The Radioactive Boy Scout

The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and his Backyard Nuclear Reactor

By Ken Silverstein

Fourth Estate, 2004, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/30942

David Hahn could have been taken for a typical US teenager in the 1990s. He loved driving his partner in his car with the speakers throbbing out the bass, but his mind was really on other things, like building a model nuclear reactor in the potting shed of his parents' home, 40 kilometres from Detroit, Michigan.

His experiment was successful enough, and dangerous enough, to trigger off the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan and, as Ken Silverstein's fascinating investigation illustrates, David's dangerous obsession to get energy from the atom mirrored the reckless mania of US governments and the nuclear industry.

David had a stressful childhood and he found in science an escape from the traumas of his broken home life — a work-obsessed father, a schizophrenic mother, two sets of step-parents. David's quick mastery of science also gave him the sense of "control, self-confidence and self-respect" that he lacked in the rest of his life. Without his scientific experiments, he would be just an "insecure, unhappy teenager with few friends, who had a hard time fitting in at home or at school".

Discovering an old copy of The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, a relic of the upbeat, technocratic science of the 1960s, David was soon consumed with a single-minded passion for chemistry, and his high-risk experiments yielded a succession of violent explosions, toxic gases and other threats to life and limb.

In an attempt to distract David's mind from chemistry, his father forced him to join the Boy Scouts, but this only made the problem worse. The Boy Scouts was a conservative, quasi-militarist movement dating from England in 1908, fathered by the anti-socialist (and later pro-Nazi) Sir Baden-Powell to promote the values of empire and obedience to authority. One of the 21 "merit badges" required to achieve scouting's highest honour in the US, Eagle Scout, requires the scout "to explain why you should respect your country's flag, repeat from memory the Pledge of Allegiance, and tell about two things you have done that will help law-enforcement agencies".

Two of David's merit badges were in chemistry and atomic energy, the new object of his scientific ardour. The long record of nuclear accidents and catastrophes had not shaken David's love affair with nuclear power, nor that of the scouting movement. Following their government and industry mentors, both David and the Scouts scorned the anti-nuclear movement as "ignorant nay-sayers", like an older generation that feared electricity.

David's nuclear ambitions were merely stoked, not sated, by his atomic energy merit badge and, after initially setting himself the goal of collecting a sample of every element in the periodic table (including the radioactive ones), David began his fanatic pursuit to build a working model of a nuclear reactor.

As "Professor" Hahn, David wrote to government and industry organisations who were only too happy to share tips and hints on nuclear science, which David employed to build his home reactor.

Americium (which he obtained from smoke detectors), and then radium (obtained from antique clocks), were his sources of alpha rays. These were absorbed by aluminium, then beryllium (which he stole from a chemical laboratory), releasing their neutrons. This neutron stream was fired through tritium (which he got from night-vision rifle sights by defrauding gun merchants) at his fissionable fuel, thorium (which he obtained by stealing hundreds of gas-lantern mantles from a retail camping store, and extracting pure thorium from their thorium dioxide by chemical exchange with lithium, which he obtained by shoplifting hundreds of lithium batteries).

No bigger than a shoe box, David's reactor could not sustain a fission reaction but his thorium fuel did release energy, and dangerous levels of radiation up to five houses away. After a few days, David at last became scared and shut down his experiment, but he soon attracted the attention of police, the FBI, the Department of Public Health and other government authorities, who removed the potting shed in January 1995.

It was fortunate that David lacked the "sophisticated and vastly expensive equipment" needed to produce fissionable uranium from his minute (and reluctantly discarded) samples of uranium ore, for if he had fired his neutron gun at reactor-grade uranium, instead of his thorium, he would have produced plutonium, the most deadly substance in the world. Nevertheless, for four years of his experiments with radioactive elements, he had placed his parents, his girlfriend and her potential children, and 40,000 residents at risk from radioactive dust and radiation.

Cancer, chromosomal damage, weakened immune systems and other illnesses were quite likely to have been set in train by David's nuclear follies. Normal background radiation registers 50 counts per minute (CPM) on a Geiger counter, but the environmental authorities were registering counts in the thousands and tens of thousands of CPMs on David's lab equipment. The true levels of radiation will never be known because David's family feared they would lose their home once the government moved in, and dumped most of the highly radioactive material from the potting shed into landfill.

David's mad nuclear zeal, says Silverstein, reflected the irresponsible, decades-long behaviour of the nuclear industry, its government handmaidens and its unquestioning scientists, behaviour in which the intellectual sex appeal of nuclear physics flirted with starry-eyed commercial optimism heedless of risk and danger.

Just as David hid his dangerous activities from family and neighbours and took no safety precautions for himself or those around him, nuclear power plant owners and government officials have whitewashed the dangers of nuclear power and covered up the accidents. Just as David engaged in criminal activities, the nuclear industry has broken environmental and industrial safety laws.

Just as David's nuclear waste was unaccounted for or cleared up at public expense and long-term risk, so too have governments mishandled nuclear waste. Just as the teenage David avoided any scientific or social views that challenged his love affair with nuclear power, so has the adult nuclear establishment shown a profoundly unscientific lack of scepticism or receptiveness to dissenting voices.

And just as David's dangerous experiments have not shaken his pro-atomic views, neither has nuclear reality dissuaded the world's governments from shovelling billions of research and subsidy dollars into nuclear energy. David put extraordinary effort into neutron guns and fission, not photo-voltaic cells or wind-farms, whilst governments' energy planning for when the oil and coal runs out is directed at nuclear rather than renewable energy. David and his potting-shed reactor is a frightening fable for the nuclear industry in these capitalist times of ours — science without social responsibility.