
“Radioactive Boy Scout” who tried to build a homemade nuclear reactor dead at 39 - Jaruzel
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/this-fall-the-radioactive-boy-scout-died-at-age-39/
======
FiatLuxDave
So, I have complicated feelings about this.

I'm only a few years older than David Hahn. In the early mid nineties, I was
also building a nuclear reactor on the down-low. I got my first neutrons a few
days before I turned 21. My name is even David as well. So, my friends would
always compare me with him as soon as they heard his story.

I've always felt a bit of kinship with him, particularly his desire to learn-
by-doing about nuclear physics. I've also felt a bit of jealousy at the press
he got, pity for the mess he got himself into, and I'm not sure what to name
the feeling (sadness? derision?) for some of the mistakes that he made. I'm
not sure that I would have done better at his age, trying to do what he was
doing.

There were things I did that were different from him, that I guess led me to a
different fate. I made sure not to break any laws (deuteron colliders are
under a different set of rules than radioisotopes). I went to college, which
was probably easier for me than for him. I involved other people in my
project, including getting VC funding. I sure never made a mess like he did.

I also made some similar mistakes. I wasn't even aware that high voltage power
supplies would make x-rays. I was shocked and scared when Spence, our 'adult
supervision' engineer, brought in a Geiger counter and showed us that we were
making a fair amount of x-rays. I learned a lot of radiation safety on-the-
job, quickly. Without Spence, who knows how badly I would have irradiated
myself before learning on my own?

We always avoided publicity. Part of that was because we didn't want people
freaking out that we were doing "nuclear stuff" in a rented office by the
railroad tracks in Tallahassee. Our landlord knew, and was cool with it, but
we were nervous about how the general public would react. So we kept things
private.

I used to feel that maybe it was a mistake to keep my fusion project so
secret. It certainly didn't help my career to be a failed founder with no
published papers, without even a press release to point to for my years of
work. But when I look at how the mistakes that David Hahn made followed him
his whole life, and which weren't all that different from mistakes I made in
my youth, I think maybe my decision wasn't so bad. "Radiation Safety Officer"
happens to be one of my job titles these days.

Rest in Peace, David.

~~~
Exuma
Can you touch on ANY details of how this is possible with 'every day items'?
When I think of a reactor, I think of something that looks super complicated
and engineered, like CERN. It's hard for me to imagine how a reactor can be
built by a boy in a shed... what materials did he need? What powers it? What
(if any) safety measures are taken... even rudimentary ones?

~~~
fsloth
First nuclear reactor was basically a pile of graphite brics with nuclear fule
placed at calculates positions.

You get to critical reactor with just assembling materials of correct chemical
composition to a correct geometric configuration.

The most difficult part is probably acquiring the nuclear material.

I've never built one, though :)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1)

The physics what we are looking at is the fact that neutron capture requires
neutrons that go at a very specific speed. So, the nuclear fule creates some
initial neutrinos that go fast, the carbon slows it down to a sufficient speed
that they are captures by rest of the fuel, which then causes more chain
reactions.

This is the reason reactors are a bit delicate - not enough neutrinos or wrong
speed - no reaction. Too much - booom.

~~~
hydrogen18
Why do people keep repeating this? Reactors don't go 'boom'. They aren't
thermonuclear weapons. The worst you'll get is a bunch of heat when the
cooling system fails and a possible steam explosion.

~~~
logfromblammo
It depends on the design of the reactor, doesn't it?

They aren't _thermo_ -nuclear bombs. They are simple nuclear bombs.

The earliest types of nuclear bomb essentially smacked two sub-critical masses
of nuclear material together to form a super-critical mass, or compressed a
sub-critical mass to a greater density, such that it was super-critical at
that higher density. Then the core material produces heat faster than it can
be radiated away, and eventually explodes.

If the non-fuel components of the reactor are destroyed, there may be enough
nuclear material present to combine into a super-critical mass. At that point,
it will go boom unless someone acts quickly enough to stop it.

It just so happens that all reactors designed to actually be built are ultra-
paranoid about not turning even a completely failed reactor into a nuclear
bomb. In a backyard DIY reactor that is not following a design blessed by
physicists and engineers, you might get a boom. You will more likely get a
big, deadly, radioactive fire that drops toxic ash on innocent bystanders, but
if you melt cylindrical fuel rods in a graphite moderator, and they pool in
the bottom of a spherical containment vessel as one big, connected mass...

~~~
hydrogen18
I will ask again: Why do people keep repeating this?

You keep throwing around ideas like "They are simple nuclear bombs". It's not
like during WWII the US asked some physicists to make a weapon and they
replied with "just put some of this in a box and drop it on Japan. Call us
when you need more"

Here are multiple explanations as to why a reactor is not and can not be a
bomb:

[http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7149/why-does-
nuc...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7149/why-does-nuclear-fuel-
not-form-a-critical-mass-in-the-course-of-a-meltdown)

Did you get your education on nuclear power from the "The China Syndrome"?

