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Hardware Science

The Boy and his Breeder Reactor 341

Posted by chrisd from the science-projects-that-explode dept.
scubacuda writes "Here is an interesting tale about a Boy Scout who went a little too far in trying to achieve a merit badge in Atomic Energy. From smoke alarms, lantern components, the paint from radio clocks, and a little help from the Nuclear Regulator Commission, David Hahn attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed. Regarding his excessive radioactive exposure, Hahn says, "I don't believe I took more than five years off my life."" While this is an oldish story (1998) it is not the pathetic self congratulatory lame princeton story.
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The Boy and his Breeder Reactor More

The Boy and his Breeder Reactor

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  • The Hidden Joke... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:23PM (#3717665) Journal
    ...this was posted in the hardware category.

  • Kind of Old (Score:2, Interesting)

    by clarkgoble ( 241742 )
    Why would Slashdot put this as news when it happened years ago and most of us remember it? I mean I'd be all for this story if it was new - but a magazine from 1998? What happened? Find a Harper's while at the doctor's office? Next up: a Slashdot story on the WTC bombing.

    • Why would Slashdot put this as news when it happened years ago and most of us remember it?

      I had never heard of it and found it a quite interesting read.

  • This screams urban legend ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:25PM (#3717686) Homepage
    ... but as far as I can tell, it's not.

    There's several references to it everywhere, here's another [bullatomsci.org].

  • This kid didn't learn to obey the rules of
    Military Intelligence [lostbrain.com]

    tcd004

  • Yes but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by st0rmshad0w ( 412661 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:27PM (#3717702)

    ...could he split a beer atom?

  • holy shit (Score:5, Funny)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:28PM (#3717718) Homepage Journal
    Man, talk about terrible parents. They locked him out of the house because they thought he was making drugs? No wonder he wanted to a-bomb the neighborhood.
  • This same basic story was posted about a year ago. Hell, the dude who did it even made a post. Come on people.... Drink more coffee so your memory will be retained for more then an hour.

    Jolt also works.
    • "This same basic story was posted about a year ago."

      I wasn't a Slashdot visitor a year ago. I found the story mildly entertaining.

      Stop acting like posting a story means another story doesn't get posted.

    • Ah, the frustration of searching /. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Raetsel ( 34442 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @04:34PM (#3718175)

      Good grief!

      I can't believe how difficult it can be to find an older article around this place!

      Slashdot's robots.txt file is comprehensively restrictive, so if I feed Google "David Hahn site:slashdot.org", I get nothing.
      • Dear Cmdr Taco;

        Would you please release (every few months or perhaps annually) a complete archive of Slashdot on CD or DVD? I imagine a simple .tar of the database would be sufficient, as most of your users would be quite capable of handling (and searching) that format. Personally, I think raw articles (no slashboxes, sidebars, etc...) in HTML format would be very useful.

        Since CD/DVD production is relatively inexpensive, this could potentially be a non-trivial source of revenue for /.

        Alternatively, perhaps Google could be convinced to donate one of their search appliances [google.com]? Since many of us are quite proficient and familiar with Google's operation, it would make searching our collective memory that much easier.

        Further, if a donation from Google is not possible, there are likely many of us who would be willing to donate to a search appliance fund.

        Please, PLEASE consider these (and any other!) options to improve Slashdot searching.

        Sincerely,
        Raetsel.

      • I just got a call from Rob. basicly he said,
        • "you organize the fund for a cache server"
        • "you pay for the diskspace to index our DB"
        • "you burn the CD's"
        • "You pay us (VA) for the rights to publish iyr stories"
        • "You pay the relatively inexpensive costs of quarterly updates.
        but the thing that really got him twisted...
        • you to pay the copywrite fees, to all the users who would claim ownership of thier works if CD/DVDs like that where to hit a market.
        I think his point was "We've looked at it, and we are not set up to handle such a thing. If we claimed ownership of all posting,
        1) we would be liable for what they say, and
        2) we would owe the original owners for the copy.        "

        I hope this clears everything up

        hell no, it's not true... I would never give that punk malda my number :)
        • "You pay us (VA) for the rights to publish [our] stories"

          How about VA paying me for a rather popular feature article that Rob published without even asking me first [slashdot.org]? Mind you I am not even a little angry about this (I did email it to him because I was curious if he thought it was /. material), but I would have liked a chance to fix a few typos first.

