SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: The Story of the Nuclear Boy Scout

David Hahn was a kid who was really into science. So much that he built a nuclear reactor in his mother's potting shed. And it worked. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:34Josh Clark?

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• 2:42Speaker 04

  All right, Chuck here, winding it down with number 11. We wanted to finish on an odd number, because odd things are weird, and this is the SYSK Gets Weird playlist, "The Story of the Nuclear Boy Scout." What a great episode. I hope you guys enjoy it. I enjoyed it, listening to it in QA the other day all over again, so listen to it right now, "The Story of the Nuclear Boy Scout."

• 3:09Speaker 05

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 3:19Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and this is a good old-fashioned barn burner of a Stuff You Should Know type topic.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Woo, whiz bang!

• 3:28Josh Clark?

  Chuck, this was a...somebody sent this in as a suggestion recently, I think, right?

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I think you and I had both been aware of this story, but we did get a recent suggestion from David Parcher?

• 3:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, David Parcher. I think just a couple of weeks ago sent in the suggestion, and look at the timing.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, thank you, David. And we're going to talk about another David, that is David Hahn, the Nuclear Boy Scout.

• 3:54Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  And this is one of those where we owe a huge debt to a single human, because this story was, may have just gone fairly unnoticed as a pretty localized, local newspaper item.

• 4:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  If it hadn't have been found by a gentleman named Ken Silverstein, who ended up writing a very large piece in Harper's Magazine, and then a book called "The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor." So, big thanks to Ken, a lot of this came from your work.

• 4:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and shout out also to the journalist from the Natural Resources News Service, which is this investigative journalist group that, just as a public good, like investigates stories and then turn around and give them to news outlets. And apparently, that's how Ken came across the story and began researching it. So, there's two people that were responsible for it, at least.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and three, because we have to count David Hahn, the Michigan teenager who, in the 90s, managed to create a nuclear reaction in the potting shed of his mom's house. It is a story that is interesting and amazing, but also very sad in its ending.

• 5:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and technically, we should thank five people, because it took Patty and Ken Hahn to reproduce and create David Hahn. So, we're at five people now that we need to thank.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  All right, so David was born October 1976. That's the year you were born, right?

• 5:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I was just a couple of months older than him.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and look what this guy did.

• 5:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  What have you ever done?

• 5:37Josh Clark?

  Thanks for that.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Hey, you gotta, you gotta hit podcasts, you're not sweating it.

• 5:42Josh Clark?

  Oh, I'm sweating.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  When he was a little, and we say this because it very much figures into the end of David's story, it's very sad, but his mother Patty was diagnosed with depression and paranoid schizophrenia, was hospitalized through his early childhood, off and on, and she would eventually take her own life in 1996.

• 6:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that will play into the story later on, but Patty remains a character throughout most of it, so too does David's father, Ken, who we mentioned. He's person five we need to thank. Patty and Ken got divorced, I think, when David was really little, like maybe a toddler, and Ken ended up marrying a coworker, person number six we need to thank, Kathy Missig. Ken and Kathy were both engineers at General Motors. This whole thing took place in the suburbs of Detroit.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:33Josh Clark?

  Specifically, Clinton Township, Michigan. Specifically, later on, in a subdivision called Golf Manor, as we'll see. But, so, David lives with Ken and Kathy, and then on weekends, he goes and stays with his mom Patty and her boyfriend, person number seven, who we need to thank, Michael Palasic. And they're the ones, I believe, who lived in Golf Manor. And under, by all accounts, like, David lived a pretty normal childhood, just doing normal childhood things. It wasn't until he was 10 that his life found its purpose, which is pretty early, if you think about it, for your life to find its purpose.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and by the way, if you live in Golf Manor, hold your emails, we know you're in Commerce Township.

• 7:17Josh Clark?

  Yes, thank you for that. I think his dad lived in Clinton Township.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's probably like where I live, in New Jersey. It's like, all these old townships just run together.

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's what it looked like on the map.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, the person we really need to thank...

• 7:33Josh Clark?

  This is number eight, person eight.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Is, like you mentioned, when David was 10 years old, his stepmom's father, so I guess his step-grandfather, if you count that as a thing, he was also an engineer at GM. He gave little David a book called "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments," and little David was fascinated with science and chemistry, but in particular with the stories of Marie and Pierre Curie and their radium discovery, and the glow, I think the glow of that whole thing really enthralled this young guy.