~~~
landryraccoon
"Boom" in this context I assume doesn't mean kilotons of TNT equivalent
explosion, it means "criticality event resulting in the release of a lethal
dose of radiation". At Los Alamos, Harry Daghlian was killed by the "boom"
resulting from simply accidentally dropping a brick onto a core of nuclear
material.

~~~
milesokeefe
More on that:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian#Criticality_acc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian#Criticality_accident)

------
Declanomous
The lack of details in the obituary make me think he took his own life.

Regardless of how he died, Hahn's story taught me it was possible to learn and
build without the latest and greatest tools and equipment. His approach to
safety was concerning (to say the least), and he stole a lot of the nuclear
material he used, but I think it's important to realize that amazing work can
be done without millions in funding. This is probably not a huge revelation
for the field of computer science, as even a powerful computer can be bought
for relatively little. However, it's easy to look at the equipment used in the
physical sciences and think that you need the same equipment to make a
meaningful contribution to science. A world of possibilities opens up once you
have the idea that you can make the equipment you need to run the experiments
yourself.

One of the things I love about the internet is that we can share our
experiments and hacks with each other. There are a lot of great YouTube
channels that are spiritually aligned with mentality behind Hahn's reactor.
I'd personally recommend Applied Science, as well as Cody's Lab, and I'd be
interested in hearing about any channels that other people find interesting.

~~~
tptacek
His story is very sad. He joined the Navy after an young adulthood set adrift
after the suicide of his mother. He was discharged and diagnosed
schizophrenic. Ten years ago, he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors,
and the court proceedings implied he'd gone off his medications.

~~~
Declanomous
I'd heard parts of that story. He reminds me of one of the people who I went
to school with. We shared a lot of hobbies, but his antisocial and self-
destructive tendencies meant that I never could really consider him a friend.
He was incredibly smart and capable, but he always acted like he had something
to prove. He was expelled from high school for hacking, which unlike a lot of
"expelled for hacking" stories, was entirely legitimate. He was doing some
pretty impressive exploits on the network computers, but then he was also
downloading information he had no business possessing. I was interviewed by
the FBI about it, because I was president of the cs club, and he had been
using our computers.

During his expulsion he took the classes needed for college and applied to the
CS program at a prestigious state school rather that coming back to high
school. It was really impressive -- between the grades he had skipped before,
and the grades he skipped going to college, he got in before he was old enough
to drive.

I don't think he ended up graduating from college. He is very capable, but he
needed a mentor who was operating on the same level as him to help him develop
emotional and social skills on par with his intellectual talents.

------
Jaruzel
The saddest bit is at the end of the Harper's[1] article which I originally
read when it was published:

\--

Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a relatively
small, enclosed space is most worrisome of all. Back in 1995, the EPA arranged
for David to undergo a full examination at the nearby Fermi nuclear power
plant. David, fearful of what he might learn, refused. Now, though, he’s
looking ahead. “I wanted to make a scratch in life,” he explains when I ask
him about his early years of nuclear research. _“I’ve still got time. I don’t
believe I took more than five years off of my life.”_

\--

[1] [http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-
scout...](http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/)

~~~
codezero
In this vein does anyone know if there are treatments for radiation poisoning
that aren't purely palliative?

~~~
VLM
Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including
wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment
for electricity. You mean UV damage to the eyes from being exposed to arcs or
thermal explosions or shock to heart or RF burns or ... and radiation is the
same.

Also some of the stuff he did was questionable purely chemically. So ...
boring holes in lead, you're at least washing your hands before eating, right?
Or the feeling I get from this guy, no. Or his refining process involving
lithium metal, interesting but not advisable.

I wonder what the guys "banana equivalent dose" was. He didn't get that much
material, at least as reported by the press. A thousand times nothing is still
nothing unless the true story is more interesting. From what I can find an
unmolested smoke detector is about a tenth of a BED/yr so the mere presence of
a thousand detectors in one room, if you sit in it for the entire year, is
about the same as eating 100 bananas in that year, which I probably do! If
you're sloppy and it stays outside your body its about the same. Unless you
inhale it.

He accumulated more "stuff" than the NRC feels safe to give out unlicensed,
but the NRC is pretty pessimistic so he should have survived. And seemed to
have done so, unsurprisingly.

