Citation Needed - The Radioactive Boyscout

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

David Charles Hahn (October 30, 1976 – September 27, 2016), sometimes called the "Radioactive Boy Scout" or the "Nuclear Boy Scout", was an American nuclear radiation enthusiast who built a homemade neutron source at the age of seventeen. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

But Freddie Mercury was gay, wasn't he? He was by, and he could still be aware that fat, bottom girls make the rock and whirl go round if he's gay, Tom. And it just feels appropriate. There they are. Right, Monday, cool. Is this Jolt Cola? It sure is.

Try it with the Dunkeros. Uh-oh. And NOAA might let you try next on the Dreamcast. I never said that. Okay. I'll bite. What's with all the retro stuff today? Well Cecil, as you know, today's episode is about David Han, the nuclear boy scout

as he's often known. Right. Yeah. At first, we were thinking, get a nuclear thing from Eli's nuclear bomb guy, but you know It's not a lot I actually almost filled up the stamps on my card and besides isn't this story of David Han Much more about a generation left to drift than it is about some kids wacky experiments I mean sure radium is dangerous, but far more dangerous is a generation of uncaring post-tipy parents

and their disaffected middle-class kids living in a post-regum economy. Right? I mean, if you think about it, isn't society the real poison? Do whatever. Joel's delicious. That's not so good. Thank you, Tom. And those graphics are bad.

Okay, yeah, but they weren't at the time. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed. Podcasts to re-choose a subject, read a single article about our Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet. That's how it works now. I'm Cecil, and I'll be engineering this show today, but I'll need my team of crack scientists to help me out. First up, two guys who would forego the science for the crack. Eli Antichy.

And my teeth were going to fall out from all the candy anyway. This is a weird thing. Yeah. Do you floss mango nectar? I feel like your dentist tells you to do that. Also joining us tonight, the guy who's gonna read the story and the person who will continuously correct him, Tom and me. See, so I doubt it will be continuous, probably just the nouns and verbs.

He's very unlikely to take issue with my propositions. I feel like, yes, that's fair. Yeah, no, apparently they can go any damn wear in a sentence. And today's hero of linguistic energy. Yeah. Patrons, your funding shoots us into an excited state. And if you'd like to learn how to be rad, stick around until the end of the show. Thanks for the way.

Tell us Noah, what person plays thing concept phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today. I I feel like we're just going to spend the next half hour appreciating that, that rad that radiation absorption dose joke actually, but if we can't do that, if we're not allowed to do that, we will take it, we will talk about David Han. Okay. All right. Well, Tom, I feel like in this essay, you're going to be out of your element. Are you ready to spill your knowledge on us?

Spill an introduction like that. Just for me. Ah, well done, sir. Well done, for me. Well done, well done, well done, well done, good man. All right, so Tom, who was a new podcast? I, I rescind the shit bits for last week, actually. Eli's dying inside right now.

Absolutely, absolutely. I am dying. We used to talk about Tom. Talk about smooth love that. He used to talk about pussy. So Tom, who was David Han? All right. So like many of you, I was a pretty typically disaffected Gen X Lashkey kid with divorced parents. And like many of my cohort, I sometimes did some stupid and even dangerous shit sometimes Who's David Han?

I get there goddamn it. This is my process, respect my process. I'm starting oh no, I'm editing it out. I'm saying it out. I I'm never saying you did some stupid and even dangerous shit. Yes, but why? Sometimes from board. Sometimes.

I'm sure as a way of dealing with complicated feelings, I lacked the tools to process. Keith, No matter how insane and dangerous your teen angst rebellion phase was, I absolutely iron clad guarantee that it was nothing compared to the shenanigans that David Han got up to. Because unless your teen exploits required the combined efforts of the EPA and the nuclear regulatory commission and resulted in the creation of a super fun site. You and I, we were just fucking around in the minor leagues. I started a forest fire when I was five years old. I thought that was bad. I started

on fire when I was five years old. So David Hans parents divorced when he was a toddler. His dad and engineer GM remarried and David stepmom was also an engineer from GM. David lived as dad and his stepmom and spent occasional weekends at his mom paddy's house. David's dad, not a particularly affectionate guy, pretty much just worked all the time, and his stepmom was no more lovingly demonstrative. Both were fairly strict and disciplined, heavy,

but not otherwise problematic. His mom paddy was much more emotionally volatile and his stepdad, a hard drinking, but otherwise amiable forklift driver was by all accounts loving, if not particularly cerebral. The two homes couldn't be more different. David didn't fit perfectly well in either. Young nuclear enthusiasts sometimes collide with their parents and their relationship to K's so

