[wordup] When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor

[Adam Shand]

This is old but still fascinating.

I think Gene's comments are pretty much right on the money, and the
options he lists are bout the only ones I can think of either as somehow
me "realism" suspect's that we're not "all just gonna get along" any
time soon.

Adam.

From: http://csof.net/node.php?id=148 (and Richard Schwartfeger)

Radioactive Boy Scout   
Submitted by Gene on Monday, 
June 17, 2002 - 15:51

I bet you never knew there was a merit badge for Atomic Energy...

This story interested me on a couple of different levels. The first is
the pipe bomb building, fuse-making side of me which I indulged in
during high school, although this kid took it to the nth degree. The
other reason was all the press that "dirty bombs" have been getting
lately. This guy put 40,000 people at risk by playing in his toolshed...
so how hard can it actually be?

My opinion is that we are in a race with technology. Someday, hundreds
(maybe thousands) of years from now, destroying the world will be in the
hands of any well financed group of people. I don't think nuclear will
be the first across the finish line... nanotechnology and genetic
engineering are gaining quickly. What's the answer? Make sure we're
colonizing multiple planets by then? Evolving towards some sort of hive
mind? Hoping for a comet to hit before then and send us back to those
innocent dark ages?

From: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/n1782_v297/21281407/p1/article.jhtml
More: http://www.meritbadge.com/bsa/mb/024.htm

Harper's Magazine
Nov, 1998

The radioactive boy scout: when a teenager attempts to build a breeder
reactor. (case of David Hahn who managed to secure materials and
equipment from businesses and information from government officials to
develop an atomic energy radiation project for his Boy Scout
merit-badge)

Author/s: Ken Silverstein

When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor

There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in
finding out about things. And that's exactly what chemistry is: Finding
out about things--finding out what things are made of and what changes
they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing!

--The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to
happen, the kind of place where people live precisely because it is more
than 25 miles outside of Detroit and all the complications attendant on
that city. The kind of place where money buys a bit more land, perhaps a
second bathroom, and so reassures residents that they're safely in the
bosom of the middle class. Every element of Golf Manor invokes one form
of security or another, beginning with the name of the subdivision
itself--taken from the 18 hole course at its entrance--and the community
in which it is nestled, Commerce Township. The houses and trees are both
old and varied enough to make Golf Manor feel more like a neighborhood
than a subdivision, and the few features that do convey subdivision--a
sign at the entrance saying "We have many children but none to spare.
Please drive carefully"--have a certain Back to the Future charm. Most
Golf Manor residents remain there until they die, and then they are
replaced by young couples with kids. In short, it is the kind of place
where, on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the corner is a
Mister Softee ice-cream truck.

But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day. Ask Dottie Pease. As she
turned down Pinto Drive, Pease saw eleven men swarming across her
carefully manicured lawn. Their attention seemed to be focused on the
back yard of the house next door, specifically on a large wooden potting
shed that abutted the chain-link fence dividing her property from her
neighbor's. Three of the men had donned ventilated moon suits and were
proceeding to dismantle the potting shed with electric saws, stuffing
the pieces of wood into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive
warning signs. Pease had never noticed anything out of the ordinary at
the house next door.

A middle-aged couple, Michael Polasek and Patty Hahn, lived there. On
some weekends, they were joined by Patty's teenage son, David. As she
huddled with a group of nervous neighbors, though, Pease heard one
resident claim to have awoken late one night to see the potting shed
emitting an eerie glow. "I was pretty disturbed," Pease recalls. "I went
inside and called my husband. I said, `Da-a-ve, there are men in funny
suits walking around out here. You've got to do something.'"

What the men in the funny suits found was that the potting shed was
dangerously irradiated and that the area's 40,000 residents could be at
risk. Publicly, the men in white promised the residents of Golf Manor
that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of
the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the
Environmental Protection Agency briefly invaded their neighborhood. When
asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far
more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy
next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor
in his mother's potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.

It seems remarkable that David's story hasn't already wended its way
through all forms of journalism and become the stuff of legend, but at
the time the EPA refused to give out David's name, and although a few
local reporters learned it, neither he nor any family members agreed to
be interviewed. Even the federal and state officials who oversaw the
cleanup learned only a small part of what took place in the potting shed
at Golf Manor because David, fearing legal repercussions, told them
almost nothing about his experiments. Then in 1996, Jay Gourley, a
correspondent with the Natural Resources News Service in Washington,
D.C., came across a tiny newspaper item about the case and contacted
David Hahn. Gourley later passed on his research to me, and I
subsequently interviewed the story's protagonists, including David--now
a twenty-two-year-old sailor stationed in Norfolk, Virginia.

