Radioactive Boy Scout - How Teen David Hahn Built a Nuclear Reactor

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David Han also known as the radioactive Boy Scout built a nuclear reactor in his mom's backyard out of common household items when he was 17 as shocking as that is that a teenager built a nuclear reactor at his mom's house the story of what made it all possible and the terrible mess it created is even more insane David was born just outside of Detroit Michigan in 1976 his parents who both worked for General Motors when they employed basically everyone in the area unfortunately divorced when David was still very young growing up he spent most of his time living at his dad and stepmoms house and lived on the weekends at his biological mom Patty's house when he was 10 years old his grandfather his stepmoms dad gave David a seemingly harmless gift which would start this soon-to-be out-of-control train of events in motion the gift was a book called the golden book of chemistry experiments and David was instantly obsessed David set up a small laboratory in his bedroom at his father's house but this wasn't like the pretend fun beakers full of water with food coloring in them type laboratory you might normally find in a kid's room no David bought legit beakers Bunsen burners test tubes and lined his shelves with chemistry books and volumes and volumes of the Encyclopedia by 14 when most are messing around with relatively harmless experiments or making baking soda volcanoes David had fabricated nitroglycerine David was also in the Boy Scouts in one-time show up to a Boy Scout camping trip with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of cam facts intent which he claimed he was taking to test methods for artificial tanning he was literally performing experiments on himself when he was just a kid on that same trip David along with some of his fellow Scouts blew a hole in one of their tents by igniting a stockpile of magnesium David had brought along to make fireworks despite the fact that David's father and stepmom are frequently alarmed by small explosions and chemical spills in their son's bedroom they didn't put a stop to his experimentation they just made a move his lab setup down to the basement as they were tired of him destroying his room pockmarking the walls with various explosions and spilling chemicals all over the carpet this is likely where all of this should have been put to a stop but it wasn't and David started heading down an even more dangerous path with his experiments banishing him to the basement was actually the opposite of punishing david now he just had more room and more privacy to conduct his experiments he only became more obsessed and more focused on chemistry he held down a variety of afterschool jobs just so he could make money to buy materials to mess with in his laboratory soon David would do something that would cause another change in location for his laboratory he had gotten a hold of a bunch of red phosphorous basically match heads and he placed it in a glass container and started hammering it with a screwdriver and yeah it exploded he injured his hands and arms badly and he had to have glass which exploded from the container removed from his eyes he had glass shards explode into his eyes because of course David wasn't wearing goggles again this seems like the time any parent or guardian would take away the chemistry kit but in this case David just moved his lab to his biological mother's potting shed in her backyard and that's where things started to get radioactive David would spend countless hours in the shed doing god-knows-what but both his mother and his mother's boyfriend never cared to check in on him they were both just in awe of his work ethic and dedication one day David's mom's boyfriend Michael did ask him what he was up to and David responded by saying you know someday we're going to run out of oil and here we go David's dad thought that his son needed to take his obsessive work ethic and put it towards something useful becoming an Eagle Scout Eagle Scouts need to earn 21 merit badges across a variety of disciplines some are mandatory but a few of them are Scouts choice as it were you could earn a badge in business or woodworking for example but David went ahead and opted to earn a badge in atomic energy which raised a red flag to absolutely no one even though David was the only Scout in the troops history to go after that merit badge any out of history of blowing himself up David put together an information pamphlet with the help of several utility companies to go towards earning his atomic energy badge the general gist of the pamphlet was that nuclear energy was good nuclear energy was vital and nuclear energy needed to be studied more he also made a chart explaining nuclear fission and a harmless toy model nuclear reactor using a juice can coathangers soda straws kitchen matches in a rubber band david also had the opportunity to visit a hospital's radiology unit to learn how they use radioactive isotopes and in the end David was awarded his atomic energy merit badge on May 10th 1991 just a few months before his 15th birthday not content with his fake nuclear reactor he made out of soda cans and coat hangers David decided he was going to build an actual radioactive nuclear power reactor in his mom's potting shed and guess what he did but to do so David would have to overcome some obstacles and a few more adults would have to not ask any questions David set out to build what's known as a breeder reactor which is a specific type of nuclear reactor that not only generates power it continuously creates new fuel for itself in an endless self-sustaining cycle in theory solving the world's energy problem there were a few functioning large-scale breeder reactors built but they were all either shut down for not actually producing cost-effective energy or they had partial meltdowns before we get into the type of stuff David would have to acquire to build a breeder reactor here's a very simplified explanation of the science behind it all reactors rely on a bunch of a naturally radioactive element typically uranium or plutonium as the fuel for a sustained chain of reactions known as fission fission occurs when a neutron combines with the nucleus of a radioisotope like uranium and transforms it into a new highly unstable form of uranium that immediately splits in half creating a massive amount of energy and causing a chain reaction of endless combining and splitting and the releasing of energy anyway if that went over your head don't worry about it the point is david would have to get his hands on a bunch of legitimately radioactive and extremely dangerous materials which should basically be impossible right nope not really here's how we did it and be warned it will shake your faith in just about everything quite simply David just pretended to be a college professor writing letters and making phone calls to places like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the NRC the American nuclear Society the Edison Electric Institute and the atomic industrial forum and then nobody decided to double-check David's made-up identity over the phone a rep from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ended up basically walking David through the end entire process of obtaining and isolating radioactive isotopes