Failure™ Magazine

You Glow Boy!

The story of a teenager’s nuclear ambitions.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Science & Technology

Boy Meets Girl
Although Hahn could undeniably be described as a science geek, he maintained the same interests as any other teenage boy. In other words, he wanted nothing less than a girlfriend on one arm, a car in the driveway and enough spending money to pursue his favorite activities. In order to finance his expensive experiments Hahn started his own lawn service and worked part-time at a Kroger supermarket. Ken took care of the car issue, buying his son a used Pontiac 6000. Finding a girlfriend was the hardest part, but Hahn managed to develop a steady relationship with the younger Heather Beaudette, who somehow accepted his frustrating tendency to steer all conversations toward science. Most boys would have made Beaudette their number one priority, but experimenting remained Hahn’s true love, and reading about the exploits of Marie and Pierre Curie (Nobel Prize winners who studied radioactivity and discovered the elements radium and polonium) captivated his interest like nothing else.

In the same spirit of inventiveness that possessed the Curies, Hahn began collecting information on nuclear power and exploring ways to obtain radioactive elements. Venturing out to junkyards and antique stores with his Geiger counter he uncovered old clocks that had been painted with radium. He obtained thorium from the mantles of Coleman gas lanterns (which, at the time, were coated with thorium dioxide). And he removed americium from countless smoke detectors. “Sometimes the way he obtained these things was more interesting that what he obtained,” begins Silverstein. “He wrote away to a smoke detector company and said he needed detectors for a school project he was doing. David convinced the company to send him a bunch that were just sitting in a warehouse. His father told me he came home and found boxes and boxes of smoke detectors had mysteriously arrived,” continues Silverstein, who says that Hahn would sometimes try to send back the merchandise after extracting the radioactive element in question. “David bought a bunch of gun scopes from a gun shop and returned them. The owner was furious because they were all perfect except that the tritium was gone.”

It wasn’t long before Hahn discovered that questioning experts via mail was the most sensible way for a teenager like himself to obtain information about nuclear reactions, largely because it allowed him to remain faceless and anonymous. He wrote to agencies like the Department of Energy (DOE), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the American Nuclear Society, often posing as “Professor Hahn.” Although his requests for information were more often than not ignored—atrocious spelling and the conspicuous absence of academic letterhead may have been factors—it’s ironic that the NRC was one of the more helpful government agencies, providing him with a list of commercial sources for radioactive materials. “He got a lot of information from nuclear trade organizations and significant information from the government,” says Silverstein. “It was not like they were sending him plans to build a nuclear reactor. But in his letters he sounded like a professor and he was able to obtain information that he needed to advance the experiments. He [even] got samples of ore that contained uranium from a company in Czechoslovakia.”

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