I met with David in the hope of making sense not only of his experiments
but of him. The archetypal American suburban boy learns how to hit a
fadeaway jump shot, change a car's oil, perform some minor carpentry
feats. If he's a Boy Scout he masters the art of starting a fire by
rubbing two sticks together, and if he's a typical adolescent pyro, he
transforms tennis-ball cans into cannons. David Hahn taught himself to
build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial
information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and
then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and
thorium.

I had seen childhood photographs of David in which he looked perfectly
normal, even angelic, with blond hair and hazel-green eyes, and, as he
grew older, gangly limbs and a peach-fuzz mustache. Still, when I went
to meet him in Norfolk, I was anticipating some physical manifestation
of brilliance or obsession. An Einstein or a Kaczynski. But all I saw
was a beefier version of the clean-cut kid in the pictures. David's
manner was oddly dispassionate, though polite, until we began to discuss
his nuclear adventures. Then, for five hours, lighting and grinding out
cigarettes for emphasis, David enthused about laboring in his backyard
laboratory. He told me how he used coffee filters and pickle jars to
handle deadly substances such as radium and nitric acid, and he
sheepishly divulged the various cover stories and aliases he employed to
obtain the radioactive materials. A shy and withdrawn teenager, David
had confided in only a few friends about his project and never allowed
anyone to witness his experiments. His breeder-reactor project was a
means--albeit an unorthodox one--of escaping the trauma of adolescence.
"I was very emotional as a kid," he told me, "and those experiments gave
me a way to get away from that. They gave me some respect."

You--Scientist!

--The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, Chapter 10

In The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes notes that the
psychological profiles of pioneering American physicists are remarkably
similar. Frequently the eldest son of an emotionally remote,
professional man, he--almost all were men--was a voracious reader during
childhood, tended to feel lonely, and was shy and aloof from classmates.

David's parents, Ken and Patty Hahn, divorced when he was a toddler. Ken
is an automotive engineer for General Motors, as is his second wife,
Kathy Missig, whom he married soon after the divorce. David lived with
his father and stepmother in a small split-level home in suburban
Clinton Township, about thirty miles north of Detroit. Ken Hahn worked
extraordinarily long hours for GM. With close-cropped hair and a
proclivity for short-sleeved dress shirts, Ken radiates a coolness that,
combined with his constant preoccupation, must have been confounding to
a child. When asked about his undemonstrative nature, Ken attributes it
to his German ancestry. Yet for all his starchiness, it was Kathy who
was David's chief disciplinarian.

David spent weekends and holidays with his mother and her boyfriend,
Michael Polasek, an amiable but hard-drinking retired forklift operator
at GM. Golf Manor is demographically similar to Clinton Township, but
the two households could not have been more different emotionally. Patty
Hahn committed suicide in the house a few years ago, but Michael still
lives there surrounded by pictures of her. ("She was a beautiful
person," he says. "She was my whole life.") He keeps five cats and a
spotless household, and looks like a member of Sha Na Na.

Despite the fact that David was shuffled between households, his early
years were seemingly ordinary. He played baseball and soccer, joined the
Boy Scouts, and spent endless hours exploring with his friends. An
abrupt change came at the age of ten, when Kathy's father, also an
engineer for GM, gave David The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.
The book promised to open doors to a brave new world--"Chemistry means
the difference between poverty and starvation and the abundant life," it
stated with unwavering optimism--and offered instructions on how to set
up a home laboratory and conduct experiments ranging from simple
evaporation and filtration to making rayon and alcohol. David swiftly
became immersed and by age twelve was digesting his father's college
chemistry textbooks without difficulty. When he spent the night at Golf
Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the livingroom
floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In his father's house, David set up a laboratory in his small bedroom,
where the shelves are still lined with books such as Prudent Practices
for Handling Hazardous Chemicals in Laboratories and The Story of Atomic
Energy. He bought beakers, Bunsen burners, test tubes, and other items
commonly found in a child's chemistry set. David, though, was not
conducting the typical adolescent experiments. By fourteen, an age at
which most boys with a penchant for chemistry are conducting rudimentary
gunpowder experiments, David had fabricated nitroglycerine.

David's parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the
chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn
household. After David destroyed his bedroom--the walls were badly
pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out--Ken
and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.

Which was fine with David. Science allowed him to distance himself from
his parents, to create and destroy things, to break the rules, and to
escape into something he was a success at, while sublimating a
teenager's sense of failure, anger, and embarrassment into some really
big explosions. David held a series of after-school jobs at fast-food
joints, grocery stores, and furniture warehouses, but work was merely a
means of financing his experiments. Never an enthusiastic student and
always a horrific speller, David fell behind in school. During his
junior year at Chippewa Valley High School--at a time when he was
secretly conducting nuclear experiments in his back yard--David nearly
failed state math and reading tests required for graduation (though he
aced the test in science). Ken Gherardini, who taught David conceptual
physics, remembers him as an excellent pupil on the rare occasions when
he was interested in classwork but otherwise indifferent to his studies.
"His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the
periodic table," Gherardini told me with a laugh during an interview at
Chippewa Valley before his 8:20 A.M. class. "I don't know about you, but
my dream at that age was to buy a car."