normally no one person would be able to legally obtain a large enough amount of the radioactive materials needed to pose any sort of danger but this isn't a normal situation this is David frickin Hong he was an Eagle Scout David later said the NRC gave me all the information I needed all I had to do is go out and get the materials and he did from his conversations with government officials and by looking over old Boy Scout booklets David learned that you could find small amounts of radioactive elements in smoke detectors old luminous clocks painted with a radioactive paint that made the numbers on the clock low and old camping lanterns just one of each of these items wouldn't cut it David would need a large amount more than any normal person would ever purchase to get what he needed so David just kept on pretending to be a professor and began his journey of procuring radioactive elements from these everyday items until he found something that succeeded in creating fission first he called up a smoke detector company and said he needed 100 smoke detectors for a quote school project not only did they agree to ship him 100 smoke detectors for a low price they told him exactly where the radioactive material was located in the device without ever getting confirmation of his identity or intentions David received the smoke detectors immediately obtained the radioactive material from all of them which was a mercy him too for one by the way welded it all together and placed it inside of a lead casing with a small hole punctured in it creating what is known as a neutron gun the first step to achieving fission still no adults have stepped in to stop this from there keeping in line with David's obsessively focused work ethic and keeping in line with the theme of no adults asking any questions or sounding any alarms whatsoever David was able to extract thorium from thousands of old camping lanterns and get his hands on radium from old luminescent clocks which he purchased from an antique store all that along with some uranium he had ordered from Czechoslovakia over the phone because why the hell wouldn't that be possible and some barium sulfate from the nurses at the local hospitals radiology Ward who just sort of gave it to him David made a makeshift reactor core out of the highly radioactive radium and immerse him he had gotten from the smoke detectors and clocks then he surrounded this radioactive ball with a blanket composed of tiny foil wrapped cubes of thorium ash which he got from the old camping lanterns and uranium powder which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape now he had a fully functional an unspeakably dangerous nuclear reactor in his mom's backyard and no one had any idea from there since David was a teenager and really had no business doing any of this and wasn't exactly famous for his safety precautions in the past the level of radioactivity from his reactor kept rising it was already extremely hazardous but David soon realized that he might be putting other people in danger soon he was able to detect the radiation from his reactor five doors down from his mom's house at this point even David decided to dismantle the reactor and try to get all of that radioactive material he created to not be all concentrated in one place so he did what the pros do and started to load it into the trunk of his Pontiac at 2:40 a.m. on August 31st 1994 the police were called by David's neighbors because they thought David was stealing tires from cars he wasn't he was simply loading a nuclear reactor into his own car he told the cops he was just minding his own business basically but they didn't trust him so they searched his car with the fair warning from David that it was quote radioactive this is something the cops didn't like hearing and they assumed David was in possession of an atomic bomb the bomb squad was called in and to the delight of everyone they realized that David didn't have a homemade atomic bomb however they did measure one thousand times the normal background radiation they should have been measuring automatically triggering the federal radiological emergency response plan finally some adults were stepping in kind of it took two months two months for anyone to take any real action when he was initially arrested David didn't say anything about his lab and his mom shed and nobody took a look then when they did take a look two months after David was arrested the NRC didn't actually do anything about cleaning up the shed because it was out of their jurisdiction since it wasn't a federally recognized nuclear site it wasn't until January five months after David was arrested that the EPA showed up to David's potting shed lab what they noted was David's lab quote presented 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 the food chain the memo further stated that conditions such as heavy wind rain or fire could cause the contaminants to migrate or be released and also what they didn't know at that time but what they came to learn later is that during those five months of complete inaction David's mom had thrown away a lot of what was in the shed into just the regular old household trash if you're following David's mom unbeknownst to her put highly radioactive materials things that need to be cleaned up handled sealed and buried by professionals just into the bins thereby spreading the radiation even farther exposing more and more people the EPA's cleanup took place in June they dismantled the potting shed sealed it up in bits and buried it in a dump in the middle of the Great Salt Lake desert where it remains entombed alongside radioactive debris from governmental atomic bomb research and other radioactive industrial waste according to the EPA's official assessment David's nuclear reactor experiments exposed at least 40,000 people to extremely dangerous cancer-causing levels of radiation if there's any sort of lesson to be learned from this it isn't you shouldn't let kids build nuclear reactors in the backyard the lesson is rather sobering and that lesson is that everyone is just kinda winging it when presented with a case like David's none of the grown-ups or government agencies you trust to keep you safe had any idea what to do everything is chaos and we see it again and again right here in America in places like Flint where the water is poisonous or just outside of st. Louis where there is radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project in a landfill causing unfathomable illness and death to local residents and basically nothing has been done about it in 1995 the EPA arranged for David to have a full examination to see just what kind of damage all of the radiation he exposed himself to had done but David refused fearful of what he might learn David Hahn died in 2016 when he was 39 of alcohol poisoning which is of course tragic but the real tragedy here is that it seems like all this could have been avoided if some adults just decided to pay attention thanks for watching this video be sure to like this video and subscribe to this channel for more of history's weirdness that you won't find in your textbooks all those textbooks that you had to give back no one has their textbooks anymore right I don't have mine anyway there's this video here is this one here there's more stuff here there's more good stuff if you liked it stick around