          My point is that I own the article, not VA. The only thing /. (or VA) ever did was provide a forum, they never purchased rights of any kind to my writing. Perhaps they pay John Katz, I dunno, but they aren't paying anyone other than the editors that I know of. So Rob does have a point, but his point includes more than just karma whoring posts. It also includes all the blurbs and articles submitted by people like me which provide /. with free content. Damn good content sometimes...

          Jack William Bell
        • So we add a check box which says "I give slashdot the right to publish any future posts I make in an unaltered form in an not-for-profit distribution mode" or somesuch.

          Then add another which says "I give slashdot the right to publish any posts I have made in the afforementioned manner"

          IANAL so the language would have to be changed obviously. But I think those two would deal with teh problem. That... and add a "No Publishing Rights" check box to the submission form.

      • I don't think we'll ever see /. in any other format, for the same reasons as everything2.com [everything2.com]. If you look at the bottom of the page, the second to last sentence on the bottom bar says "Comments are owned by the Poster." That means if /. publishes your works, they're plaigarizing you, and breaking their agreement with you, the poster.

        Dang, I wouldn't mind seeing /. on a CD, though I don't think it would do me much good.

      • raw html.... (Score:2, Informative)

        by pyrote ( 151588 )
        it may not be a tar archive, but if your intrested in raw html, this is as close as it gets: http://slashdot.org/palm/ [slashdot.org]
        works well with Avantgo [avantgo.com] too
    • Of course, the same basic story was also made into a movie called The Manhattan Project [imdb.com] in 1986. One can only speculate where this kid got the idea.

      -a

  • Interesting but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jonerik ( 308303 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:31PM (#3717738)
    It's certainly an interesting story. In spite of being an incredibly stupid thing to do, the kid definitely earned his geek merit badge with his little stunt. "You installed Linux on your PS2? Hey, that's great - I built a breeder reactor out of old watches."

    Still, it's an old story. Maybe it's just a slow news day, but how is this particularly newsworthy?

  • Radiation (Score:5, Funny)

    by sean23007 ( 143364 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:31PM (#3717742) Homepage Journal
    "I don't believe it took more than 5 years off my life. The amount of years it took off the lives of my offspring, however, is yet to be seen..."
  • Seriously, why are we posting this 4 *year* old story? And the editors even know it is 4 years old!

    I don't suppose a story about Mozilla vs. Microsoft on CNN [cnn.com] would be more useful than this old, useless story?

    2002-06-17 17:43:06 Writeup on Mozilla vs. Microsoft (articles,mozilla) (rejected)

    Hmmm...I guess not. Oh well. Old stories for all!

    • Mozilla -> Netscape -> AOL -> AOLTW <- Time Warner <- CNN

      No, I don't think that's a useful story ;-)

      Actually, I just read it. It's still not a useful story.
    • "I don't suppose a story about Mozilla vs. Microsoft on CNN [cnn.com] would be more useful than this old, useless story?"

      Hasn't Mozilla been covered ad nauseum on Slashdot already?

      At least with this story, I got a peek into how nuclear reactors work, and I had no idea what a "Breeder Reactor" was until today.

      I dunno about you guys, but I'm all for diversity. Even if the story is 'old', doesn't mean we've all heard it.
    • LOL, happened just like I said. They posted your article by someone else just a little later. Just do what I did...quit submitting articles.

  • The Scout Law (Score:5, Funny)

    by datastew ( 529152 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:33PM (#3717757)
    In a final indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit-badge activities had endangered the community.

    A Scout is:

    Trustworthy,
    Loyal,
    Helpful,
    Friendly,
    Courteous,
    Kind,
    Obedient,
    Cheerful,
    Thrifty,
    Brave,
    Clean,
    and Reverent.

    I think the only thing they could fault him for is "Clean," but I'd give him bonus points for "Thrifty." Makes me proud to be a Boy Scout.

  • Hey! look at this! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:34PM (#3717763)
    http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/0 3/0026226

  • heh, heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:35PM (#3717773)
    Quoate 1: Finally, David, whose safety precautions had thus far consisted of wearing a makeshift lead poncho and throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes following a session in the potting shed

    Quote 2: the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it.

    Quote 3: David pulverized the ores with a hammer, thinking that he could then use nitric acid to isolate uranium. [...] David made his own [nitric acid] by heating saltpeter and sodium bisulfate, then bubbling the gas that was released through a container of water, producing nitric acid. He then mixed the acid with the powdered ore and boiled it, ending up with something that "looked like a dirty milk shake."