David's scientific preoccupation left less and less time for friends,
though throughout much of high school he did have a girlfriend, Heather
Beaudette, three years his junior. Heather says he was sweet and caring
(she once returned from a weeklong trip to Florida to find a pile of
lengthy love letters) but not always the perfect date. Heather's mom,
Donna Bunnell, puts it this way: "He was a nice kid and always
presentable, but [in the days before her second wedding] we had to tell
him not to talk to anybody. He could eat and drink but, for God's sake,
don't talk to the guests about the food's chemical composition."

Not even his scout troop was spared David's scientific enthusiasm. He
once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an
overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of
artificial tanning. One summer at scout camp, David's fellow campers
blew a hole in the communal tent when they accidentally ignited the
stockpile of powdered magnesium he had brought to make fireworks.
Another year, David was expelled from camp when--while most of his
friends were sneaking into the nearby Girl Scouts' camp--he stole a
number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his
experiments. "Our summer vacation was screwed up when we got a call
telling us to pick David up early from camp," his stepmother recalls
with a sigh.

Up to this point the most illicit of David's concoctions were fireworks
and moonshine. But convinced that David's experiments and increasingly
erratic behavior were signs that he was making and selling drugs, Ken
and Kathy began to spot-check the public library, where David told them
he studied. In variably, David would be there as promised, surrounded by
a huge pile of chemistry books. But Ken and Kathy were not assuaged,
and, worried that he would level their home, they prohibited David from
being there alone, locking him out when they were away, even on quick
errands, and setting a time for their return so that he could get back
in. Kathy began routinely searching David's room and disposing of any
chemicals and equipment she found hidden under the bed and deep within
the closet.

David was not deterred. One night as Ken and Kathy were sitting in the
living room watching TV, 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. He was rushed to the
hospital to have his eyes flushed, but even months later David had to
make regular trips to an ophthalmologist to have pieces of the plastic
phosphorus container plucked carefully from his eyes.

Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted
his base of operations to his mother's potting shed in Golf Manor. Both
Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he
spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up
to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in
the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there
until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited
education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but
that "what he told me went right over my head." One thing still sticks
out, though. David's potting-shed project had something to do with
creating energy. "He'd say, `One of these days we're gonna run out of
oil.' He wanted to do something about that."

The force hidden in the atom will be turned into light and heat and
power for everyday uses. Chemists of the future, working with their
brother-scientists, the physicists, will find new ways of harnessing and
using the atoms of numerous elements--some of them unknown to the
scientists of today. Do you want to share in the making of that
astonishing and promising future?

--The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

Like Michael, few people whom David confided in understood what he was
doing. Ken Hahn, who had taken chemistry courses in college, could
follow some of what David told him but thought he was exaggerating for
attention. "I never saw him turn green or glow in the dark," he says. "I
was probably too easy on him."

It probably didn't feel that way to David. Although Ken is immensely
proud of David's experiments now that they have a certain notoriety, at
the time they represented a breakdown in discipline. As fathers are wont
to do, Ken felt the solution lay in a goal that he didn't himself
achieve as a child--Eagle Scout. As teenagers are wont to do, David
subverted that goal.

In addition to showing "scout spirit," Eagle Scouts must earn twenty-one
merit badges. Eleven are mandatory, such as First Aid and Citizenship in
the Community. The final ten are optional; scouts can choose from dozens
of choices ranging from American Business to Woodwork. David elected to
earn a merit badge in Atomic Energy. His scoutmaster, Joe Auito, who
lives on a rural road an hour or so north of Detroit and who resembles
an aging Deadhead rather than the rock-ribbed conservative I'd expected,
says he's the only boy to have done so in the history of Clinton
Township Troop 371. David's Atomic Energy merit-badge pamphlet was
brazenly pro-nuclear, which is no surprise since it was prepared with
the help of Westinghouse Electric, the American Nuclear Society, and the
Edison Electric Institute, a trade group of utility companies, some of
which run nuclear power plants. The pamphlet judiciously states that
America is a democracy and "the people decide what the country will do."
The pamphlet goes on to suggest, however, that critics of atomic energy
were descended from a long line of naysayers and malcontents, warning
that "if America decides for or against nuclear power plants based on
fear and misunderstanding, that is wrong. We must first know the truth
about atomic energy before we can decide to use it or to stop it."

