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BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, January 1999:

The do-it- yourself reactor
David Hahn wanted to be an Eagle Scout, but he was not interested in typical merit-badge projects. Instead of astronomy, backpacking, or business, Hahn was interested in producing energy. He set out to build his very own breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed.

Hahn never built anything resembling a working reactor. But his merit-badge project got some attention. On June 25, 1995 agents from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raided his home in the quiet Detroit suburb of Golf Manor. The extremely high levels of radioactivity the EPA found in his backyard shed prompted the agency to declare it a federal Superfund site.

Hahn was remarkably resourceful in his search for radioactive substances. According to Ken Silverstein ("The Radioactive Boy Scout," Harper's Magazine, November 1998), Hahn "figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium."

Even at age 15, Hahn knew how to ask nrc officials for information about how to isolate radioactive elements, which isotopes were capable of sustaining a chain reaction, and where he could find commercial sources of radioactive materials. "The nrc gave me all the information I needed," he told Silverstein. "All I had to do was go out and get the materials."

Not that he had to look very far for most of his "reactor" elements. In an interview on cbs This Morning (October 19, 1998), Hahn listed his sources: "I found lantern mantels, which contain thorium dioxide. They sold these at Kmarts. . . . [I got] tritium from bow-and-arrow sights, polonium from electrostatic film brushes, americium from smoke detectors, radium from, of course, radium dials."

But, writes Silverstein, what Hahn really wanted was uranium 235, because it would provide the "biggest reaction." His first approach was to drive hundreds of miles through northern Michigan with a Geiger counter on his dashboard. The search yielded only a few rocks of pitchblende (which contains minuscule amounts of uranium 235), so he decided to go back to his friends at the nrc for help. His contacts at the regulatory commission gave him the address of a Czechoslovakian firm that sells uranium to commercial buyers. That contact resulted in a few more samples of pitchblende. His attempts to isolate and purify the uranium, however, resulted in little more than a small pile of black powder.

Armed with his radioactive cocktail––and a sketch of a checkerboard breeder reactor from one of his father's college textbooks–– Hahn began devising his backyard breeder. He knew that it took at least 30 pounds of enriched uranium––vastly beyond anything he had––to initiate a chain reaction, but he thought he could at least generate some interesting results. "No matter what happened," he told Silverstein, "there would be something changing into something––some kind of reaction going on there."

His makeshift reactor had a "core" of radium, americium, and beryllium that was wrapped in a "blanket" of thorium ash and uranium powder. And it produced. "The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at assembly," he recounted. "I know I transformed some radioactive materials."

When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation several doors down from his house, Hahn decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place," and he disassembled the "reactor." By the time the EPA showed up, he had hidden most of the radioactive materials, including the purified thorium pellets, leaving only the radium and americium behind. "The funny thing is," he joked to Silverstein, "they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff."

The "garbage" was enough to scare the EPA, which spent $60,000 on the Golf Manor Superfund clean-up. And, according to CBS This Morning, the agency "never sent a bill."
––Michael Flynn