The Radioactive Boy Scout
erco
Posts: 20,256
I was just given the book, an amazing read on a whiz kid who attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project. Yes, for real. And I thought my science fair project, "Light Beam Communications" was cool...
The executive summary is at http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html Kids, don't try this at home!
Too bad his face looks like this now, probably radiation burns:
Edit: I see bits beat me to it: http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/141439-Radioactive-boy-radio-piece?highlight=radioactive+scout
The executive summary is at http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html Kids, don't try this at home!
Too bad his face looks like this now, probably radiation burns:
Edit: I see bits beat me to it: http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/141439-Radioactive-boy-radio-piece?highlight=radioactive+scout
350 x 450 - 29K
Comments
"Hahn diligently amassed this radioactive material by collecting small amounts from household products, such as americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lantern mantles, radium from clocks and tritium (as neutron moderator) from gunsights. His "reactor" was a bored-out block of lead, and he used lithium from $1,000 worth of purchased[2] batteries to purify the thorium ash using a Bunsen burner."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
Man, some people never learn, radioactive materials are not toys. Well not unless you have that Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab.
Maybe he has Chirpees.
One of those canarial diseases.
It's untweetable.
I don't think he's insane at all, just look at his life. He's a kid genius who built a nuclear reactor in his shed when he was 17. Since then, what has he amounted to? He's a community college dropout who became an unranked member of the Navy, and his life has seemed to go downhill ever since the event that made him famous. He's prohibited from working with what he loves most because he's been overexposed to radiation.
He's trying to recreate his old life, and why wouldn't he want to?
I grew up with a neighbor kid that was always into not listening to what was a real hazard and took great pride in the pursuit of the taboo and the dangerous. He hit the wall with glue sniffing.
I guess what I am saying is that at some point one has to set aside ego and listen to others.
In university I was one of 3 students out of 500 in my General Chemistry class that would get 99-100% on all the test and finish 2 hour exams in 20 minutes. The head of the Chemistry Department told me that I had a bright future in Chemistry and I said that I'd rather not as it was likely to ruin the planet and my own health along the way.
It was interesting, but it just didn't feel right. When your classroom has a shower, an eye wash stand, and ventilation hoods -- should that be a source of pride or concern?
By the time I was 20 something in technical college all that stuff was considered to dangerous for us to do by ourselves, we could only watch demos.
Seems to me that kids today don't get to do any of that. To feel the danger. To learn responsibility for their actions.
Was that guy a genius? Did he build anything like a reactor? Or was he just ignorantly stumbling around?
My hat of to him for even trying to do something.
You made the right choice. I occasionally work in places with the showers, eye washes, and ventilation hoods, and even more exotic PPE requirements. I don't feel bad about going there occasionally but the idea of working at such a place EVERY SINGLE DAY creeps me right the hell out. The odds of being present when something fall down go boom get unpleasantly high.
Even my occupation's distance doesn't keep people like me completely safe. In 1988 the Shell Norco refinery catalytic cracker exploded, flattening a bunch of buildings, breaking windows 20 miles away, killed seven plant workers (at 3:00 AM in a plant that doesn't have a lot of human workers in busy times). Two of my colleagues were scheduled to check the calibration of the main gate truck scale at 7:00 that morning. The building in which the scale indicator was housed was completely destroyed. They would have been at the plant for about two hours, and missed the explosion by less than twice the length of their once every three month visit.
Me? I was on vacation, camping at the state park on Grand Isle, about 40 miles as the crow flies from the refinery. I was awakened by the explosion, although I didn't learn what the loud early morning booming thunder from a clear sky was until later that day.
From what I remember the back yard shead where the reactor was . Was pegging gieger dectors to the max ! ...
After graduation, my first job was with Bechtel Power Corporation doing material estimating of piping on a breeder reactor project based in the Hanford Area... where the first atomic bomb was made. Eventually, I was transfered to the job site and spent nearly a year working in and around the actual reactor construction. The only radiationhazard was welding x-ray as we did not have any fuel on site. But again, in spite of what seemed like an excellent career move, I didn't feel the nuclear industry was really addressing all the problems and issues. Most of the engineers were highly motivated by the opportunity and claimed we would have a good national waste management in effect within ten or so years. I left and eventually became general contractor and home builder.
Over many years and the sequence of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fujiyama, a litany of short-comings have been made obvious to me. The foremost is that nearly all spent nuclear fuel rods are stuck in cooling ponds on the reactor sites due to the lack of a final destination for spent nuclear fuel. While I have read 'Silent Spring' and consider it way over the top, the hazards of nuclear power, petro-chemical industry, and chemical engineering remain seriously high. These technologies become blinded by greed.
Safety compliance is difficult at best. I live in the center of Taiwan's petro-chemical industry and where something like one-third of the world's plastics is made. Industrial incidents do occur and are often fatal to a few on-site personel. And cancer remains the leading cause of death throughout Taiwan.
I've no idea how the industrial might of the petro-chemical industry will play out -- but amongst the people that I have known that work in it, there is the bitter-sweet dilemma of providing a stable income for their family at a significantly increased risk.
As for myself, I am safer with a skill saw in hand than I would ever be in a chemistry lab. It takes a great deal of tedious attention to detail.