David Hahn
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For other people with this name, see David Hahn (disambiguation)
David Hahn (born 1976) attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in 1994 in his backyard shed in Commerce Township, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at the age of 17.
Hahn, nicknamed the "Radioactive Boy Scout", is an Eagle Scout who had previously earned a merit badge in Atomic Energy and had spent years tinkering with basement chemistry which included small explosions. Furthering his experiments, Hahn diligently amassed radioactive material by collecting small amounts from (occasionally stolen) household products, such as americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lantern mantles, radium from clocks and tritium (as neutron moderator) from gunsights. His "reactor" was a large, cored-out block of lead, and he used lithium from $1000 worth of batteries to purify the thorium ash using a Bunsen burner.
Hahn posed as a legitimate adult scientist or teacher to gain the trust of many professionals, despite the presence of misspellings and obvious errors in his letters. Hahn ultimately hoped to create a breeder reactor, using low-level isotopes to transform samples of thorium and uranium into fissionable isotopes.
Although his home-made reactor never achieved criticality, it ended up emitting toxic levels of radioactivity, around 1000 times normal background radiation. Alarmed, Hahn began to dismantle his experiments, but a chance encounter with police led to the discovery of his activities, which triggered a Federal Radiological Emergency involving the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Environmental Protection Agency, having designated Hahn's mother's property as a Superfund hazardous materials cleanup site, dismantled the shed and its contents and buried them as low-level radioactive waste in Utah. Hahn refused medical evaluation for radiation exposure.
Hahn suffered local ignominy, but did attain the rank of Eagle Scout. After dropping out of community college, Hahn joined the Navy, assigned to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise as an ordinary seaman.
Hahn had hoped to pursue a nuclear specialist career, but was not even permitted to tour the reactors (Silverstein, 2005). EPA scientists believe that Hahn may have exceeded the lifetime dosage for thorium exposure, but he refused their recommendation that he be examined at Fermilab, a nuclear science facility near Chicago (Silverstein, 1998). Later, Hahn re-enlisted as a Marine.
The incident received scant media attention at the time, but was widely disseminated after writer Ken Silverstein published an article about the incident in Harper's Magazine in 1998, and subsequently expanded it into a 2004 biography, The Radioactive Boy Scout.
A television documentary, The Nuclear Boyscout, aired on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom in 2003. In it, Hahn reenacted some of his methods for the camera. Though slated to air on the Discovery Channel, the program has not yet been broadcast in the United States.
The incident was also referenced by the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt ("Item 240. A breeder reactor built in a shed, and the boy scout badge to prove credit was given where boy scout credit was due."), in which a breeder reactor was actually successfully (and safely) built by two University of Chicago students ([1]).
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[edit] References
- Silverstein, Ken. "The Radioactive Boy Scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor". Harper's Magazine, November 1998.
- Silverstein, Ken. (2004) The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor. Villard. ISBN 0-8129-6660-0.
- Ghiorso, Albert. Book review of The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor. August 9, 2004 issue of Chemical and Engineering News (pp. 36-37). An analysis is given of some of Hahn's work by Ghiorso, who has been involved in the discovery of about a dozen transuranium elements.
