Note: This article is being reprinted here as an example of what NOT to do
with radioactive materials. Please do NOT attempt to recreate any part of these
experiments for the following reasons:

You will most likely poison
yourself and/or others

Nobody really needs an unsafe homemade reactor
(especially one made of duct tape and foil)

If enough people try these
dangerous experiments, the government will try to outlaw any sort of legitimate
private experiments with radioactivity or possession of any radioactive minerals
or materials (thus spoiling all of our fun).

What happened when a teenager tried a dangerous experiment in his back
yard

Tale of the Radioactive Boy Scout.

FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE BY KEN SILVERSTEIN

Golf Manor, a subdivision in Commerce Township, Mich., some 25 miles
outside of Detroit, is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to
happen, where the only thing lurking around the corner is an ice-cream truck.
But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day.

Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down
Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in
respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed
with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with
radioactive warning signs.

Huddled with a group of neighbors, Pease was
nervous. "I was pretty disturbed," she recalls. Publicly, the employees of the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that day said there was nothing to fear.
The truth is far more bizarre: the shed was dangerously irradiated and,
according to the EPA, up to 40,000 residents of the area could be at
risk.

The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had
attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout
merit-badge project.

Grander Ambitions

David Hahn's early years were seemingly ordinary. The blond, gangly
boy played baseball and soccer, and joined the Boy Scouts. His parents, Ken and
Patty, had divorced, and David lived with his father and stepmother, Kathy, in
nearby Clinton Township. He spent weekends in Golf Manor with his mother and her
boyfriend, Michael Polasek.

An abrupt change came at age ten, when
Kathy's father gave David The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. David
became immersed. By age 12 he had digested his father's college chemistry
textbooks; by 14 he had made nitroglycerin.

One night his house in
Clinton Township was rocked by an explosion in the basement. Ken and Kathy found
David semiconscious on the floor. He had been pounding some substance with a
screwdriver and ignited it. He was rushed to the hospital to have his eyes
flushed.

Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he
shifted his operations to his mother's shed in Golf Manor. Neither Patty nor
Michael had any idea what the shy teenager was up to, although they thought it
was odd that David often wore a mask in the shed, and would sometimes discard
his clothing after working there until two in the morning. They chalked it up to
their own limited education.

Michael does, however, remember David
saying, "One of these days we're gonna run out of oil."

Convinced he
needed discipline, David's father, Ken, felt the solution lay in a goal that he
didn't himself achieve, Eagle Scout, which requires 21 merit badges. David
earned a merit badge in Atomic Energy in May 1991, five months shy of his 15th
birthday. By now, though, he had grander ambitions.

Concocted identity

He was determined to irradiate anything he could, and decided to
build a neutron "gun." To obtain radioactive materials, David used a number of
cover stories and concocted a new identity.

He wrote to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC), claiming to be a physics instructor at Chippewa
Valley High School. The agency's director of isotope production and
distribution, Donald Erb, offered him tips on isolating and obtaining
radioactive elements, and explained the characteristics of some isotopes, which,
when bombarded with neutrons, can sustain a chain reaction.

When David
asked about the risks, Erb assured him that the "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 learned that a tiny amount of the radioactive isotope
americium-241 could be found in smoke detectors. he contacted smoke-detector
companies and claimed that he needed a large number for a school project. One
company sold him about a hundred broken detectors for a dollar
apiece.

Not sure where the americium was located, he wrote to an
electronics firm in Illinois. A customer-service representative wrote back to
say she'd be happy to help out with "your report." Thanks to her help, David
extracted the material. He put the 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 block he placed a sheet of aluminum, its atoms absorb alpha rays and kick
out neutrons. His neutron gun was ready.

The mantle in gas lanterns, the
small cloth pouch over the flame, is coated with a compound containing
thorium-232. When bombarded with neutrons it produces uranium-233, which is
fissionable. David bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and
blowtorched them into a pile of ash.

To isolate the thorium from the ash,
he purchased $1000 worth of lithium batteries and cut them in half with wire
cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium ash together in a ball of aluminum
foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. This purified the thorium to at
least 9000 times the level found in nature, and up to 170 times the level that
requires NRC licensing. But David's americium gun wasn't strong enough to
transform thorium into uranium.

More Help From the NRC

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, he fell behind in school, scoring
poorly on state math and reading tests (he did, however, ace the test in
science).

Wanting radium for a new gun, David began visiting junkyards
and antique stores in search of radium-coated clocks. He'd chip paint from them
and collect it.

It was slow going until one day, while driving through
Clinton Township, he says he came across an old table clock in an antique shop.
In the hack of the clock he discovered a vial of radium paint. He bought the
clock for $10.

Next he concentrated the the radium and dried it into a
salt form. Whether he fully realized it or not, he was putting himself in
danger.

The NRC's Erb had told him that "nothing produces neutrons from
alpha reactions as well as beryllium." David says he had a friend swipe a strip
of beryllium from a chemistry lab, then 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 had located some pitchblende, an ore containing tiny
amounts of uranium, and pulverized it with a hammer. He aimed the gun at the
powder, hoping to produce at least some fissionable atoms. It didn't work. The
neutron particles, the bullets in his gun, were moving too fast.

To slow
them down, he added a filter, then targeted his gun again. This time the uranium
powder appeared to grow more radioactive by the day.

"Imminent Danger"

Now 17, David hit on the idea of building a model breeder reactor, a
nuclear reactor that not only generates electricity, but also produces new fuel.
His model would use the actual radioactive elements and produce real reactions.
His blueprint was a schematic in one of his father's textbooks.

Ignoring
safety, David mixed his radium and americium with beryllium and aluminum, all of
which he wrapped in aluminum foil, forming a makeshift reactor core. He
surrounded this radioactive ball with a blanket of small foil-wrapped cubes of
thorium ash and uranium powder, tenuously held together with duct
tape.

"It was radioactive as heck," David says, "far greater than at the
time of assembly." Then he began to realize that he could be putting himself and
others in danger.

When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation
five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive
stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the
material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the
rest into the trunk of his Pontiac.

At 2:40 a.m. on August 31, 1994,
Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been
apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them
he was meeting a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his
car.

They opened the trunk and discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock
and sealed with duct tape. The trunk also contained foil-wrapped cubes of
mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, and mercury
switches. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David said
was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.

The discovery
eventually triggered the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state
officials would become involved in consultations with the EPA and NRC.

At
the shed, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a Pyrex cup, a milk
crate and other materials strewn about, contaminated at up to 1000 times the
normal levels of background radiation. Because some of this could be moved
around by wind and rain, conditions at the site, according to an EPA memo,
"present an imminent endangerment to public health."

After the
moon-suited workers dismantled the shed, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed
barrels that were trucked to the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of
David's experiments were entombed with other radioactive debris.

"These are conditions that regulations never
envision," says Dave Minnaar, radiological expert with Michigan's Department of
Environmental Quality. "It's simply presumed that the average person wouldn't
have the technology or materials required to experiment in these
areas."

David Hahn is now in the Navy, where he reads about steroids,
melanin, genetic codes, prototype reactors, amino acids and criminal law. "I
wanted to make a scratch in life," he explains now. "I've still got time." Of
his exposure to radioactivity he says, "I don't believe I took more than five
years off my life."

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