• 8:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, this book was heavily illustrated, and like, the instructions kind of looked, had the same look as like those Ripley's Believe It or Not comic strips, almost. Totally something that would appeal to a kid that age or a little older. You can find it online in its entirety as a PDF, and I looked at the illustration and don't really know what he saw, and it's actually black and white, that glows to some lines coming off of a beaker or whatever, but...

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Imagination, my friend.

• 8:37Josh Clark?

  For some reason, it enthralled him, so much so that, within two years of receiving that book, he was devouring his father's chemistry textbooks at age 12.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he was, I mean, these were books that were more advanced than his age. Clearly, a smart guy.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  At the age of 14, he apparently made nitroglycerin by himself, which evidently isn't the hardest thing to do, but is very dangerous to do. There are other stories, like, he brought, wanted to make his own fireworks at Boy Scout Camp, so he brought some powdered magnesium, ended up catching on fire, and ruined a tent. So, what else? He tried to develop a self-tanning method that didn't work out, right?

• 9:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he overdosed on canthazanthin, which, I can't remember which one, which episode that came up in, but it's a pigment that turns your skin orange from the inside out, and that's what he did. He was trying to come up with a self-tanning method that didn't use any kind of UV radiation.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, no comment.

• 9:40Josh Clark?

  But he was that kind of dude. He would just turn up at like a scout meeting or something, bright orange and be like, yeah, too much cantazanthin.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  So, yeah, he's exactly that kid. He's also the kind of kid who essentially destroys his bedroom because he's doing science. The walls were wrecked, the carpet was stained, they had to move the carpet out. Eventually, his dad was like, listen, this is getting serious. You're destroying our home. You got to move into the basement, first of all, and when we're not here, you can't be in here either. They took away equipment, they took away some chemicals, and finally, they said, all right, this is out of hand. You can't do this anymore. So he said, all right, I'll do it. Like every divorced kid says, I'll do it at the other parent's house.

• 10:30Josh Clark?

  That's right. And so he did. He ended up setting up a lab in his mom's potting shed in Gulf Manor in Commerce Township. And this is where the story really starts to kind of take off. Because his dad was getting really worried that his son was basically creating and selling drugs. Like, that's what he was doing with his chemistry experiments. And so like, they would, he and his stepmom would drop in on the library when he was supposedly there to see if he was there. Like, they really did not trust this fascination with chemistry. Which, I mean, I can understand. If your kid blows himself up a couple of times, you're like, what are you doing exactly here?

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:16Josh Clark?

  So I don't know if he knew that David went and set up a lab in his mom's potting shed or not, and just was like, it's fine as long as it's out of my house. I'm not sure. I've never seen that either way. But one thing that he did do to try to be like, okay, I think you're creating drugs. You're probably on them. You may or may not be selling them. None of those seem to be true, from what I can tell. You need to become an Eagle Scout. And he pushed his son to become an Eagle Scout.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's exactly what he did, as we will later find out. But when it came time for merit badge selection, he said, I want the one that says atomic energy. And the scoutmaster said, I think he told the writer of the book, no one had ever chosen that before in the history of the troop.

• 12:03Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  So it kind of reminds me of the Brian Cox scene in Rushmore with Bill Murray, when he says, he's one of the worst students we've got. I can just picture Brian Cox saying that, that no one's ever tried for this badge before. But it was a legit badge. It's kind of funny that it existed. It's different now, as we'll see. But in 1963, they introduced the atomic energy badge. It came with a pamphlet that they created with the nuclear energy industry that turned out to have a lot of really useful information, almost like a starter kit on how to like, source radioactive elements in the real world.

• 12:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  And how to get your own reactor going.

• 12:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, one of the projects you could do was to build your own Geiger counter. Like, it was serious stuff.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe so legit that, like I said, the Boy Scouts would eventually change that badge. I think probably because of what happened with David. In 2005, they replaced it with the nuclear science badge.

• 13:06Josh Clark?

  Yes. So, but he's still working on the original, the atomic energy badge from 1963, right?

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:13Josh Clark?

  So he's just devouring this. He's having the best time. He visits a hospital ward to learn about X-rays, which is part of the merit badge certification. The thing that really changed things, though, Chuck, is he decided, just these things the merit badge was having him do, like, one of the things was draw a diagram of a fission reaction.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:38Josh Clark?