    Quote 4: Another year, David was expelled from camp when [...] he stole a number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his experiments.

    This kid is a walking advertisement for the Darwin Awards ...

    -Sean

    • Re:heh, heh (Score:4, Funny)

      by Dephex Twin ( 416238 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:46PM (#3717835) Homepage
      This kid is a walking advertisement for the Darwin Awards ...

      Yeah, but the "walking" part is what keeps him from winning one.

      mark

    • Re:heh, heh (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Planetes ( 6649 )
      >This kid is a walking advertisement for the Darwin Awards

      True, but at the time, so were the Wright brothers and most of the other early inventors in the field of aeronautics (I mean, come on.. those things were actually supposed to fly!?! bah, man isn't meant to fly.. *grin*).. Stupidity and Ignorance are not the same thing. The kid obviously wasn't stupid and he very well could end up being an important player in the scientific world at some point.

      This isn't to say what he did was smart or wise. Simply that doing "stupid" things doesn't make one stupid.

      • Re:heh, heh (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Travoltus ( 110240 )
        EXACTLY!!!!!!!! The word "Mad Scientist", at worst, comes to mind.

        The best thing anyone could do for this boy is to take him over to Lawrence Livermore, educate him on nuclear safety procedures, and quite vigorously complete his training.

        Despite his RELATIVELY unsafe procedures, we obviously have one smart kid. I don't know of too many ADULTS who can figure out, much less secure, the knowledge AND materials for a breeder reactor.

        Kids like this should be fiercely cultivated.

    • Re:heh, heh (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CanadaDave ( 544515 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @04:04PM (#3717967) Homepage
      Other beauties:

      "He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning."

      "Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home." That means no more boy scout sleepovers okay David?

      "Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education."

      "I never saw him turn green or glow in the dark,"

      "He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his classes and spent much of the day in bed or driving in circles around their block.". ???

      • Re:heh, heh (Score:4, Informative)

        by Pathwalker ( 103 ) <hotgrits@yourpants.net> on Monday June 17, 2002 @04:14PM (#3718057) Homepage Journal
        You said:
        "He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning."

        I reply:

        I went to high school with Dave when this was going on, and I was in his scout troop as well.

        I never saw him bright orange at a scout meeting, but I did see him looking like a carrot shortly after he graduated. He didn't get into artificial tanning until after he graduated.

    • Darwin Awards (Score:4, Insightful)

      by crucini ( 98210 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @04:53PM (#3718300)
      This kid is a walking advertisement for the Darwin Awards ...

      That meme irritates me a bit - it seems to imply that evolution never favors risk-taking. Actually, evolution favors a good balance between risk-taking and fear. If you are paralyzed by fear you won't win any "Darwin Awards" on the internet, but you won't get any rewards from life either.

      I think most people who talk about "Darwin Awards" are overlooking the fact that death by excessive risk-taking is not the only kind of death - starvation awaits those who do not take enough risks.
      • I'm not sure the Darwin awards have much to do with risk taking, nor did my original comment. I think here there is an implied level of stupidity critical for a death to be pushed into the Darwin catagory. Any kid who is going to hit pure red phosphorous with a screw driver is taking a risk, but not a smart one. The same goes for that kid who is willing to put others in danger by disabling large numbers of smoke detectors in public places.

        -Sean

        • Re:Darwin Awards (Score:3, Interesting)

          by zenyu ( 248067 )
          Any kid who is going to hit pure red phosphorous with a screw driver is taking a risk, but not a smart one.

          Yes, he should have looked it up first. But did you never burn off your eyebrows with a chemistry set? It was only after I lost my eyebrows twice, a big chunk of hair once, and most of the hair on my legs once that I started taking extra precautions. You could say, "slow learner" but I'd just say it didn't really bother me until I was asked about it by my friends that I thought, oh, burning body bad. (I already had a scar on my chest from an accident at 2 and had enough scars from playing that a painless loss of hair was no biggie.)

          The same goes for that kid who is willing to put others in danger by disabling large numbers of smoke detectors in public places.

          Oh come on, you never took apart one fire detector to test your Geiger counter? He just got caught up in it because he had a tough family life and uninteresting school. You prolly got just as caught up in computers, it was just inherently safer.