David was awarded his Atomic Energy merit badge on May 10, 1991, five
months shy of his fifteenth birthday. To earn it he made a drawing
showing how nuclear fission occurs, visited a hospital radiology unit to
learn about the medical uses of radioisotopes,(1) and built a model
reactor using a juice can, coat hangers, soda straws, kitchen matches,
and rubber bands. By now, though, David had far grander ambitions. As
Auito's wife and troop treasurer, Barbara, recalls: "The typical kid
[working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor's office and
asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a
reactor."

What is a breeder reactor? This simplistic description comes from a
publication that David obtained from the Department of Energy (DOE):
"Imagine you have a car and begin a long drive. When you start, you have
half a tank of gas. When you return home, instead of being nearly empty,
your gas tank is full. A breeder reactor is like this magic car. A
breeder reactor not only generates electricity, but it also produces new
fuel."

All reactors, conventional and breeder, rely on a critical pile of a
naturally radioactive element--typically uranium-235 or
plutonium-239--as the "fuel" for a sustained chain of reactions known as
fission. Fission occurs when a neutron combines with the nucleus of a
radioisotope, say uranium-235, transforming it into uranium-236. This
new isotope is highly unstable and immediately splits in half, forming
two smaller nuclei, and releasing a great deal of radiant energy (some
of which is heat) and several neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by
other uranium-235 atoms to begin the process again.

A breeder reactor is configured so that a core of plutonium-239 is
surrounded by a "blanket" of uranium-238. When the plutonium gives off
neutrons, they are absorbed by the uranium-238 to become uranium-239,
which in turn decays by emitting beta rays and is transformed into
neptunium-239. Following another stage of "radioactive decay," neptunium
becomes plutonium-239, which can replenish the fuel core.

The nuclear industry used to tout breeders as the magical solution to
the nation's energy needs. The government had opened up two experimental
breeders at a test site in Idaho by 1961. Amid great fanfare, in 1963
Detroit Edison opened the Enrico Fermi I power plant, the nation's first
and only commercially run breeder reactor. The following decade,
Congress appropriated billions of dollars for the Clinch River Breeder
Reactor in Tennessee. Hopes ran so high that Glenn Seaborg, chairman of
the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon years, predicted that
breeders would be the backbone of an emerging nuclear economy and that
plutonium might be "a logical contender to replace gold as the standard
of our monetary system."

Such optimism proved to be unwarranted. The first Idaho breeder had to
be shut down after suffering a partial core meltdown; the second breeder
generated electricity but not new fuel. The Fermi plant--located just 60
miles from Clinton Township--was plagued by mechanical problems,
accidents, and budget overruns, and produced electricity so expensive
that Detroit Edison never even bothered to break down the costs. In
1966, the plant's core suffered a partial meltdown after the cooling
system malfunctioned; six years later the plant was shut down
permanently. In 1983, when it was estimated that completion costs would
deplete much of the federal budget for energy research and development,
Congress finally killed the Clinch River program.

If he knew of such setbacks, David was in no way deterred by them. His
inspiration came from the nuclear pioneers of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries: Antoine Henri Becquerel, the French physicist
who, along with Pierre and Marie Curie, received the Nobel Prize in
chemistry in 1903 for discovering radioactivity; Fredic and Irene
Joliot-Curie, who received the prize in 1935 for producing the first
artificial radioisotope; Sir James Chadwick, who won the Nobel Prize in
physics the same year for discovering the neutron; and Enrico Fermi, who
created the world's first sustainable nuclear chain reaction, a crucial
step leading to the production of atomic energy and atomic bombs.(2)

Unlike his predecessors, however, David did not have vast financial
support from the state, no laboratory save for a musty potting shed, no
proper instruments or safety devices, and, by far his chief impediment,
no legal means of obtaining radioactive materials. To get around this
last obstacle, David utilized a number of cover stories and concocted
identities, plus a Geiger-counter kit he ordered from a mail-order house
in Scottsdale, Arizona, which he assembled and mounted to the dashboard
of his burgundy Pontiac 6000.

David hadn't hit on the idea to try to build a breeder reactor when he
began his nuclear experiments at the age of fifteen, but in a step down
that path, he was already determined to "irradiate anything" he could.
To do that he had to build a "gun" that could bombard isotopes with
neutrons. David wrote to a number of groups listed in his merit-badge
pamphlet--the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the American
Nuclear Society, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Atomic
Industrial Forum, the nuclear-power industry's trade group--in hopes of
discovering how he might obtain, from both natural and commercial
sources, the radioactive raw materials he needed to build his neutron
gun and experiment with it. By writing up to twenty letters a day and
claiming to be a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School,
David says he obtained "tons" of information from those and other
groups, though some of it was of only marginal value. The American
Nuclear Society sent David a teacher's guide called "Goin' Fission,"
which featured an Albert Einstein cartoon character: "I'm Albert. Und
today, ve are gonna go fission. No, ve don't need any smelly bait and
der won't be any fish to clean. I mean fission, not fishin'."

