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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.
There's several references to it everywhere, here's another.
...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.
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!
Mozilla -> Netscape -> AOL -> AOLTW <- Time Warner <- CNN
;-)
No, I don't think that's a useful story
Actually, I just read it. It's still not a useful story.
--
E_NOSIG
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
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?"
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
"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
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
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"?
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)
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.
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.
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.