Boyscout-Built Breeder Reactor

Growing up next to the "Bomb Plant", I'm always interested in Nuclear stuff. David Hahn, persuing his Eagle Scout merits, built a Breeder Reactor in his shed. All of the parts were available, it just took some digging to get everything needed. After irradiating the neighborhood, he dismantled it, but was soon discovered. Read the whole story below.

What happened when a teenager tried a dangerous experiment in his back yard

Tale of the Radioactive Boy Scout.

FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE BY KEN SILVERSTEIN

Golf Manor, a subdivision in Commerce Township, Mich., some 25 miles outside of Detroit, is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, where the only thing lurking around the corner is an ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day.Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs.Huddled with a group of neighbors, Pease was nervous. "I was pretty disturbed," she recalls. Publicly, the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that day said there was nothing to fear. The truth is far more bizarre: the shed was dangerously irradiated and, according to the EPA, up to 40,000 residents of the area could be at risk.The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project.

The Radioactive Boy Scout

technorati tags:nukes, david, hahn, breeder, reactor, boyscout

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