Info

Channel: Weird History

Views: 6,860,442

Rating: 4.6380763 out of 5

Keywords: Radioactive Boy scout, radioactive, boy scouts, david hahn, true story, crime, true crime, nuclear reactor, nuclear energy, radiation, LMFBR, chemistry, experiments, teenage crime, teenagers, david hahn nuclear reactor, david hahn radioactive boy scout, david hahn nuclear, david hahn documentary, david hahn radioactive, nuclear fusion, nuclear power plant, nuclear waste

Id: G0QMeTjcJDA

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018

Reddit Comments

"...and be warned, it will shake your faith in just about everything..."

The narration was so startling.

👍︎︎ 1745 👤︎︎ u/failure_most_of_all 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

No adults checked how biased this narration was.

👍︎︎ 803 👤︎︎ u/Chapi_Chan 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

Just in case any one is interested David's girlfriend broke-up with him after the experiment and his mother committed suicide in 1996. He ended up enlisting as a ~~nuclear technician~~ seaman in the Navy and then went onto become a Marine where he was discharged for health related issues.

He would be arrested in again for stealing the smoke detectors in his apartment building and ended up dying at age 39; allegedly of alcohol poisoning.

Seems like this kid was never able to catch a break.

EDIT: So I basically just took this off the wiki so I have no idea regarding veracity of the claim that he was a nuclear tech. I did find a PBS interview that stated:

"he became the helmsman of the USS Enterprise — a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier — which he says is a bear to parallel park."

The original 1998 Harpers article also alludes that he was an undesignated seaman:

"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."

An arstechnica article also stated that he served on the USS Enterprise:

"Hahn later served four years in the United States Navy, including service aboard the USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. He also briefly served in the United States Marine Corps and then returned back to his home state."