  Or build a model of a nuclear reactor, but a model, like a cardboard model, basically, or paper machine.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Or?

• 13:46Josh Clark?

  Yes. Or, I will create my own nuclear reactor in my mom's potting shed. He decided he was so psyched about atomic energy that he wanted to do it himself.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I guess you do the model, and you're like, hey, that wasn't so hard. Let me see if I can do it for real. And he wanted to build, and you know, this shows that he was a kid. I think, I don't think this was to cause harm. He wanted to build a neutron gun. And the way I, just for my research, this is speculation, but it didn't seem like he was like, I want to build a neutron gun to try and like, blow up the city that I live in.

• 14:27Josh Clark?

  Not at all.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  It seemed more like a kid who was really into science and sci-fi and chemistry, and wanted to make a little pew pew gun.

• 14:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I think neutron gun is a, it's a misleading term. I can't get the Nintendo Duck Hunt gun out of my head whenever I hear neutron gun. But really, what a neutron gun is, at least the one that David made, it's a block of lead with a cavity carved out, and you put radioactive material in the cavity, and then cover it over with like aluminum foil. And then you just point the aluminum foil side of that block of lead at what you want to irradiate, and then you try to start a chain reaction, a nuclear reaction. That seems to be the sum total of his goals. He wasn't trying to build a bomb. He wasn't trying to sell plutonium to the Libyans. He wasn't doing anything like

• 15:19Josh Clark?

  that. He just wanted to see if he could start a nuclear chain reaction, this thing that had fascinated him since he was 10 years old. And so he set about doing that with help from this Eagle Scout merit badge pamphlet.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 15:35Josh Clark?

  Which makes the whole thing that much more nuts.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also by adopting a persona as a professor, because he starts writing into organizations trying to get information, trying to get materials, trying to get schematics. He said he was Professor Han that taught at his high school, Chippewa Valley High School.

• 15:55Josh Clark?

  Oh, go Chipmunks.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Are they?

• 15:58Josh Clark?

  I don't know.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 15:59Josh Clark?

  They better be.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  And over the next few years, basically, and apparently, you know, he applied himself, he didn't apply himself in school. He was smart, but he was failing, almost failing out, basically, barely passing like the math and English exams needed to graduate eventually. But that is to say, these letters had like, spelling errors and grammatical errors. It didn't seem like they were written by a professor. But people bought it. And before you know it, he's like, corresponding as a professor to these adults.

• 16:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and these adults are just totally into this correspondence. They're really enjoying helping this, who they think a high school physics teacher, learn the stuff he's looking for about nuclear energy to ostensibly go and teach to the kids, right? So this correspondence is like, genuine. The only thing illegitimate about it was that he was misrepresenting who he actually was.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:52Josh Clark?

  A professor rather than a high school student. But other than that, everything else about it seems to be pretty neat.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, except for the fact that it's dangerous and illegal.

• 17:01Josh Clark?

  Yes. So one of the people that he corresponded with, I think he corresponded with him the most, was named Donald Erb, E-R-B. And he was the guy who was the head of the department that produces isotopes. If you need isotopes, you can go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This is not you, but like, if you are in some sort of industry that uses isotopes.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Or they'll hook you up.

• 17:23Josh Clark?

  And this Erb will be like, I got you. I got you covered. For some reason, they come in these little baggies with like, card suits printed all over them. It's weird. That's an Erb kind of touch.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  That's so nice.

• 17:37Josh Clark?

  But he was, he worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and nobody helped David Hahn more than Donald Erb did, again, unwittingly.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So, should we take a break?

• 17:49Josh Clark?

  We should.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Okay, all right. I was about to keep going, but let's take a break. And we're going to talk about his pursuit of radioactive materials right after this.

• 18:12Josh Clark?

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• 19:15Speaker 04

  You know, you're never done decorating your home. You know what I mean?

• 19:18Josh Clark?

  Sure.

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  Yeah, because it's a process. There's always something you could do or buy or update. The only question is, what's next? For us, our animals just wear out our rugs so quickly. It's usually a new rug.

• 19:29Josh Clark?

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• 19:47Josh Clark?

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• 20:13Speaker 04

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• 20:20Josh Clark?