To make it weird town, but you just described a home life demonstrably better than three fifths of this podcast at growing up so Cheers noble to you She's noble. She's noble too. So good. Eli's so mad, right? Oh, he's so mad. I'm doing a separate whispered podcast with all these so man. Oh, the pussy talk I want. Jesus. As a youngster, David's life was fairly normal. He did the boring, normal kid stuff. The parents tolerate and pretend it's precious and wonderful,

like playing sports and joining the boys scouts and hanging out with friends. Okay, so when the situation needed to the future, it doesn't episode about your kid. I don't think it's gonna be kind to you, Tom. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha assuredly not, but David wasn't really anything like his friends. Or anyone else for that matter, when he was 10, David's father gave him as a gift, the golden book of chemistry experiments. And in that moment, everything changed for David. David began an obsession and focus that makes any interest I've ever had in anything seem like nothing more than a passing thought. By 12,

David had moved on from the golden book of chemistry experiments and began working his way through his father's college chemistry textbooks, which sounds percusious, but was in fact utterly terrifying and bizarre. Tom, I'd appreciate if you didn't piss off the part of our audience best equipped to send us a bomb. You mind elaborating a bit besides. David was not by any stretch or any account, a particularly good student.

He was not a gifted intellectual prodigy, but here he was at 12 routinely falling asleep face down surrounded by chemistry books and encyclopedias. He accumulated into vowed texts like prudent practices for handling hazardous chemicals in laboratories and this story of atomic energy. With David Lackton, broader educational interest and ability, he more than made up for with unwavering unhealthy obsession. He soon set up a laboratory in his bedroom of his dad's house and began running his own experiments. And by 14, he had made nitroglycerin in his bedroom lab. What? Wow.

Okay, when I was 10, me and my friend Dan went up to his dad and we were holding handfuls of packing peanuts. And Dan's like, hey, dad, where's the gasoline? And his dad was like, it's in the shed, don't use too much for where the fuck you're doing. We tried to make napom using the anarchist. I know, yeah, definitely. You're using the gasoline in the styrofoam. But turns out it takes a while for the styrofoam to dissolve,

so we got bored. We got bored. But the names were weird. The weirda. His dad was a Vietnam vet and a fight? Well, for those days, he's just, he was worried about keeping himself in business. I guess. Yeah.

No, so the difference between this kid and me and Heath was that he had a better recipe, right? I was probably as high as I was. I guess that's right. You were high. No, I was my big problem. Now David probably should have voted more time to that book about the safe handling of dangerous shit because explosions in his home were commonplace.

So much so that the walls were packed with blast damage and shrapnel from exploded vessels and failed experiments. His carpet was singed and stained to the point that it had to be ripped up and removed entirely. And while many teens have trashed their bedrooms, few had demoed theirs from the inside with chemical explosions. And rather than sitting down with their son and maybe banning him from playing with explosive chemicals in their home, David's dad simply relocated his makeshift lab from the bedroom to his basement. Look kid, I don't care if you blow yourself up. Just don't

do it around me, huh? If our generation had a bottle, see so cool. The experts continued no matter where David went. When he was sent to Boy Scout Camp, he couldn't bring himself to stop his experiments. And so he brought along chemical substrates to camp to try to make his own fireworks. Of course, what he really accomplished was blowing a hole in the communal tent where the magnesium he brought with him ignited unexpectedly. Sorry, guys, I swear that's never happened to me before. So disease if you don't technically. Other next year he was caught removing the camps smoke detectors to take them apart for parts much more on that later.

And he was kicked out of Cub Scout camp. Hey, Mr. Han, it's the camp. It's the 90s. We don't know what autism is yet. So we've decided that your son's evil come get him. All right. That's another good contender for the model. Yeah.

No. All things only got worse from there. And David's parents began to wonder if maybe he was like breaking bad and cooking up some chili pee. When he told them he was at a library, his folks would show up unexpectedly to try to catch him not being there. But he was there buried in home after Tom on chemistry. And this did convince his parents that he wasn't making drugs, but they were still so frightened

that he was gonna blow them all up, that he was banned from being in his family home alone at all, ever, even for a few minutes. If his parents went out to run an errand, David was locked out of his home house until they returned. I feel like leaving them in situations where the only way to his stuff was to blast his way in didn't make things better. Right?