          • Heh, Heh. Yes, I did my fair share of dumb things when I was 11 not when I was in high school, though. I did a bunch of other stuff in grad school to. I assisted a physical chemistry lab once a week and I spent the entire time during lecture sticking odd things into liquid nitrogen...

            -Sean

    • some clues (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Erris ( 531066 )
      e surrounded this radioactive ball with a "blanket" composed of tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape.

      Woops! He screwed up like the Germans did and did not realize that Carbon contains Boron, a powerful neutron absorber. Or did he?

      Miller, a nuclear-savvy high-school friend in whom David had confided, warned him that real reactors use control rods to regulate nuclear reactions. Miller recommended cobalt, which absorbs neutrons but does not itself become fissionable.

      Ieeee! Cobalt may suck down neutrons, but it does so by making Cobalt-60, a powerful gamma emitter with a five year half life. Not good, kids better to use borax.

      The article over all is sinister and alarmist. While the author bettered himself by reading snippits of the Golder Book of Chemistry, the overall tone is that knowledge and should be controled like materials that can POTENTIALY be abused. The parents were at fault for alowing this to go on and not seeking help at the university, but the contamination produced was not great. Our here might not have realized that he had stepped into illegal or unhealthy concentrations. Overall, as the "garbage go the good stuff", there was very little stuff to he had. Most municpal dumps have radiation detectors for the protection of the public and workers. It's kind of a last step in the control of medical isotopes and what not; if the isotope is not controled by the state/federal regulator; if the isotope is lost by the hospital; if the isotope goes to Mexico and comes back; if the isotope is sold or disposed of and can't be found, the isotpe will make it's way to a dump and be found there. That the local dump did not alarm is reassuring. He could have really hurt himself by ingesting some of his work, and his set up was childish and silly, but it's doubtful he ever possed a real threat to his neighbors.

      The sad part is that his tallents were not channeled properly, that he never was convinced of the need to study other foundation material like math, that today he is a simple sailor. It's good for the Navy to have such a bright fellow, but bad for the rest of us. At age 21, it's not too late for this man to be educated and made useful. He has more curiosity and energy than most people. Go back to school, David.

    • > This kid is a walking advertisement for the Darwin Awards ...


      I would be more worried about how many legs his grandkids will be walking on.


      Bob.

  • Just a small list:

    • Pipe the radiation at the nads at those guys who feel the need to drive by your house at 2:30 AM with their base pounding loud enough to shake windows.
    • UPS? We don't need no UPS!
    • Take it to bed with you on those cold, winter nights.
    • Who needs a fridge when you can kill all the bacteria just with putting it in the "shed" out back for a few minutes?
    • For that matter, forget the stove.

  • This teaches me to trust no one (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ilan Volow ( 539597 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:36PM (#3717777) Homepage
    Yesterday at Wal-mart I saw a suspicious-looking guy wearing a"Death to America" T-shirt buying up all the smoke detectors. I just assumed he was overzealous about fire safety.

    • Re:This teaches me to trust no one (Score:4, Funny)

      by sean23007 ( 143364 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @06:50PM (#3718977) Homepage Journal
      In related news, Vice President Dick Cheney has announced that the country should be on full alert of a possible nuclear attack on American soil in the near future, adding that there is no reason to believe it could happen, just that we need to be more careful. Attorney General John Ashcroft followed with a press conference condemning all manufacturers of smoke detectors, calling them "domestic terrorists" and adding them to the until now rather exclusive membership of the "Axis of Evil." Effective noon tomorrow, all smoke detector factories will be shut down, and anyone attempting to purchase a smoke detector from any such radioactive material dispensing locations as "Walmart" or "Kmart" or "Target," etc, will be arrested on the spot and handed over to the military until such time as they can be tried, or the War on Terrorism is over. "Whichever comes first," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who recently submitted an application to President George W. Bush to change the name of his department from the old, boring name of "Department of Defense" to something more exciting and relevant, such as the "Department of Capture, Murder, and Torture of Foreigners." Also included as options in his application were "Department of Sexy Guns" and "Department of Kiss My Ass, You Foreign Scumbags
      !" Rumsfeld requested that the exclamation point be emphasized rather heavily, as it added a certain levity to the situation, which he prefers, as it puts him in the proper mood to bomb those filthy targets.

      That should be an article in the Onion, shouldn't it? Hehe... :)
  • If I was a corporation (or a government lab) I would be clamoring to hire this kid. He's smart, he's motivated, he has more ingenuity than 20 average people combined, and he obviously has great science skills. Put him in a lab with whatever supplies he needs, and just sit back and let him invents stuff.