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• 20:39Josh Clark?

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• 21:30Josh Clark?

  By the way, Chuck, it's the Chippewa Valley Big Red, which appears to be a giant cardinal.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 21:36Josh Clark?

  If you ask me, that was a missed opportunity.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Chipmunks?

• 21:41Josh Clark?

  Chippewa chipmunks, the rabid chipmunks.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I love it. All right, so when we left off, David Han was getting serious about building this nuclear reactor. He needs material to do that. So, and we should point out that, you know, I said it was dangerous. It was dangerous. He did know this. He still pursued it, but he like, he had a lead shield that he worked with. He threw away his contaminated clothes. He left his shoes in there and didn't take them in his house, so.

• 22:13Josh Clark?

  It was like his driving shoes, but in a potting shed that he was building a breeder reactor in.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Do you have driving shoes? Is that a thing?

• 22:20Josh Clark?

  I know that it's a thing from watching old episodes of Frasier.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  I've never heard that.

• 22:26Josh Clark?

  Yes, you've seen driving shoes. People wear them, and they're totally unaware that you're not supposed to wear them out of your car. But it's like, if your car is so nice, you take off your outdoor shoes and put on your driving shoes that never leave your car. And that way, you don't get your car dirty.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  Wow. I don't know if I have seen them. I guess I just maybe didn't.

• 22:45Josh Clark?

  You have. They're like, they look kind of like a cross between a loafer and a moccasin. And then the dead giveaway is the tread on the bottom comes up the back of the heel as well, because of the position that your foot is in when you're driving. It gives you grip.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  All right, I'm gonna have to look this up.

• 23:01Josh Clark?

  You've seen them.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  All right. All right, so, it's amazing. 52 years old, never knew about this.

• 23:10Josh Clark?

  I was only probably 40 when I learned about it, so I don't feel bad.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  All right. So, he starts looking for materials. And these are just a few sort of stories about he would go about that. He wanted some americium 241 for this neutron gun. In the booklet that he got from the Boy Scouts, said you can get this stuff in smoke detectors. So, he tries to steal them from the Boy Scout camp, got caught and sent home early. Then he writes, "Smoke detector companies saying, I need a bunch of these things for a school project." Eventually, one company sold him 100 broken ones for 100 bucks.

• 23:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Couldn't figure out how to find this americium, so got in touch with another smoke detector company. He was like, oh, well, here's where you find it, and was able to extract americium enough to like weld together with a blowtorch.

• 24:04Josh Clark?

  Yes, so remember I was talking about the neutron gun is a lump of lead with a cavity hollowed out? And then you put your radioactive material in the cavity of lead? Now we had this radioactive material.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 24:17Josh Clark?

  Americium is, I looked up why it would be in smoke detectors. Did you see why?

• 24:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 24:23Josh Clark?

  It's really interesting, just for a second. So, americium, because of its radioactive decay, it creates a flow of ions, positive and negative ions, that are moved across like this metal plate. And there's a constant movement of ions that this americium is creating from the air around it. And when smoke interacts with those ions, it actually breaks that flow. That flow is detected by the smoke detector, which triggers it to go off. Isn't that just so bizarre? That's how your smoke detector works.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  And that's how they still work?

• 24:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, there's still americium in smoke detectors today.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 25:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  So, you said he built his own Geiger counter.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  I don't know if it was this one or if he ended up getting another one, but he would drive around Upper Michigan with this Geiger counter on, just looking for naturally occurring uranium out in the world. And then eventually, he's like, this isn't working out. So, he got a Czechoslovakian firm that the NRC told him about and sourced uranium ore.

• 25:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he had that Geiger counter mounted to his dashboard, and apparently anytime he drove, he had it turned on. Isn't that amazing?

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's, you gotta find this stuff.

• 25:39Josh Clark?

  And he actually did find some stuff. It's called Pitch Blend, and it's a, it's a source of low-grade uranium. And he tried to extract it, but he couldn't purify it enough. So like you said, he was like, well, I'll just buy some pure uranium from a firm in Czechoslovakia that he heard about, either from the pamphlet or from Donald Urb, one of the two.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, another thing he did was the little mantle, like the little mesh sacks that you tie onto a gas lantern. He bought thousands of those, because they have little tiny amounts of thorium-232. And so, you know, he buys thousands of these from surplus stores, buys thousands of dollars in lithium batteries to extract lithium. So he's been very, you know, I think showing a lot of initiative, and at least how to find this stuff.

