Part 2 here: www.youtube.com David Hahn, nicknamed the “Radioactive Boy Scout”, is an Eagle Scout who received a merit badge in Atomic Energy and spent years tinkering with basement chemistry which sometimes resulted in small explosions and other mishaps. He was inspired in part by reading The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, and tried to collect samples of every element in the periodic table, including the radioactive ones. 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 large, bored-out block of lead, and he used lithium from $1000 worth of purchased batteries to purify the thorium ash using a Bunsen burner. Hahn posed as an adult scientist or professor to gain the trust of many professionals in letters, despite the presence of misspellings and obvious errors in his letters to them. Hahn ultimately hoped to create a breeder reactor, using low-level isotopes to transform samples of thorium and uranium into fissionable isotopes. Although his homemade reactor never achieved critical mass, it ended up emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity, likely well over 1000 times normal background radiation. Alarmed, Hahn began to dismantle his experiments, but a chance encounter with police led to the discovery of his activities, which triggered a Federal …
11 Responses
i’m reading this book. its pretty awesome :)
@wowggscrub Thats what the carbon is for
so waht does he do now?
@wowggscrub Yes. That is all I am going to say about that.
I like how they contacted a radiological expert in order to ask if extracting hundreds of americium samples from smoke detectors would be a concern to him
Thorium is some nasty shit, he’ll be lucky to live past 40.
well neutrons can also be emmited if you bombard the metal beryllium with alpha particles from Am-241 source but the neutrons are move to fast for A nucleous to capture the neutron so they need to be slowed down by A moderator , such as Deuterium water (heavy water ) D20 .
@wowggscrub I dunno, are you saying they skipped a step? because I wouldn’t be surprised if they left steps out so that the documentary wouldn’t be a how-to manual, and for the overall brevity required by a half-hour timeslot.
dont you need to moderate the neutrons to thermal range though?
write on my wall of the channel please?
in advance thank you very much good bye!
good video…!!
this is badass.