  • I read this a long time ago (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nf1nk ( 443791 ) <nf1nk@@@yahoo...com> on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:50PM (#3717873) Homepage
    And at the time I remeber the consensus was that he hadn't made any kind of reactor at all, all he had actualy managed to do was isolate a bunch of radioactive junk and produce a pile of low grade radioactive waste. No fission reaction had been accomplished, nothing useful had been done. Not much had been learned, except that if you quietly bang around in your shed no one will pay much attention until you blow something up or get busted by the cops.

    That and work on his own personal Darwin award

    • From the article:

      David [...] targeted the gun at uranium powder. He carefully monitored the results with his Geiger counter over several weeks, and it appeared that the powder was growing more radioactive by the day. [...] "It was radioactive as heck," he says. "The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of assembly. I know I transformed some radioactive materials. Even though there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent."

      Although I agree it's not really a reactor, it sounds like he managed to do more than isolate a bunch of radioactive waste.

      Classic Darwin Award material (or at least honorable mention): combines intelligence, ignorance and ingenuity at an early age.

  • How to make a dirty bomb in 12 easy steps. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @03:56PM (#3717906)
    Great read.

    However I'm surprised that the "Powers That Be" haven't killed this story since it has step by step directions on how to make uranium-233.

    • > However I'm surprised that the "Powers That Be" haven't killed this story since it has step by step directions on how to make ...

      When this story came out a few years ago, I worried a bit about this too, but I remember some stuff from the few physics classes I took, and after dusting off my old texts, concluded that it's impossible to use this process to make enough of the substance to constitute a proliferation risk.

      I wouldn't be surprised to find that large purchases of precursor materials are tracked, and even my limited understanding of the physics led me to conclude that there are characteristics of many of the materials at various steps in the process that are detectable at long range.

      From either of these, it seems clear that any group or nation who managed to try and scale this process up would either fry themselves in the process, and if they didn't, would find themselves looking at the business end of an assault rifle, a laser-guided bomb, (or both), long before they had a significant amount of anything that could pose a threat.

      Bottom line - the kid had a way-cool science project (but he should have hooked up with a professor at a university who could have helped him do it safely), but it's not a proliferation risk.

      (If I had to speculate as to why the article was so detailed, it's to make high school teachers and college professors aware that when a high school student shows up with a science project involving a lantern and a smoke detector, it's a mentoring opportunity, not something to be ignored just because it sounds crazy! ;-)


    • On the other hand, if you read the story, expect a knock on your front door sometime soon...

  • Yes, this is newsworthy! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @04:06PM (#3717989) Journal
    I see some people complaining that this story is old, how is it newsworthy. Well let's put it into context with what is going on in the world today. There is a looming threat of dirty bombs being used in the USA. Previously I wasn't too worried, because although I knew the terrorists were good at making bombs, I had assumed it was fairly tough to generate radioactive material that could make them radioactive.

    Then I read a story about a 17-year old kid with not much money and a lot of time generating a heap of radiation.

    Now add hundreds of thousands or even millions in funding, [at least slightly] better equipment, and you might want to wake up.

    But as that lady riding on a New York subway said in a CNN article I read, "If I were really nervous about these terrorists, I'd probably be underground somewhere."

    Ahem.
    • I'm no nuclear weapons engineer, but everything I've read says dirty bombs,

      - Do less damage, to people and things, than a plain old-fashioned bomb filled with nails.

      - Can be cleaned up (for contaminated humans, at least) by stripping and washing yourself with a garden hose.

      - Cost so much more than a standard terrorist bomb to make, and being less effective (if you discount the hype and resulting fear), that we should hope the terrorists waste their resources on it instead of something more dangerous.
      • I'm no nuclear weapons engineer, but everything I've read says dirty bombs,

        - Do less damage, to people and things, than a plain old-fashioned bomb filled with nails.

        - Can be cleaned up (for contaminated humans, at least) by stripping and washing yourself with a garden hose.

        - Cost so much more than a standard terrorist bomb to make, and being less effective (if you discount the hype and resulting fear), that we should hope the terrorists waste their resources on it instead of something more dangerous.

        If you manage to steal any of the spent fuel that's lying around, or even a medium-sized shipment of medical isotopes, you have enough to contaminate a good chunk of the core of a major city. While harder to acquire than a few bags of fertilizer, it's by no means prohibitively hard.