Other organizations proved to be far more helpful, and none more than
the NRC. Again posing as a physics teacher, David managed to engage the
agency's director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, in
a scientific discussion by mail. Erb offered David tips on isolating
certain radioactive elements, provided a list of isotopes that can
sustain a chain reaction, and imparted a piece of information that would
soon prove to be vital to David's plans: "Nothing produces neutrons ...
as well as beryllium." When David asked Erb about the risks posed by
such radioactive materials, the NRC official assured "Professor Hahn"
that the "real dangers are very slight," since possession "of any
radioactive materials in quantities and forms sufficient to pose any
hazard is subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or equivalent)
licensing." David says the NRC also sent him pricing data and commercial
sources for some of the radioactive wares he wanted to purchase,
ostensibly for the benefit of his eager students. "The NRC gave me all
the information I needed," he later recalled. "All I had to do was go
out and get the materials."

The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the
average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff.... But curiously
little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is
of most urgent interest to all of us, namely, "How difficult are these
things to manufacture?"

--George Orwell, "You and the Atom Bomb," 1945

Armed with information from his friends in government and industry,
David typed up a list of sources for fourteen radioactive
isotopes..Americium-241, he learned from the Boy Scout atomic-energy
booklet, could be found in smoke detectors; radium-226, in antique
luminous dial clocks; uranium-238 and minute quantities of uranium-235,
in a black ore called pitchblende; and thorium-232, in Coleman-style gas
lanterns.

To obtain americium-241, David contacted smoke-detector companies and
claimed that he needed a large number of the devices for a school
project. One company agreed to sell him about a hundred broken detectors
for a dollar apiece. (He also tried to "collect" detectors while at
scout camp.) David wasn't sure where the americium-241 was located, so
he wrote to BRK Electronics in Aurora, Illinois. A customer-service
representative named Beth Weber wrote back to say she'd be happy to help
out with "your report." She explained that each detector contains only a
tiny amount of americium-241, which is sealed in a gold matrix "to make
sure that corrosion does not break it down and release it." Thanks to
Weber's tip, David extracted the americium components and then welded
them together with a blowtorch.

As it decays, americium-241 emits alpha rays composed of protons and
neutrons. David put the lump of americium inside a hollow block of lead
with a tiny hole pricked in one side so that alpha rays would stream
out. In front of the lead block he placed a sheet of aluminum. Aluminum
atoms absorb alpha rays and in the process kick out neutrons. Since
neutrons have no charge, and thus cannot be measured by a Geiger
counter, David had no way of knowing whether the gun was working until
he recalled that paraffin throws off protons when hit by neutrons. David
aimed the apparatus at some paraffin, and his Geiger counter registered
what he assumed was a proton stream. His neutron gun, crude but
effective, was ready.

With neutron gun in hand, David was ready to irradiate. He could have
concentrated on transforming previously nonradioactive elements, but in
a decision that was both indicative of his personality and instrumental
to his later attempt to build a breeder reactor, he wanted to use the
gun on radioisotopes to increase the chances of making them fissionable.
He thought that uranium-235, which is used in atomic weapons, would
provide the "biggest reaction." He scoured hundreds of miles of upper
Michigan in his Pontiac looking for "hot rocks" with his Geiger counter,
but all he could find was a quarter trunkload of pitchblende on the
shores of Lake Huron. Deciding to pursue a more bureaucratic approach,
he wrote to a Czechoslovakian firm that sells uranium to commercial and
university buyers, whose name was provided, he told me, by the NRC.
Claiming to be a professor buying materials for a nuclear-research
laboratory, he obtained a few samples of a black ore--either pitchblende
or uranium dioxide, both of which contain small amounts of uranium-235
and uranium-238.

David pulverized the ores with a hammer, thinking that he could then use
nitric acid to isolate uranium. Unable to find a commercial source for
nitric acid--probably because it is used in the manufacture of
explosives and thus is tightly controlled--David made his own 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." Next he poured the "milk shake"
through a coffee filter, hoping that the uranium would pass through the
filter. But David miscalculated uranium's solubility, and whatever
amount was present was trapped in the filter, making it difficult to
purify further.

Frustrated at his inability to isolate sufficient supplies of uranium,
David turned his attention to thorium-232, which when bombarded with
neutrons produces uranium-233, a man-made fissionable element (and,
although he might not have known it then, one that can be substituted
for plutonium in breeder reactors). Discovered in 1828 and named after
the Norse god Thor, thorium has a very high melting point, and is thus
used in the manufacture of airplane engine parts that reach extremely
high temperatures. David knew from his merit-badge pamphlet that the
"mantle" used in commercial gas lanterns--the part that looks like a
doll's stocking and conducts the flame--is coated with a compound
containing thorium-232. He bought thousands of lantern mantles from
surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of
ash.

