Daily MOS: The Nuclear Boy Scout

When the nuclear age came to America, organizations approached our friend, the atom, with varying levels of suspicion, enthusiasm, and awe. In the boy scouts, you could earn a merit badge in atomic energy by building a model of a nuclear reactor.

You know one fucking overachiever had to go and build the real thing.

Today’s Moment of Science… David Hahn, the radioactive boy scout.

There’s more than one way to split an atom, or at least different types of contraptions to do it safely. A breeder reactor creates more fissile material, i.e. material that can sustain a nuclear reaction, than it consumes. A major advantage is that it uses uranium-238 (U-238), which exists in relatively high abundance compared to the uranium-235 that’s required to fuel a conventional reactor. In a fast breeder reactor, bombard U-238 with unmoderated neutrons, and you’ll get some highly fissile plutonium-239. Thermal breeder reactors use moderated neutrons, and similar story, thorium-232 is transmuted to the fissile uranium-233.

Despite the promise of ‘fuel system that creates fuel,’ breeder reactors really haven’t caught on for a few reasons. They’re much costlier to run and maintain, and managing the waste from one of these things is a level messier than from a conventional nuclear reactor.

Like any of that was going to stand in the way of Dave Hahn’s next goddamn merit badge.

As a chemist, I can’t tell what Hahn loved more: chemistry or blowing shit up. To be fair, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Reportedly, he was changed forever after his grandfather gifted him with The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. After burning up his room, his parents’ basement became his lab. After blowing up the basement, the backyard shed became his lab.

Between igniting a pile of powdered magnesium and pounding phosphorus until it literally blew up in his face, he found a variety of interesting ways to scorch his eyebrows off.

In his early teens, he got a merit badge for a model of a nuclear reactor, which piqued his curiosity. Why not just make a real one? Getting enough enriched uranium to make a standard reactor would present a difficulty, so a fast breeder reactor was his best option. It sounds like an impossible task, to construct a nuclear, uh, anything in your backyard shed. But what was he going to do, build it in the house?

Hahn wrote to the Nuclear Regulatory Commision and, claiming to be a physics teacher, asked “so how do you build a nuclear reactor?”

They just fucking told him.

Because how on Earth would this “physics teacher” actually build a working nuclear reactor? For that you need radioactive materials.

Which are almost certainly in your home right now.

The difficulty isn’t in getting some fissile materials, it’s getting your hands on more than a smidge. So when Hahn added up a small mountain of smoke detectors with americium, clocks with radium dials, gas lanterns with thorium, and some uranium ordered from Czechoslovakia, he might have had enough to cause some mischief.

So, did he actually make a breeder reactor?

Kinda.

By the time he was 17, he’d made a “subcritical reactor” that likely produced just a bit of fissile material. In other words, it was working, but it did not produce sustained fission. I don’t care if he only made one goddamn atom of thorium. That’s far too close to the libertarian wet dream of ‘backyard nuclear reactor’ than anyone should have been able to make.

For all his brilliance, somehow he never thought “perhaps I shouldn’t store radioactive materials in my car.” When someone called the cops on him for what looked like suspicious activity, they searched his car. Telling the cops “watch out, that toolbox is radioactive” somehow didn’t have the intended effect of calming them down, and they had to call an annoying number of government agencies. It took a Superfund cleanup costing $60,000 to get his mother’s backyard reasonably non-radioactive.

I hear some people just learned about coin collecting for their scouting merit badges.

David Hahn dealt with depression and personal tragedies in the wake of the scandal. He served in both the Navy and the Marines, struggling with his mental health and drug use through most of his life.

The radioactive boy scout died in 2016 at the age of 39 from complications due to drug and alcohol use.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, a little disappointed that I missed the era when you could mail-order uranium.

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