Give it as age you probably played Legend of Zelda already. He knew. I like that they never considered taking him with they just left him in the yard like an in the arms of the angels dog What the fuck man? You just breaks a clay pot. All right. There's the key to the house Now none of these interventions mattered one day From the basement lab there was an explosion that rocked the house David's parents rushed downstairs to find a semi-conscious David now with out his eyebrows lying on the floor. You see, he had been pounding red phosphorus with the handle of a screwdriver like a mortar and pestle situation. But unaware that this causes that to fucking explode. For months, David had to return again and again to the eye doctor to have pieces of plastic

from the phosphorus container removed from his eyes. At this point, David did lose basement lab privileges. Okay, I'm confused. Was David actually reading the chemistry books? Because I feel like one of those would have mentioned bang bang make phosphorus go bull. Yeah. I would, David had two sets of parents and his mom and stepdad were quite a bit less intellectual than his father and stepmom had been.

And David simply moved his lab and his experiments from dad's house to moms where no one really understood what the hell he was doing anyway. And David had the perfect cover for his next more ambitious round of experiments. David was, as you'll recall, a Boy Scout. And now he was working on his Eagle Scout badge, and it turns out there is a Merit badge in atomic energy. Which what? Well, this probably shouldn't be anymore. No! What the fuck? He's just out in the woods, bunch of Boy Scoutsouts hull around tiny fire. David's got a nuclear reactor running a laser sauna.

It's like, I'm not. Man. The merit badge itself was nothing. He got the merit badge by making a drawing demonstrating how nuclear vision occurs and then making basically a diorama of a nuclear reactor and visited a hospital radiology unit to learn about radioisotopes. Oh, and then of course, he decided to make for himself his own nuclear breeder reactor.

Well, while we pause for a minute to wonder if they should have outlawed breeding of any kind by any of these family members, let's take a quick break for some apropos of nothing. I mean, given what he's gonna do to the testicles nearby, I feel like we've got a fair of. Yeah, right, fair of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Son, you got a second. God, dad, what you want. So your mother tells me you've been messing around with your chemistry, sad. Your experiments, dad. God, chemistry. Right, right.

I like you. I like you, Mensen. And I was just wondering, you know, what you're up to. Well, I mean, this is phosphorus, warming it into a ball. So when you throw it something, it would like totally blow up. Doing a little mining area, fantastic, huh?

Yeah, yeah, then this, this is a deadly and untraceable poison. You can put in any food or beverage. Ha, ha, ha, cranking your friends, yeah. I remember those days and hey, what's this here, son? Oh, this is Mortal Kombat. Damn it, boy, don't you know this stuff is dangerous? I'm taking this away right now.

Oh, I liked that game. Yeah, this was parenting in the 90s. Yes, yes it was. Yup. game. Yeah, this was parenting in the 90s. Yes, yes, it was. Yep. We left off. David got his nuclear badge. Was he hard at work on his rice and and Sarah badges Tom is that One for carpet bombing who knew All right, so now we have to just go all Noah and leave a perfectly good story and talk a little bit about science stuff I was hoping for to understand Doesn't even make sense to you said I need you to understand what a breeder reactor is so you can understand why teenagers shouldn't

build them. Honestly, Tom, I was convinced that nuclear. So you can save yourself some time. All reactors really. So the idea behind a breeder reactor is that the process of fission that takes place in a breeder reactor not only produces electricity in the same way all nuclear reactors do, by the way, by harnessing the energy from vision to heat water and to steam, which in turn drives turbines. But then that same reaction produces a byproduct that can itself be used

as fuel. The process here starts with a core of plutonium 239 surrounded by a blanket made of uranium 238. I'm sorry. I hate to interrupt, but blanket can't be the right word. It can't. There's no way that society is. It's not. It's it's it's it's a weighted blanket extra neutrons. It's the fun.

The plutonium shits out neutrons, which turns the uranium 238 into uranium 239. The uranium 239 then decays into neptonium 239, and then that decays back into plutonium 239. Which is where the whole thing began. So you start out with fuel, you get fission, you get heat, then you get the fuel back. The reactor breathes its own fuel. Yeah, it's awesome. When I heard about this, I was 15 and I handed a piece of chemistry

homework into my teacher with a drawing on the back and I had a series of breeder reactors like in a loop blowing up the entire. The homework came back and it said, see me in giant red marker across the whole thing. I think I might be like David Homb, but too dumb. Like I was just like lazy and dumb. I was like, perpetual motion machine. This is amazing. Just don't do that. And to be very fair to the technology, breeder reactors are in use in China, Japan, India,

and Russia. So they are a real thing. In the US, we don't have them. In part because sources of uranium have been found that make building standard issue, light water reactors, just more economical, and also in part because the two we tried to build were utter failures.