• 26:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I mean, like, he's using his after-school job money to buy $1,000 in lithium batteries to purify the thorium that he got from the gas lanterns that he purchased and extracted it from. Like, I can't imagine how much time and effort this took. And by the way, he did purify that thorium pretty well. I saw that he got it to 9,000 times the level found in nature of radioactivity, and about 170 times the level that you would need a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to possess.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  He also went around, of course, where you're gonna find old, dangerous radioactive things, junkyards and antique shops. So he would take that Geiger counter into a junk shop or an antique store, and he would walk around until something lit up, like radium paint. If you remember our, I think it was pretty excellent podcast on the radium girls. And he would find like radium paint and an old clock.

• 27:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah, he found a vial of paint just tucked away inside of one in that. Then he really had his radioactive material for his neutron gun. He actually stepped it up and built a second gun. He'd also, from corresponding with Donald Urb, gotten even better at creating a neutron gun that was going to be useful in creating a nuclear reaction. He also found that when he used the radium on, I think, the thorium that he purified, he was trying to trigger a chain reaction by bombarding thorium with neutrons. That's what he was trying to do. He found that the thorium wasn't converting into uranium like it was supposed to. So he contacted Donald Urb, and Donald Urb said, "Your neutrons are too fast.

• 28:11Josh Clark?

  You gotta slow them down." One of the best ways to slow them down is tritium. And he said, "Well, where would I find tritium?" And apparently, they used tritium to make the glowing sights on gun scopes and gun sights. So, he ordered, I think, dozens of gun sights from mail-order catalogs from stores. And then he would scrape the tritium off and then send them back and say, "I need this sight repaired. There's no tritium on it." And they would put more tritium on it and send it back. And he'd just create a new pseudonym and send that back. And that's how methodical that kid was.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  So this is all kid stuff. He's like 14, 15 years old.

• 28:49Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  Eventually, he turns 17, and he says, "All right, I think I want to build an actual nuclear reactor." It's called a tiny breeder reactor. They've been around since the early 1950s, when the US developed them, when we were, you know, sort of the beginning of the age of trying to use nuclear power for electricity. And they're like, "Well, these little tiny breeder reactors might be a good way to extend the supply of fuel or something." It never quite worked out that way. I think they're still working on that kind of thing in Russia and China. But it never really went off the ground. But it was enough to inspire David to think that maybe I can build a small thing like this in my mom's potting garage, or a potting shed.

• 29:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah. The difference between a breeder reactor and a regular reactor is that you, in a regular reactor, you just use fuel and you get energy from the fuel. With the breeder reactor, you get energy from the fuel, but it also creates more fuel, and you end up with more fuel than you started with. I saw it likened to leaving your house with a car with a half a tank of gas, and when you return home, the tank is full. That's kind of like what it does. And yet, they just could never get it to work. But that's what he was trying to do. And the reason why is because you start with uranium-238, and that's the most abundant uranium found in nature.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  That's right. So he doesn't have enough uranium, no matter what kind it is, to create an actual chain reaction for a normal reactor. So he says, maybe I can at least do something. Like, it seemed like he became sort of obsessed just with this goal of creating some kind of nuclear reaction himself.

• 30:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Got a blueprint from one of his dad's textbooks, took that americium and the radium from his neutron guns, mixed it with some aluminum shavings, some beryllium, wrapped that up in aluminum foil, and basically you have yourself a very small reactor core right there.

• 30:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he created an atomic pile, like the first one that Fermi created in Chicago, but on a much, much smaller scale. But it worked. Like, it worked. He created, like you said, a nuclear reactor, and it started a nuclear chain reaction. And it started to take off, actually, pretty quickly.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. He's got that Geiger counter, and he's measuring this thing like on a daily basis. And he's like, it's actually growing. Like, it's getting more radioactive in here. I imagine he was thrilled, and also possibly a little bit like Matthew Broderick in War Games, where it's like, oh, wait a minute. Like, what have I done here? Such that he was worried and took it apart.

• 31:34Josh Clark?

  He did. Apparently, he could detect it from five houses down the street. And I looked up pictures of Golf Manor. And I mean, their yards are decent size. So five houses away is a pretty good distance to be able to pick up his nuclear reactor in his mom's potting shed with his Geiger counter. And at that-

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Big side yards there.