David still had to isolate the thorium-232 from the ash. Fortunately, he
remembered reading in one of his dad's chemistry books that lithium is
prone to binding with oxygen--meaning, in this context, that it would
rob thorium dioxide of its oxygen content and leave a cleaner form of
thorium. David purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and extracted
the element by cutting the batteries in half with a pair of wire
cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium dioxide together in a ball of
aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. Eureka! David's
method purified thorium to at least 9,000 times the level found in
nature and 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.

At this point, David could have used his americium neutron gun to
transform thorium-232 into fissionable uranium-233. But the americium he
had was not capable of producing enough neutrons, so he began preparing
radium for an improved irradiating gun.

Radium was used in paint that rendered luminescent the faces of clocks
and automobile and airplane instrument panels until the late 1960s, when
it was discovered that many clock painters, who routinely licked their
brushes to make a fine point, died of cancer. David began visiting
junkyards and antiques stores in search of radium-coated dashboard
panels or clocks. Once he found such an item, he'd chip paint from the
instruments and collect it in pill vials. It was slow going until one
day, driving through Clinton Township to visit his girlfriend, Heather,
he noticed that his Geiger counter went wild as he passed Gloria's
Resale Boutique/Antique. The proprietor, Gloria Genette, still recalls
the day when she was called at home by a store employee who said that a
polite young man was anxious to buy an old table clock with a tinted
green dial but wondered if she'd come down in price. She would. David
bought the clock for $10. Inside he discovered a vial of radium paint
left behind by a worker either accidentally or as a courtesy so that the
clock's owner could touch up the dial when it began to fade. David was
so overjoyed that he dropped by the boutique later that night to leave a
note for Gloria, telling her that if she received another "luminus [sic]
clock" to contact him immediately. "I will pay any some [sic] of money
to obtain one."

To concentrate the radium, David secured a sample of barium sulfate from
the X-ray ward at a local hospital (staff there handed over the
substance because they remembered him from his merit-badge project) and
heated it until it liquefied. After mixing the barium sulfate with the
radium paint chips, he strained the brew through a coffee filter into a
beaker that began to glow. This time, David had judged the solubility of
the two substances correctly; the radium solution passed through to the
beaker. He then dehydrated the solution into crystalline salts, which he
could pack into the cavity of another lead block to build a new gun.

Whether David fully realized it or not, by handling purified radium he
was truly putting himself in danger. Nevertheless, he now proceeded to
acquire another neutron emitter to replace the aluminum used in his
previous neutron gun. Faithful to Erb's instructions, he secured a strip
of beryllium (which is a much richer source of neutrons than aluminum)
from the chemistry department at Macomb Community College--a friend who
attended the school swiped it for him--and placed it in front of the
lead block that held the radium. His cute little americium gun was now a
more powerful radium gun. David began to bombard his thorium and uranium
powders in the hopes of producing at least some fissionable atoms. He
measured the results with his Geiger counter, but while the thorium
seemed to grow more radioactive, the uranium remained a disappointment.

Once again, "Professor Hahn" sprang into action, writing his old friend
Erb at the NRC to discuss the problem. The NRC had the answer. David's
neutrons were too "fast" for the uranium).(3) He would have to slow them
down using a filter of water, deuterium, or tritium. Water would have
sufficed, but David likes a challenge. Consulting his list of
commercially available radioactive sources, he discovered that tritium,
a radioactive material used to boost the power of nuclear weapons, is
found in glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights, which David promptly
bought from sporting-goods stores and mail-order catalogues. He removed
the tritium contained in a waxy substance inside the sights, and then,
using a variety of pseudonyms, returned the sights to the store or
manufacturer for repair--each time collecting another tiny quantity of
tritium. When he had enough, David smeared the waxy substance over the
beryllium strip and targeted the gun at uranium powder. He carefully
monitored the results with his Geiger counter over several weeks, and it
appeared that the powder was growing more radioactive by the day.

Now seventeen, David hit on the idea of building a model breeder
reactor. He knew that without a critical pile of at least thirty pounds
of enriched uranium he had no chance of initiating a sustained chain
reaction, but he was determined to get as far as he could by trying to
get his various radioisotopes to interact with one another. That way, he
now says, "no matter what happened there would be something changing
into something--some kind of action going on there." His blueprint was a
schematic of a checkerboard breeder reactor he'd seen in one of his
father's college textbooks. Ignoring any thought of safety, David took
the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead
casings and, after another round of filing and pulverizing, mixed those
isotopes with beryllium and aluminum shavings, all of which he wrapped
in aluminum foil. What were once the neutron sources for his guns became
a makeshift "core" for his reactor. He surrounded this radioactive ball
with a "blanket" composed of tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and
uranium powder, which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon
cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape.