        The actual health effects of the contamination would be next to nil. But the goal of terrorism is exactly that - terror. North America is full of people who run around screaming about nuclear reactors which release less radiation than the concrete in their basements. People would go *nuts* if a dirty bomb raised background radiation by *any* detectable amount.

        Not even a nerve gas attack would cause that much mayhem. It would be the perfect attack.

        Nevermind the fact that lawsuits over alleged health problems from the infinitesimally higher exposure would drag on for decades.
    • Dirty Bombs are not something news-worthy. The press has pushed on them as a horrible threat only because they want to scare people into watching. Every single expert says you're chance of EVENTUALLY dying of cacner due to the radialogical bomb is about 1 in 100 IF you are practically at ground zero... And then, if you were that close anyhow, you would probably be at more danger from the inital old-fashioned bomb blast.

      Chock one up to mass-hysteria. Not that the FBI/CIA hasn't helped push the threat.

  • Splitting the atom? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ZaneMcAuley ( 266747 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @04:21PM (#3718102) Homepage Journal
    "the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it. "

    Hmmm i think ill split this atom i found. *gets screwdriver, hammer...*

    wap
    wap
    wap

    *KABOOM*

  • ...since he's going to need that new thymus before long.

  • Best Internet Geek Legend? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @04:54PM (#3718313) Journal

    OK, reactor boy is great. Is it better than the JATO car story? I'd call this a genre, but I can only think of these two stories. Then of course there are "geek legends" that are actually true, like the guy who built the roller-coaster in Indiana. Can anybody think of more geek legends, if we can think of enough then there could be a poll.

    Note, mere "hacking" doesn't qualify. In order to be a geek legend, you have to be a single person, or perhaps a very small group, you have to be outside the corporate setting, you have to work with a technology that is dangerous and thought to be beyond the scope of what such a group can deal with. For example, concoct a story about a guy who built a submarine in his garage, took it out to sea, and penetrated a carrier battle group. Nobody can verify it because the Navy immediatly classified his plans, moved the model to storage, and ordered him to clam up (under threat of treason charges) for national security reasons because the plans might allow enemies to penetrate carrier groups. If you want to author such a story, feel free to take this idea and flesh it out. Post it to /.. I think we would all enjoy it.

    • heh.

      My favorite part about the first time this breeder reactor story was put on Slashdot was the guy who said something like, "I was in the kid's class - I rememer him coming to school sometimes with burns on his hands and pieces of uranium in his pockets. There were a lot of rumors about him and he was kindof a loner. If you have any questions just reply to this post and I'll answer them."

      He got a lot of replies ;-)
    • It's not in quite the same class but John Carmack's space exploration plans are pretty good (and a hell of a lot more realistic). Keep up to date here [armadilloaerospace.com].
    • Guess it's not really a legend...Yet [rocketguy.com].
  • And the US Government says that terrorist's don't have the resources to build an atomic device but a 17 year old kid can? Well at least we don't have mass hysteria.

    • And the US Government says that terrorist's don't have the resources to build an atomic device but a 17 year old kid can?

      They also require you to show ID before getting on an airplane "for security purposes" (yeah, security of you not reselling your deep discount non-refundable tickets). So, a terrorist won't be able to get a fake ID but a 17 year old kid can?

  • This is just a scary story! (Score:3, Informative)

    by bsharma ( 577257 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @05:21PM (#3718516)
    Relax! With his methods, he would never have been able to create any fission chain reaction. Sure, his technic can be used to build a "dirty bomb" - but a nuke never. The hardest trick in making a nuke is extreme difficulty increasing the purity of Radioactive isotopes. And he would be dead long before the purity reached dangerous level (let alone it is very hard - one needs acre sized plants for diffusion or centrifuge and hundreds of megawatts of power and millions of gallons of water)

