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On 10 May 1991, a 14-year-old Boy Scout named David Hahn earned an Atomic Energy merit badge, the first (and likely only) person in the history of Troop 371 in Clinton Township, Michigan, to receive a badge in that discipline: Throughout his childhood, Hahn had been obsessed with chemistry, teaching himself everything he knew from encyclopedias, textbooks, and chemistry sets, while personal safety did not seem to be a concern of his. According to a 1998 Harper’s profile of Hahn written by Ken Silverstein, 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. In another instance, he was held responsible for a blowing a large hole in the wall of a Boy Scout tent after accidentally igniting a stockpile of powdered magnesium he had brought along. His laboratory was eventually moved to the potting shed behind his mother’s house, after an incident in his father’s basement that did not go as planned: After achieving the rank of Eagle Scout, Hahn decided he wanted to experiment with real radioactivity, not merely the models he had used to earn his badge. He created various radioactive devices, including two different neutron guns that emitted radioactive particles, and eventually decided he wanted to create a breeder reactor — an energy generating nuclear reactor that actually produces more fissile material than it consumes (by essentially turning material around it radioactive). The concept was popular in the 1970s but for the most part has been abandoned thanks to modern technology and geologic finds that make mining uranium more cost-efficient. The breeder reactor concept was described by the Department of Energy in 1971 as follows: The obvious question is how would an adolescent working out of his mother’s potting shed acquire fissile material to play around with? This is where Hahn’s myopic focus and determination really shined: Many household products (and even more in the 1990s) contain radioactive material, but the problem is scale. Hahn exploited several commonly found products and used his knowledge of chemistry to extract and concentrate it to create radioactivity at levels not found in nature. Early on, one common source of Hahn’s radioactive material came from household smoke detectors, which contain extremely small amounts of the radioactive isotope americium-241 as part of the mechanism that detects smoke. He contacted smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a large number of the devices for a school project. To obtain the radioactive isotope thorium-232, Hahn recalled a fact he had learned as an Eagle Scout: that the mantle of gas lanterns contains traces of the radioactive material. So he purchased thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of ash. This method produced radiation levels 9,000 times the level found in nature and 170 times the level that requires [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] licensing. Radium-226, he learned, was found in the paint of antique luminescent clocks. Hahn was able to find an antique can of the mildly radioactive paint in a clock at a nearby antique store, which he used to isolate the isotope for experiments. Tritium, he found, was used as a component of glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights, which he repeatedly purchased and returned as part of a scheme to collect the material. Hahn removed the tritium contained in a waxy substance inside the sights, and then, using a variety of pseudonyms, returned the sights to the store or manufacturer for repair—each time collecting another tiny quantity of tritium. These purchases were not the only instances in which Hahn employed subterfuge to obtain radioactive material. Claiming to be a professor, he once wrote to a Czechoslovakian firm that sells uranium to commercial and university buyers, obtaining a few samples of material which contained uranium-235 and uranium-238. Ignoring any thought of safety, as Harper’s described it, he attempted to build a reactor using the radioactive material he had collected over the years, using a schematic in his father's college chemistry textbook as his guide: While he never achieved the critical mass necessary for a self-sustaining reaction, Hahn certainly appeared to have accomplished the creation of some new fissile material: All of these events took place before the end of 1994, and perhaps they would have remained a secret to this day if Hahn had not stashed the remains of his nuclear reactor in that Pontiac. On 31 August 1994, police responded to complaints that Hahn was in a residential neighborhood stealing tires from a car. In their discussion with Hahn, the police ended up performing a search of the car and found: The discovery of the radioactive contents of Hahn's trunk automatically triggered the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state officials soon were embroiled in tense phone consultations with the DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC. After examining his mother’s property (which she had cleansed of the most radioactive material in advance of law enforcement searches of the property for fear she would lose her home), authorities decided that the site was to be an EPA clean-up operation: Hahn fell into a deep depression following this episode, according to Harper’s, which was likely exacerbated by his mother’s suicide in 1996. He enlisted in the armed forces and spent four years in the U.S. Navy followed by some time in the Marines Corps before returning to his home state of Michigan. In 2007 the FBI investigated claims that Hahn was storing radioactive material in his apartment. In an interview with the FBI, Hahn described his honorable discharge from the military and his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia in the years following his return home: Hahn ran into trouble with the law for stealing smoke detectors in 2007 as well, and he experienced repeated drug-related incidents in the years following. He died on 27 September 2016 at the age of 39, a death which was the result of alcohol poisoning, his father said: Hahn's story first came to public light in the 1998 Harper’s profile written by Ken Silverstein. Silverstein later expanded that piece into the book The Radioactive Boy Scout which was in turn optioned for a feature film in 2016. I’m proud of my son and I’m very sad that he’s gone, Kenneth Hahn told Ars Technica in March 2017. He could have done a lot more in this world.
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