~~~
maxerickson
_Yes, plenty._

So what are they?

~~~
VLM
To start there's triage. Go away and come back for cancer screening every five
years. Stay here and we treat you. You're toast here's some painkillers.

In between there's a wide mix of removing the cause and repairing the damage.

This almost seems too obvious but there's obvious recent surface
decontamination, wash it off. A test tube in the lab shattered, well get it
all off you first of all.

Only a step past that, if you chug heavy water you'll be encouraged to drink
tap water to pee out the heavy water. Likewise if you ate something
contaminated an hour or a day ago they'll give you stuff to make your
digestive system explode out both ends. I donno if they'd feed you an
expectorant for inhalation. There's no point if the exposure was months ago of
course.

There are peculiar specific treatments if you've been recently exposed to
iodine isotopes from a bomb or very major plant accident they can flood your
system with zero radioactivity clean iodine to convince your body to pee out
99% of your intake rather than adsorbing 100% of the bad stuff into your
thyroid. Its like reducing your exposure by a factor of 100 just by popping
some pills. There are other isotopes like that I can't remember.

If you were doing radioactive labeling experiments obviously they'd flood your
body with unlabeled clean stuff to make you pee the glowing stuff out.

If its a bone-seeker there are mineral chleation treatments that are very hard
on the skeleton but you'll pee out those isotopes which is better than having
them irradiate you from the inside for decades.

If you wipe out your bone marrow you're screwed unless you get a bone marrow
transplant. In the short term they could pump units of blood into you. This
works better if there's one victim per hospital than if there's an entire
Japanese city and the hospital was vaporized, which is why not too much was
done along these lines at the end of WWII.

Similar to the above paragraph if you wipe out your digestive tract alongside
100K neighbors there's not much the hospitals can do, but if it was an
unfortunate lab accident, you might be kept alive via IV until recovery.

If its a surface burn I'm not sure what they'd do WRT preventative skin
cancer, maybe skin graft it on general principles or wait and watch and see if
a tumor forms. Obviously there's antibiotic treatment.

~~~
maxerickson
So I would draw a line between those. Most of them are treatments for exposure
to radioactive materials and not for radiation damage (which I think was more
the question being asked).

The bone marrow transplant and supportive care are treating the damage.

~~~
codezero
I was definitely asking for any treatment, but I wasn't clear, so any
information is of interest :)

------
JoeDaDude
To repeat a comment I posted elsewhere [1], ...it is tragic that a child and
later teen with so much curiosity and interest in science was not able to get
the guidance he needed to channel his drive into a more rewarding and
productive life. I suspect many HN readers will see a lot of themselves in
David, as did I, and wish things could have turned out differently.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951194)

------
logfromblammo
The article is woefully lacking by not answering the question that everyone
who starts to read the article must have on their mind: was the cause of his
death related to radiation exposure?

~~~
PaulKeeble
He could have been hit by a car or slipped on a banana. This is the sort of
lazy news article that we all hate in the world, the implication without the
actual presentation of the facts.

Ars is a terrible source of news, this isn't their first offence.

~~~
paulmd
It's not entirely their fault. The linked obituary doesn't list a cause of
death either.

~~~
pavel_lishin
The reporter could have done some investigating.

~~~
Eduard
maybe he did.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Typically, an article would include something like "Hahn's family could not be
reached for comment".

------
tlrobinson
This is a pretty sad story. I remember reading about him (when I was a Boy
Scout, actually) and being impressed and inspired, in a way (despite the whole
superfund site in his backyard thing...)

Unfortunately he was later diagnosed as bipolar and paranoid schizophrenic. I
have to wonder what he could have achieved otherwise.

------
eth0up
For Hahn, death is but a beltway 'round a life too slow. Though you'll
probably haven't time to chat, I say he can be seen in passing - if one knows
where to look: [http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how-
to-...](http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how-to-build-
your-own-particle-detector)

------
janj
Is what he did similar to what this high school student is trying to do?

[https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/first-
afric...](https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/first-african-
american-nuclear-fusor)

It's hard for me to understand the concept of building a nuclear anything on a
residential property.

~~~
chriswarbo
Fusors perform nuclear fusion, Hahn was experimenting with nuclear fission.

The important differences are:

\- The fuels used. Fusion uses the lightest elements like hydrogen and helium,
which can be non-toxic and non-radioactive (although it depends on the exact
process being used). Fission uses the heaviest elements like uranium, which
are very toxic and very radioactive.

\- Control of the reaction. Fusion reactions typically fizzle out if the
device isn't powered up and controlled very precisely (this is what makes
fusion difficult); they're nothing like hydrogen bombs. Fission reactions are
typically spontaneous, caused by the radioactivity and arrangement of the
materials in the reactor; control systems regulate this reaction, which would
otherwise be pretty similar to an atom bomb.

------
bitwize
I got to the bit about the _Enterprise_ and thought, they trusted that kid
aboard a nuclear wessel?

~~~
neaden
IIRC he was restricted from ever actually working a job that would have let
him work with the nuclear reactor. Those navy ships are huge though, so there
are plenty of other jobs that keep you far away.

~~~
iaw
And they have their own police too, right?

~~~
jsjohnst
Yes, there are MPs on board Navy carriers

~~~
digler999
fun fact: navy nuclear engineers are one of the few/only enlisted sailors that
can lawfully refuse orders from anyone above them - all the way to an admiral
- if they believe the order will compromise the safety of the reactor.