David monitored his "breeder reactor" at the Golf Manor laboratory with
his Geiger counter. "It was radioactive as heck," he says. "The level of
radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of
assembly. I know I transformed some radioactive materials. Even though
there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on
in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent."

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, began to
realize that, sustained reaction or not, he could be putting himself and
others in danger. (One tip-off was when the radiation was detectable
through concrete.) Jim 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. "Reactors get hot, it's
just a fact," Miller, a nervous, skinny twenty-two-year-old, said during
an interview at a Burger King in Clinton Township where he worked as a
cook. David purchased a set of cobalt drill bits at a local hardware
store and inserted them between the thorium and uranium cubes. But the
cobalt wasn't sufficient. When his Geiger counter began picking up
radiation five doors down from his mom's house, David decided that he
had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble
the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets in a shoebox that he hid in
his mother's house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and
packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac
6000.

WASTE DISPOSAL. If you can dump your waste directly into the kitchen
drain (NOT into the sink), you are all right. If not, collect it in a
plastic pail to be thrown out when you're finished.

--The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

At 2:40 A.M. on August 31, 1994, the Clinton Township police responded
to a call concerning a young man who had been spotted in a residential
neighborhood, apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police
arrived, David told them he was waiting to meet a friend. Unconvinced,
officers decided to search his car. When they opened the trunk they
discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape for
good measure. The trunk also contained over fifty foil-wrapped cubes of
mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects,
lantern mantles, mercury switches, a clock face, ores, fireworks, vacuum
tubes, and assorted chemicals and acids.The police were especially
alarmed by the toolbox, which David warned them was radioactive and
which they feared was an atomic bomb.

For reasons that are hard to fathom, Sergeant Joseph Mertes, one of the
arresting officers, ordered a car containing what he noted in his report
was "a potential improvised explosive device" to be towed to police
headquarters. "It probably shouldn't have been done, but we thought that
the car had been used in the commission of a crime," Police Chief Al
Ernst now says sheepishly. "When I came in at 6:30 in the morning it was
already there."

The police called in the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad to examine the
Pontiac and the State Department of Public Health (DPH) to supply
radiological assistance. The good news, the two teams discovered, was
that David's toolbox was not an atomic bomb. The bad news was that
David's trunk did contain radioactive materials, including
concentrations of thorium--"not found in nature, at least not in
Michigan"--and americium. That discovery automatically triggered the
Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state officials soon
were embroiled in tense phone consultations with the DOE, EPA, FBI, and
NRC.

With the police, David was largely uncooperative and taciturn. He
provided his father's address but didn't mention his mother's house or
his potting-shed laboratory. It wasn't until Thanksgiving Day that Dave
Minnaar, a DPH radiological expert, finally interviewed David. David
told Minnaar that he had been trying to make thorium in a form he could
use to produce energy and that he hoped "his successes would help him
earn his Eagle Scout status." David also finally admitted to having a
backyard laboratory.

On November 29, state radiological experts surveyed the potting shed.
They found aluminum pie pans, jars of acids, Pyrex cups, milk crates,
and other materials strewn about, much of it contaminated with what
subsequent official reports would call "excessive levels" of radioactive
material, especially americium-241 and thorium-232. How high? A
vegetable can, for example, registered at 50,000 counts per
minute--about 1,000 times higher than normal levels of background
radiation. But although Minnaar's troops didn't know it at the time,
they conducted their survey long after David's mother, alerted by Ken
and Kathy and petrified that the government would take her home away as
a result of her son's experiments, had ransacked the shed and discarded
most of what she found, including his neutron gun, the radium, pellets
of thorium that were far more radioactive than what the health officials
found, and several quarts of radioactive powder. "The funny thing is,"
David now says, "they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the
good stuff."

After determining that no radioactive materials had leaked outside the
shed, state authorities sealed it and petitioned the federal government
for help. The NRC licenses nuclear plants and research facilities and
deals with any nuclear accidents that take place at those sites. David,
of course, was not an NRC-licensed operation, so it was determined that
the EPA, which responds to emergencies involving lost or abandoned
atomic materials, should be contacted for assistance. In a memo to the
EPA's Emergency Response and Enforcement Branch, the Department of
Public Health noted that the materials discovered in David's lab were
regulated under the Federal Atomic Energy Act and that the "extent of
the radioactive material contamination within a private citizen's
property beg for a controlled remediation that is beyond our authority
or resources to oversee."

EPA officials arrived in Golf Manor on January 25, 1995--five months
after David had been stopped by the police--to conduct their own survey
of the shed. Their "action memo" noted that conditions at the site
"present an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health or
welfare or the environment," and that there was "actual or potential
exposure to nearby human populations, animals, or food chain...." The
memo further stated that adverse conditions such as heavy wind, rain, or
fire could cause the "contaminants to migrate or be released."