In another arstechnica article David's father quoted David as saying:

"Kenneth Hahn said previously that his son had served as a sniper and master helmsman aboard the USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

On this really creepy website/database(?) NNDB they state:

"Hahn served as a US Navy seaman on the USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, where his duties did not involve contact with the ship's reactors"

TLDR: It seems like the wiki has failed and though he was stationed on a nuclear aircraft carrier, his job was not related to the ships reactors.

👍︎︎ 2496 👤︎︎ u/gelbkatze 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

David bought legit beakers, Bunsen burners, test tubes

WOW!

This whole video sounds like a really shoddy middle school presentation.

👍︎︎ 120 👤︎︎ u/PandaXXL 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

Didn’t even touch on the part where David set off a nuclear explosion, framing Dr. Manhattan, and ensuring world peace

👍︎︎ 48 👤︎︎ u/MOHRMANATOR 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

All you've heard is from Ken Silverstein's 2004 book, The Radioactive Boy Scout, mainly used Hahn himself as the source. It is pretty factully exaggerated for narrative value.

This story is pretty distorted. He didn't really have a technical understanding here. He just had mental problems and was obsessed with radioactive materials. It wasn't that "idiot savant with so much potential who just couldn't get a break", he really was a low-functioning mental case and didn't have actual skills.

He really didn't "build" a reactor, just stuck them together, but more for the concept, the idea, than actual effect. It wasn't really purposed and any substantial function is unlikely. His claims of measurable radiation from new synthesized isotopes seems highly dubious.

In the end he'd just collected an impressive amount of radium paint, thorium lantern mantles, and americium smoke detectors, tore it all open and wrapped contents in tinfoil.

The EPA cleanup is also overdramatized. It's unlikely "radiation could be measured from the street" is factual unless he tracked some material out there. He did spread low-level material around a shed that was just a dilapidated shed so they just called it all contaminated, hired a licensed contractor to put on hazmat suits, tear it down and hauled it away as low-level waste, like the tyvek hazmat suits themselves.

His mental problems grew later. Well he graduated from troubled kid with mental problems to dysfunctional adult with mental problems.

He was not kept away from the nuclear reactors in the Navy (not a specialist) because he'd "already exceeded the lifetime exposure limit for thorium". He had no academic or de facto competency in the field and was just a dysfunctional mental case. My read of the situation is he was "that guy" in the group you really don't want to engage with as he is not useful for tasks of any sort, just rants. He was Honorably discharged on medical grounds (mental health issue can be assumed).

I followed Hahn's story for a bit but never met him. He posted online as Thumper235 and you can read his rants here. Yes that's DamnInteresting's actual article on him, he took over the Comments section on his own article about him and made it into his personal blog and it's insane AF:

The Radioactive Boyscout here. I am currently working on several plans to help with vehicle sales and production with the "BIG 3". I am currently working on a system for pairing up, scaler (scalar) waves and gamma rays. Once I have accomplished this, I may be able to send a signal into the past. Unfortunatly, NASA has turned down all of my proposals (including a 37.00 dollar test proposal). Some of my (bear future) experiments require alot of distance and special (synergistic- like) mechanisms of action) to accomplish this. I would appreciate any funding that you may be able to provide. Please mail any donations to David Charles Hahn (address removed), Clinton Township, Michigan 48038. My experiments are designed to empower our beloved country. Please have faith in Miracles and Magic. With a donation of 19.95 or more, I will mail you a copy of my "INFINISHED" book, titled "EVEN BETTER". 100 girls were lined up. 1 female read my book. Once another man read my book, he decided to correspond with that female. This is going to be a very powerful book, designed to "GREATLY" EMPOWER, the reader.

Holy shit... I just reread this. Break that into 140 char pieces, add a few exclamation points, some repetition, and more ALL CAPS, change "I" to "we" in a few places, and it's a Trump tweetstorm

In later years, this video shows he's cleaned up quite a bit, but still quite troubled.

👍︎︎ 2646 👤︎︎ u/Oznog99 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

The biased commentary on this video ruins it.

👍︎︎ 304 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

Also interesting / Sad, Radium Girls WW1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7875DVDdmnE

👍︎︎ 23 👤︎︎ u/DohRayMe 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

I strongly recommend The Dollop's episode on this. It's hilarious.

👍︎︎ 170 👤︎︎ u/RowRowRowsYourBoat 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2018 🗫︎ replies