From Chemical and Engineering News, November 30, 1998.
Copyright © 1998 by the American Chemical Society. Used with permission.
In mid-1995, the Associated Press reported the strange case of the kid in Michigan, age 18, whose home laboratory's contents had been confiscated, packed into 39 55-gal drums, and shipped to a radioactive waste dump in Utah by the Environmental Protection Agency (C&EN, Sept. 18, 1995, page 56). Little more information than that saw the light of day at the time. One thing led to another, however, and Ken Silverstein tells a much fuller story of the episode in the November Harper's Magazine under the title "The Radioactive Boy Scout." His report was pointed out by Marshall Deutsch of Framingham, Mass.
The lad in question was David Hahn; his lab was a wooden potting shed on property in Commerce Township occupied by his divorced mother, Patty Hahn, and Michael Polasek. Young Hahn lived with his father and stepmother, but spent weekends and holidays with his mother. He went into science at the age of 10, when his stepmother's father gave him "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments."
The book fell on fertile ground. David read widely, bought laboratory equipment, and, says Silverstein, "By 14, an age at which most boys with a penchant for chemistry are conducting rudimentary gunpowder experiments, David had fabricated nitroglycerine." The regular spills and explosions in his bedroom caused his parents to banish his experiments to the basement. There, a home-rocking red-phosphorus explosion got him banished to his mother's potting shed for experimental purposes. Meanwhile, young Hahn had become a Boy Scout and earned among other distinctions a Merit Badge in Atomic Energy. At age 17, he decided to try to build a model breeder reactor.
In this quest, among other materials, Hahn acquired americium-241 from smoke detectors, thorium-232 from lantern mantles, and radium-226 from antique luminous dial clocks. These acquisitions entailed a variety of ingenious methods and correspondence. The enterprise broke down when Clinton Township cops had occasion to search Hahn's car and found there a toolbox that he warned them was radioactive and proved to be so. From there it was but a short, if bureaucratic, jump to EPA and its Superfund operatives.
Hahn completed Navy boot camp last year and was assigned to the nuclear carrier U.S.S. Enterprise. The 22-year-old seaman is doing seaman's work-"clean sweep down fore and aft," and so forth--but is still wound up in science. Silverstein asked him about his early nuclear research, especially the possibility that he had been contaminated by radium. "I wanted to make a scratch in life," Hahn responded. "I've still got time. I don't believe I took more than five years off my life."