David Hahn
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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 significant radioactive material by collecting small amounts from (occasionally stolen) household products, such as americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lantern mantles and radium from clocks and gunsights. He also obtained radium from the Undark paint which older clocks used to light their dials, and lithium from batteries. His reactor was a large, cored-out block of lead.
Hahn posed as a legitimate adult scientist or teacher, gaining the trust of many professionals, despite 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 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 contents and buried it as low-level radioactive waste in Utah. Hahn refused medical evaluation for radiation exposure.
Hahn suffered local ignominy, but did achieve 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 (where he was kept away from the nuclear reactors, largely for his own safety, as he had reached the point that further exposure would result in illness), later re-enlisting 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: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor.
A television documentary, The Nuclear Boyscout, ran on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom in 2003. In the show, Hahn reenacted some of his methods for the camera. Though slated for the Discovery Channel, the show has not yet been aired in the United States.
See also
- Nuclear reactor
External links
- [Biography by Ken Silverstein — Amazon.com]
- ['The Nuclear Boyscout' from Channel 4]
- ['The nuclear merit badge' — Christian Science Monitor]
- ['Tale of the Radioactive Boy Scout' — Harpers Magazine]
- ['The Radioactive Boy Scout' — Ken Silverstein]
- [Smoke Detectors and a Radioactive Boyscout]
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