• 31:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, lots of big side yards.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  No zero lot lines.

• 31:57Josh Clark?

  No, no, no, nothing like that. No, this is Golf Manor, man, that we're talking about. So he took it apart, and he just kind of distributed the different parts to try to drop the radioactivity levels in his mom's potting shed. And he kind of went about his life after he disassembled his reactor. He'd achieved his goal. But apparently, he had a penchant for stealing wheels and tires off of cars. He admitted as much in an interview later on as an adult. And he seems to have gotten caught doing that by the police shortly after he disassembled his reactor. And when the police called him, they said, we're going

• 32:41Josh Clark?

  to search your car. And he said, go ahead and search my car, but do not open that toolbox. That toolbox is highly radioactive.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Is that a good cliffhanger for a break?

• 32:50Josh Clark?

  I think so. Imagine the cops going, whaa?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  They're like, we gotta listen to ads before we know what happens?

• 32:56Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm. Sorry.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 33:13Josh Clark?

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• 33:36Josh Clark?

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• 33:52Speaker 04

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• 34:16Speaker 04

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• 34:23Josh Clark?

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• 34:42Josh Clark?

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• 35:23Josh Clark?

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• 35:39Speaker 04

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• 36:07Josh Clark?

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• 36:39Speaker 04

  All right. So it's August, almost September, 1994. That reactor is taken apart. I think he put the thorium in a shoebox. The radium in the americium was in the shed still, and the rest is in the trunk of his car. He's just been pulled over, like you said, because there was reports that he was stealing tires and wheels. And he said, warning, that thing's radioactive. Don't open up that toolbox. So they said, well, maybe we should... This sounds like an IED to me, an improvised explosive device. Why don't we call in the bomb squad to be safe? Called in the bomb squad. They said, this whole car, basically, is radioactive.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  And all of a sudden, the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan is triggered, and the EPA, and the FBI, and the NRC, and the DOE, and the state and local authorities are all, like, trying to, not trying to get this kid, but trying to figure out what in the world is going on with this kid.

• 37:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he's 17 at the time still. And all of a sudden, these huge agencies are like swooping down on him to figure out what's going on. The thing is, I guess they didn't think to ask the right questions, or their imaginations just didn't go as far as they could have. But they seem to have, in this initial questioning, not really have gotten any further than his car. And he didn't offer up any information whatsoever about his actual, like, nuclear reaction experiments in his mom's potting shed. They didn't even know there was a potting shed at his mom's house at this point.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  That's really hard to believe.

• 38:18Josh Clark?

  Yes, but that's the level of questioning that this kid was subjected to. And I mean, in retrospect, you're like, are you guys kidding? You didn't know about the potting shed right off the bat? But if you're an FBI agent or a Department of Energy agent, and you're talking to a 17-year-old kid, you're probably not going to assume that because they have this stuff in a toolbox in their car, they actually were successfully creating nuclear chain reactions in their mom's potting shed. I can kind of commiserate with that.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Sure. You'd probably assume he just got it at radiation, or us.

• 38:53Josh Clark?

  Pretty much.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  So a few months later is when they finally got an expert from the State Department of Public Health to interview David more thoroughly. And that turned up the potting shed. David's mom, at this point, had gathered most of the radioactive stuff and gotten rid of it. I imagine not in a very safe way at all.

• 39:17Josh Clark?

  No.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  Probably just went in the trash can. And they still found a lot of radiation at the house, in the materials there in the shed. They had the, apparently, there was a vegetable can that had about 1,000 times the normal background radiation. And so they called in federal authorities, and they said, well, your house is a, well, the potting shed at least, is a super fun site.

• 39:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah. They ended up spending 60 grand on a two, three-day operation between June 26 and 28 of 1995, disassembling the potting shed, I think getting some of the earth around it out of there, putting them in sealed barrels with, you know, radioactive hazard symbols on it. And they sent it to the Great Salt Lake Desert, where they were buried with other canisters of low-level radioactive waste. His mom's potting shed is in the Great Salt Lake Desert, buried with other radioactive material. That's kind of neat. The real stuff, though, like you said, it ended up in, like, the landfill nearby. There was a quote from

• 40:23Josh Clark?

