume that we are hearing a carefully spun version of the story that is influenced by the chance of criminal prosecution.
I originally thought that a "breeder reactor" was a Mormon singles ward event.
The middle mind speaks!
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)
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.
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?
Except that he's not helping the Navy out with their reactors. He's just regular Joe Seaman, swabbing the decks and what-not. It was mentioned at the end of the article that it was probably for the best considering his past exposure to radiation.
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.
You don't say? Well...perhaps if you had actually read the linked article rather than the 2 sentence blurb that describes it you would have known that the radiation at that point was quite intense. In fact, that's about the time that he decided that the reactor was dangerous and dismantled it.
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.
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.
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.
What's interesting is that guy's name... any relation to Otto Hahn? :)
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.
"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 believe that you're thinking of the movie The Manhattin Project. It's simular, and not to be confused with the real Manhattin Project. The kid in the movie meets a scientist who falls in love with his mom. The scientist allows him in to the lab to see the laser and he realizes that they have plutonium in there. He decides to build an a bomb...
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
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
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.