Learn the story of the boy who built a nuclear reactor in the backyard
Everybody knows that shy, geeky teenager - who has superb math, physics and chemistry, who has quirky hobbies - isn't it? This is more or less the case of a Detroit boy named David Charles Hahn, a quiet boy who, as a young boy, has begun to show an unusual interest in science, a feeling that turned into passion after his grandfather gave it to him. a book about experiments and chemical reactions.
And the boy liked to get his hands dirty! So much so that David even set up a small laboratory in the basement, equipped with test tubes, pipettes, Bunsen burners - equipment used to heat solutions - and all sorts of paraphernalia that we normally encounter in these environments. How could he get money for that? Delivering newspapers and making small nozzles around the neighborhood.
Young genius
David, instead of playing with gunpowder and the like, learned to make nitroglycerin, and by the age of twelve he was "devouring" college-level chemistry books. Once the boy was overdosed on canthaxanthin - a pigment used by the food industry - and turned orange like a carrot, and set off a small fire during a camp with his boy scout while trying to produce fireworks.
However, the boy's experiments remained more or less watched and under control until the day one of them resulted in his house on fire - an incident that caused his mother to force him to transfer the lab to the shed in the backyard that the family used as a deposit.
However, after years of conducting chemical experiments, David must have been bored and decided to develop a new project. The boy was 17 years old at the time, and wanted to earn new badges as a boy scout, so he decided to build a nuclear reactor. Only. He took about two years to assemble the contraption - and got all the information he needed by posing as a physics teacher and contacting the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Only .
Nuclear scout
The (innocent) staff of this government agency taught David the step-by-step how to build the reactor, and in order to get the radioactive material to get the device going, the boy “physics teacher” began sending sample orders to various organizations. and laboratories. Well, we are talking about something that happened in the 1990s, when things were very different today ...
David also bought a variety of flashlights and antique watches, those that glow in the dark, as these items contained small amounts of radio and lithium batteries. And as if that weren't enough, he managed to get some uranium from (then) Czechoslovakia! Anyway, the fact is that the teenager was able to assemble the reactor and start the contraption, but after a few days David took a reading and found that radiation levels in his home were increasing dangerously. A month later, the boy detected anomalies several meters from his residence.
Frightened - and aware that he was putting other people's lives at risk - David decided to dismantle the device. Then, while the boy was loading his car with the parts, some neighbors saw the activity, found everything very suspicious and decided to call the police. It was only then that everyone discovered what was going on in the backyard little house, and that the contraption could have spread radiation in an area occupied by 40, 000 people!
Yes, dear reader, there were stress and lawsuits, but the charges were dropped, the radioactive material collected and the "lab" area declared free of contamination. David later joined the US Navy - to work with nuclear reactors, but they didn't! - where he served for 4 years. He then spent another 3 years as a Marine, and unfortunately passed away 2 years ago. From cancer, because of your background as a nuclear scout? No ... David died as a result of an alcohol intoxication at the age of 39, without developing his full potential.
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