  David that I saw, where he said, the authorities got the garbage, and the garbage got the good stuff, in reference to what his mom had thrown away. So yeah, there's some lumps of americium and radium sitting somewhere in the garbage pile outside of Clinton Commerce Township.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  And what's, in like 1,000 years, it'll be safe?

• 40:46Josh Clark?

  Probably something like that.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  I was just, I don't know how long that would be. I bet somebody knows though.

• 40:52Josh Clark?

  Oh, they'll write in.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  So, uh, David falls into depression after this. Uh, his high school classmates were not kind to him, of course. Um, they called him radioactive boy. Uh, the EPA said, hi, we should, you know, we can examine you and your body to see if you're okay. He said, no, no, no, I don't want anything to do with that. I'll be fine. Uh, he did get that Eagle Scout badge. Um, I think the scout leaders were like, should we really do this? Um, but they did. They gave him that Eagle Scout badge and, uh, no, apparently that the neighborhood, his, uh, all those huge side yards came in handy because no one in the neighborhood and no one at the home or in his family,

• 41:38Speaker 04

  apparently ever suffered from any kind of radiation sickness.

• 41:41Josh Clark?

  That is so lucky.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:44Josh Clark?

  Like, that is really lucky for him and for everybody, but he, no one got hurt. Um, that's just mind boggling at this point. Um, he went on and joined the Navy a couple of years later. Um, and he served for several years, was honorably discharged and ironically served on the USS Enterprise, which is a nuclear submarine, but he didn't work in any capacity near the nuclear part of the submarine. Um, he-

• 42:12Speaker 04

  I think he fully served his time in the Navy.

• 42:14Josh Clark?

  He did. Yeah. He was honorably discharged.

• 42:17Speaker 04

  No, no, no. I think, I think he was discharged from the Marines. I think he, like, he fully served his time in the Navy.

• 42:22Josh Clark?

  Oh, I thought they-

• 42:23Speaker 04

  He was never discharged.

• 42:24Josh Clark?

  I thought they discharged you when your time was up too.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  No, you just, you're just done. Like, a discharge means it's time for you to go and then you're like, wait, I got three more years. And they're like, no, it's time for you to go.

• 42:36Josh Clark?

  Gotcha. Okay. I gotcha. All right. So yes, in between the Navy and the Marines, he went to college, uh, and started working on an associate's degree. Uh, like you said, he joined the Marines. He was honorably discharged. Um, and his life was just not going the way he wanted it to. Um, 2007 found him unemployed. Um, his mental illness had really kind of kicked in, uh, and toward the end of his life, spoiler alert, he, uh, he died at age 39. Um, there was a, an FBI report on him where somebody had been informing on him that he was not using his meds, that he was heavily using cocaine and that he was acting really paranoid. Um, from what I can tell,

• 43:19Josh Clark?

  based on the FBI documents, it seems like the person informing on him seems concerned, not like they're doing it out of any kind of vengeful reason.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:29Josh Clark?

  But the, when the FBI showed up and interviewed him, again, this is when he's in his thirties. Um, they, he, he, he passed all of the inspection or queries that they gave him, questioning that they gave him.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. And there were, you know, there were other complaints and reports, uh, with the police that, you know, he was trying to do this again, that he had a small reactor at his house. Uh, another landlord, I think, said that he had stolen some smoke detectors. Uh, that they were missing and they found them, um, like, you know, torn apart, basically, uh, near David's garage. But they never, they never found any kind of radiation. He said he hadn't done that kind of stuff in a decade. And, you know, they went and checked like where he was living and they never found any evidence that he had at least started up any more radioactive work.

• 44:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Imagine during your FBI, um, questioning, you're like, I haven't done any nuclear reactions at home for like 10 years, man. That's like, that is a different chat. It's like a whole lifetime.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  Teenage stuff.

• 44:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, uh, the FBI documents also give, um, just kind of a sad note in 2010, which is where the FBI's investigation of him as an adult left off. Based on those complaints, um, they noted that he was in rehab after being charged with a bunch of drug charges. So apparently the cocaine use thing was true. Um, that was 2010. Six years later, uh, like I said, he was dead at, um, age 39.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, uh, in the media, of course, initially there were some people that said that the radioactivity did him in, or that was a factor at least. Uh, very sadly, the, the report came back, that wasn't true, but he died from combined effects of alcohol and fentanyl, uh, and Benadryl. And he suffered from mental, uh, mental illness, just like his mom, I think, from, uh, paranoid schizophrenia and depression. And it's just a very sad end to a story of a kid who, who sounds like he was really smart and just wanted to try and do something really amazing, you know?

