Atomic merit badge

Teen who built reactor in back yard probably Scouting for attention

Scott C. Yates, Special To The News

Published March 26, 2004 at midnight

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The Radioactive Boy Scout evokes an era in 1960s America when nuclear power was all promise. But it is told with the anti-nuclear fervor of 1979, the year The China Syndrome hit the big screen.

Put these facts together, and you have an unsettling mix: an amazing story, told for all the wrong reasons.

Boy Scout recounts the little-known story of David Hahn, a boy who built a crude nuclear reactor in his backyard, with the help of a schoolbook.

David was one of those public high school kids who don't really fit in for one reason or another. His parents divorced and both re-married. As a result, he was left largely unsupervised.

But that was true for wide swaths of kids who attended high school with him. What made David unique was his overwhelming interest in science.

He collected elements on the periodic table the way other kids collect stereo equipment or old magazines.

While he was largely ignored and misunderstood, the one aspect of his life everyone agreed would be good for him was the Boy Scouts. He collected merit badges with zeal, and it was while working toward his "Atomic Energy" merit badge that his quest to build a small-scale but actual working nuclear reactor in his backyard began.

The boy was able to collect everything he needed to build a small nuclear reactor because he had: 1) superb scientific skills; 2) an obsessive streak; 3) a willingness to lie, cheat and steal; 4)a textbook from 1960, the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments; and, 5) a little luck - like the day he walked into an antiques store hoping to find a clock with radium-painted hands and numbers (so that he could scrape off the paint and use the radium) and instead found one with a vial of the paint tucked inside the clock. (Radium, it should be noted, is no longer used to make things glow in the dark, after the people who painted it on clocks started dying.)

By the time he was done, local law enforcement and eventually the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would investigate, and federal authorities would take away young David's "lab" - a backyard potting shed - in sealed barrels to a secure radioactive waste site.

All of this unfolds in an otherwise boring Michigan suburb called Golf Manor.

The book thoroughly examines every brick in the path that the boy took, starting from his early experiments and going through each step and misstep.

That's when this story is at its best.

But The Radioactive Boy Scout drags in the parts that don't have anything to do with the central character. Maybe the author was worried he didn't have enough material to fill a book, but he follows chapter-length rabbit trails tracing the entire history of the Boy Scouts, the history of nuclear power, etc.

On this latter point, the author goes too far, penning what is essentially an anti-nuclear screed.

He rants and raves like, well, like its 1979, the year anti-nuclear feelings were at their zenith - and eventually makes a reader think that the reason he wrote the book was simply to create an anti-nuclear platform for himself. The notion colors much of the central story and drags the book down.

It's too bad, because the heart of the book stands well on its own, and the story has been little reported, even though the reactor was shipped off to a secure waste site nearly 10 years ago.

In all, that makes it an interesting, if unsettling book, albeit one that should come with a warning: Don't buy it for any obsessive kids in the family. It might give them ideas.

Scott C. Yates is a Denver entrepreneur and freelance writer.

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