  • I Smell Fake.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by artsygeek ( 582248 )
    The Kid's name is Hahn! The same name as Otto Hahn, one of the forerunners of nuclear science. Here's a bio [nobel.se] of Hahn.
  • What's interesting is that guy's name... any relation to Otto Hahn [nobel.se]? :)
  • "A Scout is honest, etc." "Honest" is the first one. He was using pseudonyms and claiming to be a professor. And I don't know of any merit badge that this project could possibly fill the requirements for; at least not one that he shouldn't have submitted it for as soon as he had a reaction of any sort, as work on merit badges expires after so many months' time. Moreover, if it was not for a merit badge but for his Eagle Scout project, one's Eagle Scout project is a team leadership project, not a solitary design/construction project. His entire pretense is invalid and his failure to live within the Scout Motto is saddening, especially when all the news reports give constant mention of his Boy Scouting.
  • This story has personal relevance for me. My brother and I were in the same Boy Scout troup as David Hahn, and went to high school with him. He's two years older than me, I believe, and one year younger than my brother. He briefly served as Senior Patrol Leader; I believe my Totin' Chit (knife certification card) was signed by him.
    One of the things I've noticed about all the articles I've read about him, is that they seem to give him credit for too much competence. On more than one occasion he showed up at a scout meeting with his eyebrows missing and his face red and burned from something gone awry. He used to pull me aside and tell me that he had Americanium in his pocket, at which point I would tell him he was probably making himself sterile, which he would shrug off. This is not good science by any means.
    He would ask my brother chemistry questions, and (after my brother stopped coming to meetings) he would ask me for advice about chemicals, reactions, nuclear power, etc (I, who was two years his junior and yet to take high school chemistry). We knew about some of his experiments, but in a lot of ways assumed he was exaggerating. And we didn't know the extent to which he had lied and swindled to obtain his supplies. We didn't know until we saw the report about the EPA on the news, cleaning up a backyard shed and thought, "Good God, that must be Dave..."
    I've given several interviews with an author who was apparently working on a full length book on Dave at various times as an undergrad, but I don't know if the book ever saw the light of day. Between the EPA incident and his joining the navy, my dad and I ran into him at the local Kroger where he was a stock boy (or something). His skin color was bright orange. He was experimenting with artificial tanning, and babbled on in pseudo-science talk about trying to permanently modify his skin color. ?! And last I heard he was a helmsman on the carrier Enterprise (though that was a few years ago, now).
    Several things frustrate me about this whole story:
    1) That he still made Eagle Scout. The Board of Review for advancement in Rank is composed of senior leaders of the troop; they are supposed to judge a candidate and, if they aren't satisfied, can refuse him the rank if they find him not meeting character requirements, etc. (what with the lying, cheating, etc, one would think Dave did not). But politics on local and notional board levels has contributed to what I consider dilution of the award in more cases than this (note, I'm not an eagle scout myself, i'm just arguing on principle).

    2) What he did was really, really stupid and dangerous. This is not an inspiring tale of a brilliant young man, but a cautionary tale of how a little knowledge and not much common sense can cause lots of trouble.

    3)This gets publicity for years, but legitimate science by young people is often overlooked.

    Sigh. I'll end my rant now. But I get frustrated everytime I see this story come up yet again.

    -Wombat.
    too dismayed for a sig.

    (Dave, if you're somehow reading this, I'm sorry, but what you did was dumb)
    • You seem to stress on the fact that the guy should have been denied the award just because he stole a few small things and lied?

      Give me a break! Tell me, would he have done this if he had direct access to these materials in the first place? I find it disgusting that you'd place more importance to such trivialities of character, rather than his scientific spirit.

      In this context, this quote by HL Mencken comes to mind --

      The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret.... His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
      -- H. L. Mencken

      The guy has to be more than just admired for the fact that with little or no resources, he's built something that's definitely worth commending.

      2) What he did was really, really stupid and dangerous. This is not an inspiring tale of a brilliant young man, but a cautionary tale of how a little knowledge and not much common sense can cause lots of trouble.

      Huh? You know something? Any path that does not involve risk ultimately leads to stagnation. It's only the people who take risks, who are unafraid to break through the odds who help humanity progress.

      You cannot hope to build a rocket without risking it crashing somewhere. If that's the case, then most of the world's greatest scientists are idiots by your scale.

      If I didn't know better, I'd probably say you're jealous of this guy. Come on man! You're supposed to be an astrophysist (atleast that's what I gather from your site), you should know this of all people!!!

      All said and done, he's one smart dude. Naive yes, and a little ignorant too, but one of the smarter ones with a creative streak.
  • I recall reading about this instance in Reader's Digest. And on slashdot, years ago. I can't believe it's been reposted, some 4 years later.


  • I read this story somewhere else. I remember having some problems with it. I thought it sounded like an urban legend. Has anyone done any serious fact checking on this one?

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