Radioactive Boy Scout

In his biography The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor (2004), American author and journalist Ken Silverstein chronicles the exploits of David Hahn, a boy scout in suburban Michigan who, at the age of seventeen, sought to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard. The book is an expansion of a Harper's Magazine article published by Silverstein in 1998.

Born in 1976 in Royal Oak, Michigan, David Hahn spent weekends at his mother's house in Commerce Township, a suburb of Detroit. A Boy Scout with an intense fascination with chemistry, Hahn frequently conducted amateur chemistry experiments, some of which ended in small explosions and property damage. A particularly alarming incident occurred at his father and stepmother's house when, one night, "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." From that point on, Hahn was forced to relocate his operations to his mother's backyard, limiting his experiments to the weekends.

After reading The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, Hahn was inspired to collect a sample of every element on the Periodic Table. This included synthetic and non-synthetic radioactive elements like americium. Having achieved a Boy Scout merit badge in atomic energy, Hahn embarked on a personal quest to build a breeder reactor in his backyard. A breeder reactor is an early type of nuclear reactor that can create energy using elements like thorium rather than enriched uranium, which would be prohibitively difficult for a teenager to obtain. In defining a breeder reactor in layperson's terms, Silverstein quotes the US Department of Energy: "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."

Over time, Hahn began to extract and amass radioactive material from various household products. He extracted americium from smoke detectors, tritium from rifle-sights, radium from clocks, and most importantly, thorium from camping lanterns. Hahn also purchased one thousand dollars worth of batteries to extract the lithium from them. In many cases, Hahn learned how to extract and combine these radioactive elements by calling and writing to chemistry and nuclear professionals, posing as an adult researcher or high school teacher. Hahn was largely successful in these gambits, despite the fact that his letters frequently contained misspellings or elementary science errors that should have signaled to the recipients that Hahn was not who he claimed to be. Silverstein writes, "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."

In addition to the lack of oversight from adults, Silverstein claims that Hahn was especially impressionable and naive in his obsession with The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Published in 1960 by Robert Brent, the book presents an unrealistically optimistic perspective of the benefits to individuals and humanity held in the mysteries of chemistry and physics. Despite the fact that the book was published a mere fifteen years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it never stops to consider that the consequences of scientific inquiry and experimentation may have costly effects to humanity. It also contains shockingly quaint guidelines on waste disposal, such as advising chemists to dump toxic chemicals down the kitchen sink. Silverstein also conveys the extent to which ignorance of the harmful effects of radioactive material extends beyond backyard scientists like Hahn. In the early 1900s, for example, pharmacies sold radium elixirs designed to lower blood pressure, treat arthritis, and achieve "sexual rejuvenescence."

Hahn hoped to build a breeder reactor that would irradiate material like thorium into isotopes capable of fission, thus producing nuclear energy. While handling these radioactive materials, Hahn used common household items like pickle jars and coffee filters, exhibiting a sense of ingenuity and ignorance all at once. While what Hahn built couldn't technically be described as a successful breeder reactor, it did emit dangerous levels of radiation, up to one thousand times in excess of normal background radiation. "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."

A few days later, police responded to reports of a suspicious male stealing tires. By sheer chance, the police came upon Hahn sitting in his car waiting for a friend. Upon searching his car, the police discovered the strange equipment in his trunk and called in a bomb squad. Upon determining the true nature of the equipment, a Federal Regulatory Emergency Response was triggered, and the EPA, in consultation with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, designated the property as a Superfund site. While Hahn refused to undergo medical procedures to determine his level of radioactive exposure, the EPA believes that Hahn's life expectancy will be significantly reduced.

According to Scientific American, The Radioactive Boy Scout is "at once an engaging walk through a challenging set of scientific problems and a chilling look at what can happen when scientific problems are stripped out of their real-life context of potential impacts for good and for ill that stretch across time and space and impact people who aren't even aware of the scientific work being undertaken."