A Superfund cleanup took place between June 26 and 28 at a cost of about
$60,000. After the moon-suited workers dismantled the potting shed with
electric saws, they loaded the remains into thirty-nine sealed barrels
placed aboard a semitrailer bound for Envirocare, a dump facility
located in the middle of the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains
of David's experiments were entombed along with tons of low-level
radioactive debris from the government's atomic-bomb factories,
plutonium-production facilities, and contaminated industrial sites.
According to the official assessment, there was no noticeable damage to
flora or fauna in the back yard in Golf Manor, but 40,000 nearby
residents could have been put at risk during David's years of
experimentation due to the dangers posed by the release of radioactive
dust and radiation.

Last May, I made the 90-mile drive from Detroit to Lansing, where Dave
Minnaar works in a dreary building that houses several state
environmental agencies. Because Patty Hahn had cleaned out the shed
before Minnaar's men arrived on the scene, he never knew that David had
built neutron guns or that he had obtained radium. Nor did he
understand, until I told him, that the cubes of thorium powder found by
police at the time of David's arrest were the building blocks for a
model breeder reactor. "These are conditions that regulatory agencies
never envision," says Minnaar. "It's simply presumed that the average
person wouldn't have the technology or materials required to experiment
in these areas."

"The real danger ... lies in the radioactive properties of these
elements. [Some] migrate to the bone marrow, where their radiation
interferes with the production of red blood cells. Less than
one-millionth of a gram can be fatal."

--from David's notes

David went into a serious depression after the federal authorities shut
down his laboratory. Years of painstaking work had been thrown in the
garbage or buried beneath the sands of Utah. Students at Chippewa Valley
had taken to calling him "Radioactive Boy," and when his girlfriend,
Heather, sent David Valentine's balloons at his high school, they were
seized by the principal, who apparently feared they had been inflated
with chemical gases David needed to continue his experiments. In a final
indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David
his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit-badge
activities had endangered the community.

In the fall of 1995, Ken and Kathy demanded that David enroll in Macomb
Community College. He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his
classes and spent much of the day in bed or driving in circles around
their block. Finally, Ken and Kathy gave him an ultimatum: Join the
armed forces or move out of the house. They called the local recruiting
office, which sent a representative to their house or called nearly
every day until David finally gave in. After completing boot camp last
year, he was stationed on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft
carrier.

Alas, David's duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and
potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep,
David stays up studying topics that interest him--currently steroids,
melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids,
and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the
ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous
exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the
radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through
ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and
organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer.
Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a
relatively small, enclosed space is most worrisome of all. Back in 1995,
the EPA arranged for David to undergo a full examination at the nearby
Fermi nuclear power plant. David, fearful of what he might learn,
refused. Now, though, he's looking ahead. "I wanted to make a scratch in
life," he explains when I ask him about his early years of nuclear
research. "I've still got time. I don't believe I took more than five
years off of my life."

(1) Individual atoms of an element have the same number of protons in
their nuclei. This "atomic number" determines the element's chemical
properties and position in the periodic table. The number of neutrons
within atoms of the same elements can vary, however. Known as isotopes,
these variations have unique physical properties because the number of
neutrons affects the atom's mass. Most elements have at least two
naturally occurring, stable isotopes. But isotopes of heavier elements
(those with more protons) are often unstable. Called radioisotopes, and
often artificially produced, these nuclei undergo some form of
radioactive decay--alpha, beta, or gamma--to become more stable. In
alpha decay, the nucleus loses two protons and two neutrons, thus
transforming into another element two atomic numbers below it on the
periodic table. In beta decay, either a neutron is converted into a
proton, and the atomic number rises, or the opposite occurs, pushing the
atomic number down. Gamma radiation--in which energy is emitted but no
transformation occurs--can accompany alpha or beta decay (where the
atomic number falls) or can occur on its own. Americium-241, for
example, is a radioisotope of americium. Its atomic number is 95, its
atomic mass number is 241, and it becomes neptunium-237 through alpha
decay.

(2) Another role model, similar to David in temperament, was the
Englishman Francis William Aston. He invented the mass spectrograph in
1920, which he used to identify more than 200 isotopes. As a child,
writes Richard Rhodes, Aston "made picric-acid bombs from soda-bottle
cartridges and designed and launched huge tissue-paper fire
balloons...."

(3) Manhattan Project scientists discovered that some neutrons can move
at speeds of about 17 million miles per hour. If they are slowed down or
"moderated," to about 5,000 miles per hour, they have a better chance of
being absorbed by another atom.

Ken Silverstein's last article for Harper's Magazine, "The Boeing
Formation," appeared in the May 1997 issue. He lives in Washington, D.C.