• 45:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Um, he, he was found dead in the bathroom at a Walmart that he had gone shopping in the night he died. Um, and it is a sad end. I don't, I don't quite know what to make of it, Chuck. Like,

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Same.

• 45:50Josh Clark?

  It, it's, if he was still alive, I don't know. I think it would be a, a much different story somehow. But he did something, I don't know. Maybe it's the story of somebody who was just so single minded. They, they did something that most other people would have given up on or never even attempted. And that's worth mentioning, you know?

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, and I tried to look at other angles. I just, I never saw anything like nefarious, really.

• 46:15Josh Clark?

  No, no, either an FBI interview or a media interview, the interviewer was like, I mean, were you thinking of making a bomb or whatever? And they, they said, they reported like, he seemed to just be like, that never even crossed my mind. Like, no, it's not at all what I was doing. He was just obsessed with creating a nuclear reaction and he did it.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, uh, thankfully we don't have to end it on that sad note because Libya found this other great story, uh, of a kid named Taylor Wilson, who got the Radioactive Boy Scout, uh, book from his grandmother as an 11 year old science kid and operating under supervision and oversight and getting real experts to help. Uh, actually became the youngest person to achieve nuclear fusion at the age of 14.

• 47:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah. This is amazing. I mean, fusion's a whole new ballgame, but yeah, 14.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  And works as a, a nuclear physicist as an adult.

• 47:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And supposedly according to the Guardian, a super cool dude too.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. And directly inspired from, uh, David's story.

• 47:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And apparently his grandmother lived to regret it again, according to the Guardian.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 47:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's what the Guardian said. Uh, because I guess his grandmother was giving it to him as a cautionary tale and he was like, oh, I want to try this myself.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Very interesting.

• 47:38Josh Clark?

  Uh, Taylor Wilson's grandmother is the 11th person we need to thank in this episode. Taylor Wilson being 10 and Donald Irby being number nine.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  Right. Nice work.

• 47:48Josh Clark?

  Uh, if you want to know more about the nuclear or radioactive boy scout David Hahn, there's a lot of stuff out there. Um, but you, uh, would be remiss in not reading Ken Silverstein's, um, article, at least if not his book on David Hahn. Uh, and while you're looking that up, we'll just go ahead and do listener mail.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  All right. This is from Tiffany. Uh, hey guys, thank you for bringing back some vivid memories from my eighth grade reading class. Uh, too many decades ago to admit, but my reading teacher was also the social studies teacher. And I guess that explains why all of our reading lists included Animal Farm, Hiroshima, All Quiet on the Western Front, and you know it, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Uh, to hammer home what we read, he would incorporate details of the book into a little imaginary coin toss he did each day to determine whether the boys or girls got to go first and, uh, walk to lunch in single file line. For the weeks we discussed The Jungle, it would sound something like this. Today's menu includes hot dogs. Call it in the air. Is it the rusty nail or the severed finger?

• 48:51Speaker 04

  What a great teacher. Uh, one day we noticed that half the kids in the class had an addition to the book that included this. Uh, and yes, I still remember it decades later. Mary had a little lamb and when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to the packing town and now it's labeled chicken. I was really hoping you guys had seen this so we could hear a recitation during the podcast, but, uh, we just did it right there, Tiffany.

• 49:18Josh Clark?

  That's great. Yeah. We, I didn't run across that.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  I didn't either. This is a great ad.

• 49:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Thanks a lot, Tiffany. Uh, that's a great email and we appreciate it big time and hats off to your teacher. The 13th person we need to thank in this episode. You're number 12, Tiffany.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Can we thank Jerry?

• 49:34Josh Clark?

  Sure. Why not? We'll go with 14. Uh, we could thank ourselves and just bring it up to 16, a nice even number.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Sweet 16.

• 49:41Josh Clark?

  Uh, we're going to make it 17 because we want to thank you for listening and we want to thank you in advance for getting in touch with us via email. It's [email protected].

• 49:53Speaker 05

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 50:09Josh Clark?

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