the Radioactive Boy Scout

john fraz · Veteran Member

the Radioactive Boy Scout

Dusty · Veteran Member

We need more people like Hahn! Really we do.

His exploits echo back to the Victorian age when, undistracted by TV, Video games (And, indeed the internet) Not to mention the "Health-and-safety-Nazis". Those with curiosity about the world arround them pursued it in their spare time. and occasionally made great discoveries. (and sometimes blew themselves up in the process )

It is interesting that many of the key discoveries in science and engineering were, historically, made by hobbyists working in their own time with their own money.

EG much early rocketry research was carried out by hobbyists, especially in Germany before the war and was really quite advanced before the government took over

It is all too easy to come home at the end of the day and slump infront of the one-eyed monster and vegitate these days.

Dusty

Taylorchef · Member

That is a great story. Please find more.

Andrew · Senior Member

You know, I find this a bit worrisome. The NRC should have become suspicious when someone was asking so many questions. This thing was fairly innocent, but image what would happen if some really twisted personality had such intentions.

GoogleNaut · Guru

I have read that they didn't become suspicious in part because of the deceptiveness of the kid's letters. As I recall, he had written several "innocent" inquiries into the NRC and found out that Am-241 was present in smoke detectors. He then wrote to several smoke detector manufacturers saying he was doing some kind of science fair project which required quite a few detector elements. He was able to purchase a bunch, and then scowered landfills for more. He ended up with the americium from several thousand smoke detectors. Still this wasn't enough for him.

He ended up buying loads of lantern mantels because the silk gasoline lantern mantels are impregnated with Thorium-oxide--and most of the thorium was the fertile 232 variety. What he was doing with the americium was creating a neutron source to breed U-233 from the Th-232 in the mantels. Crazy as this sounds--whatever he did must have partially worked. Because when the NRC finally arrived, the whole area around the house--especially the shed where the kids 'breeder reactor' was located--had to be carefully knocked down, stuffed into barrels, and some of the soil had to be stripped and sent to a rad waste facility.

Perhaps what is most worrisome is that if a kid can do something like this, then a country like Iran should find little difficulty in doing it on a much bigger scale. Most of the data and engineering is already available in almost every college library on the planet. A clever but naive kid with persistance, patience, and a little know how can create a really dangerous situation. The information and a lot of nuclear material is out there already.

The nuclear Genie is out of the bottle--and it's not going back in!

10kBq Jaro · Senior Member

GoogleNaut wrote:
Crazy as this sounds--whatever he did must have partially worked. Because when the NRC finally arrived, the whole area around the house--especially the shed where the kids 'breeder reactor' was located--had to be carefully knocked down, stuffed into barrels, and some of the soil had to be stripped and sent to a rad waste facility.

Naaaah.... this has far less to do with the kid's having achieved anything that "partially worked", than it does with NRC's obsession with minute traces of radioactivity.
The same is true of the exaggerated fear of trace amounts of other poisons, such the mercury in fluorescent lights :

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=aa7796aa-e4a5-4c06-be84-b62dee548fda
The CFL mercury nightmare

Steven Milloy, Financial Post, April 28, 2007How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favour of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn't cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as US$180 annually in energy costs -- and assuming that Bridges doesn't break any more CFLs -- it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007, and, surprisingly, environmentalists.It's quite odd that environmentalists have embraced the CFL, which cannot now and will not in the foreseeable future be made without mercury. Given that there are about five billion light bulb sockets in North American households, we're looking at the possibility of creating billions of hazardous waste sites such as the Bridges' bedroom.Usually, environmentalists want hazardous materials out of, not in, our homes. These are the same people who go berserk at the thought of mercury being emitted from power plants and the presence of mercury in seafood. Environmentalists have whipped up so much fear of mercury among the public that many local governments have even launched mercury thermometer exchange programs.As the activist group Environmental Defense urges us to buy CFLs, it defines mercury on a separate part of its Web site as a "highly toxic heavy metal that can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in fetuses and children" and as "one of the most poisonous forms of pollution."Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury-thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the United States, under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.And let's not forget about the regulatory nightmare in the U.S. known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.We'll eventually be disposing billions and billions of CFL mercury bombs. Much of the mercury from discarded and/or broken CFLs is bound to make its way into the environment and give rise to Superfund liability, which in the past has needlessly disrupted many lives, cost tens of billions of dollars and sent many businesses into bankruptcy.As each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, at the Maine "safety" standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to "safely" contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal.Not only are CFLs much more expensive than incandescent bulbs and emit light that many regard as inferior to incandescent bulbs, they pose a nightmare if they break and require special disposal procedures. Yet governments (egged on by environmentalists and the Wal-Marts of the world) are imposing on us such higher costs, denial of lighting choice, disposal hassles and breakage risks in the name of saving a few dollars every year on the electric bill? - Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk-science expert and advocate of free enterprise, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

-- Edited by 10kBq Jaro at 01:50, 2007-05-02