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'Radioactive Boy Scout' Reportedly Passes Away At Age 39 (harpers.org)
A funeral notice quietly appeared on Tributes.com recently, announcing the death of David Charles Hahn. Though no cause of death was provided, when he was 17 Hahn "achieved some notoriety as a teenage Boy Scout with his attempt to build a nuclear reactor in his garden shed," remembers Slashdot reader braindrainbahrain:
His "reactor" ended when the EPA declared his backyard as a Superfund cleanup site due to hazardous levels of radiation. His story was captured in a Harper's magazine article, and later the book "The Radioactive Boy Scout" by Ken Silverstein. It was also a Slashdot topic...
Hahn had used materials from household products like lithium batteries, smoke detectors, and old radium clocks, according to Wikipedia, which adds that shortly after Hahn's lab was dismantled, he became an Eagle Scout.
Hahn had used materials from household products like lithium batteries, smoke detectors, and old radium clocks, according to Wikipedia, which adds that shortly after Hahn's lab was dismantled, he became an Eagle Scout.
He wasn't looking well the last tine he was arrested for... wait for it... stealing once again to try to get material for a new reactor.
He ended up being hospitalized for bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia, and had been on medication for schizophrenia ever since. His mother was also schizophrenic. He led an interesting life...
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
1000 times background measured directly over a source is really not that much. And the risks it presents is much lower than a huge majority of people seem to think. I know the number 1000 sounds like a lot, but 1000 times something very small can still be very small.
The question of course, is what he was exposed to, how often, and did he ingest any of the radioactive matter. He was altready a bit careless, having OD'ed on canthaxanthin that he ingested as part of an experiment. He created an explosion of Red phosphorus n the basement of his house apparently not knowing that it was sensitive to shock, and he was pounding it with a hammer. So we have a young fellow that is remarkably careless.
The Americium from the smoke detectors, of which he stole a number of them - apparently 100 known. So most of that is excreted but the rest goes to the liver and one's nutsack if they happen to have one.
Thorium is fairly safe stuff, unless it is ingested, being an alpha emitter. Ingestion of the dust from one isn't so safe. He collected lantern mantles to collect the thorium they contained. Hahn used lithium from dismantled batteries to purify the thorium, using a Bunsen burner in the process. His standard of sanitation was not high.
Radium is another matter entirely about 20 percent of ingested radium makes its's way into the bones, and it is an alpha and gamma emitter. It's daughter element radon gas is also radioactive and causes cancer.
Tritium that he was going to use as a moderator, is also a radioactive beta emitter, but probably isn't/wasn't that big a deal. So it is very plausible that this young fellow ingested enough material to do himself physical harm from the radioactivity.
We'll never know the full extent of the radioactivity, because his mother threw most of his collected materials into the regular trash. She was fearful of her property value.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Still... just that radium paint alone, you wouldn't want the teen next door to have something like that...
What if he had more dangerous toxins like those found in a can of insecticide or certain common petroleum products at his disposal? We wouldn't want that either would we.
I truly hope that you do not work in the nuclear industry, as you have a remarkably arrogant and dangerous attitude.
No, Mister D from 63, they are not an equivalent as you suggest.
Many radioactive elements are also chemically poisonous as well as radioactive. A bit of Uranium in one's lunch will take out your kidneys before the radiation does anything to you. A kid shouldn't be playing with radioactive materials nor your ridiculous insecticide comparison.
However, to take your opinion that somehow radioactivity is safe, and making grand sweeping statements to that effect and not even making reference to the type of radioactivity is/was involved, makes me feel quite safe that you don't know what you are talking about.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This guy was no Madame Curie. More like a reckless fool. The full dangers of radiation weren't well understood until perhaps the 50s or 60s. This guy really had no excuse, and was obviously reckless. Madame Curie lived in a time when nobody really suspected how dangerous this stuff was. For gods sake, women put radium covered painbrushes to sharpen the tip! And even then they didn't die of the radiation, they died of radium poisoning!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yeah, if anything, this is a cautionary tale about America's healthcare system.
But if you look at this poor guy's later life, you'll see it for what it really is. Mental illness.
He apparently was a meth head.
Meth can turn the most sober and normal person into a unrecoverable basket case in record time.
Meth - Not even once.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca