http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/n1782_v297/21281407/print.jhtml

The radioactive boy scout: when a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor. (case of David Hahn who managed to secure materials and equipment from businesses and information from government officials to develop an atomic energy radiation project for his Boy Scout merit-badge)

Author/s: Ken Silverstein
Issue: Nov, 1998

When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor

There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that's exactly what chemistry is: Finding out about things--finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing!

--The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, the kind of place where people live precisely because it is more than 25 miles outside of Detroit and all the complications attendant on that city. The kind of place where money buys a bit more land, perhaps a second bathroom, and so reassures residents that they're safely in the bosom of the middle class. Every element of Golf Manor invokes one form of security or another, beginning with the name of the subdivision itself--taken from the 18 hole course at its entrance--and the community in which it is nestled, Commerce Township. The houses and trees are both old and varied enough to make Golf Manor feel more like a neighborhood than a subdivision, and the few features that do convey subdivision--a sign at the entrance saying "We have many children but none to spare. Please drive carefully"--have a certain Back to the Future charm. Most Golf Manor residents remain there until they die, and then they are replaced by young couples with kids. In short, it is the kind of place where, on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the corner is a Mister Softee ice-cream truck.

But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day. Ask Dottie Pease. As she turned down Pinto Drive, Pease saw eleven men swarming across her carefully manicured lawn. Their attention seemed to be focused on the back yard of the house next door, specifically on a large wooden potting shed that abutted the chain-link fence dividing her property from her neighbor's. Three of the men had donned ventilated moon suits and were proceeding to dismantle the potting shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces of wood into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs. Pease had never noticed anything out of the ordinary at the house next door.

A middle-aged couple, Michael Polasek and Patty Hahn, lived there. On some weekends, they were joined by Patty's teenage son, David. As she huddled with a group of nervous neighbors, though, Pease heard one resident claim to have awoken late one night to see the potting shed emitting an eerie glow. "I was pretty disturbed," Pease recalls. "I went inside and called my husband. I said, `Da-a-ve, there are men in funny suits walking around out here. You've got to do something.'"

What the men in the funny suits found was that the potting shed was dangerously irradiated and that the area's 40,000 residents could be at risk. Publicly, the men in white promised the residents of Golf Manor that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the Environmental Protection Agency briefly invaded their neighborhood. When asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.

-- Anonymous, June 04, 2001

Answers

Imagine. All that Gov. Intervention just because the young man wanted to build a little science project. Is there no end to the attempts to take away all our freedoms?

-- Anonymous, June 04, 2001

Of course, he might have gotten a little bit too carried away with this single project and we must have well rounded children. I met with David in the hope of making sense not only of his experiments but of him. The archetypal American suburban boy learns how to hit a fadeaway jump shot, change a car's oil, perform some minor carpentry feats. If he's a Boy Scout he masters the art of starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and if he's a typical adolescent pyro, he transforms tennis-ball cans into cannons. David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.

-- Anonymous, June 04, 2001