One in Idaho had a partial core meltdown and had to be shut down, and the other just cost an ungodly amount of money and it didn't end up working. It produced electricity, but didn't end up breeding anymore of its fuel and so the project was scrapped. I saw a ramp that sends marbles back to the top on TikTok.

Did he drive one of those to ramp? Well, to be clear, though, you have to understand the fucking reactors because you have to know that what he did was dangerous for a teenager building a backyard nuclear reactor. But even if that was a standard right of passage, he didn't dangerously. Yeah, he didn't read backyard nuclear reactor for teenagers safety. Exactly. So naturally chemistry accident boys scout David fucking Han was going to be the one to crack the problem at home on his own.

Of course, as Doc Brown will be the first to tell you, it is pretty tough to get your hands on fissionable nuclear materials, not getting gunned down by Iranians in a parking lot. So he was going to by Iranians in a parking lot. So he was going to need to improvise rather a lot. The first step was to begin building a neutron gun and is a way to focus the release of the neutrons from radioactive decay onto a target material. So David wrote to everyone he could think of

that had the word nuclear in the title. He panned letters to the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the American Nuclear Society, the Edison Electric Institute, and the atomic industrial forum. He wrote letters claiming to be a high school physics teacher and said he was fishing for information on how he might be able to get radioactive raw materials to begin his experiments at home. Rick Perry, the Department of Energy had to call someone in to translate the letter into fourth grade vocabulary for him. That's a common. They put his glasses on.

It was way smart. And then the middle goes pew pew. Yeah, the middle goes pew pew. And then I'd like to ban, I think myself from existing. I forget. Are the most useful of these organizations he wrote to was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. David ended up getting into a scientific discussion by mail with a guy named David Urb, David Urb, who was the commissions director of isotope production and distribution,

which is evidently a job that involves answering letters from high school teachers somehow. Why did you enter mail? As well as evidently sending out pricing and commercial sources for radioactive wares and materials for their experiments. According to David quote, the NRSC gave me all the information I needed. All I had to do was go out and get the materials. Why do they even have a mailbox?

Just don't have that. They don't have a mailbox. It's crazy. Apparently, we spent the entire Cold War doing a bunch of nuclear science theater and maybe hoping some kid might figure out cold fusion for us. Wait, Merit Pages in WMDs and fucking Red Fossilist vending machines at middle school next to the cigarette vending machine. We had taken ice to to believe in ice tobit. Yes.

The parents are still around in the early 90s too. Yeah, but here in this Doc Brown's got to feel like such a dumbass, right? Could have written a fucking ladder instead of others. This is what you get. This is what you get for trying to wield more power than you know how to pronounce motherfucker. It's Jeff and Jigalot. That's my side. Now, there's no way in hell David was going to get his hands on you 239 or plutonium 238,

but he did have other options. He had a list of 14 radioactive isotopes that he could source from their use and relatively common household materials, including a Maracim 241, which is found in smoke detectors, radium 226, which is in old clock dials, like I think radium girls here for context. Uranium 235, which is naturally occurring in tiny amounts in a kind of oracle pitch blend, and Thorium 232, which is in those obnoxiously bright gas camping lanterns. Hey, everybody in the commercial space, circle up. We're not using any nuclear adjacent materials, just at all, find some other shit.

Just find... There you go. Or, or, or, or, surprise your fucking kids. You could supervise your fucking kids. I'm like, I feel like maybe that's easier than not having smoke detectors. But what do I fucking know? Or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, him 100 broken smoke detectors, which I guess they were saving in case someone wanted to buy what? Broken smoke detectors. Certified.

We forbids. So to get to the radioactive bits inside the detectors, he just called up the customer service rep. And he they told him that the AmeriSem was indeed in the detectors and it was just all sealed up in a little gold matrix inside. So David, use that information to take the detectors apart, take out all the AmeriSem and then he used a blowtorch

just weld them all together by melting the gold matrices into a small radioactive gold pile. Yeah, is this three mile island? Yeah, do you have any broken down radioactive stuff I can have? I'm an eagle scout in our country's Christian Hitler youth. So I just, oh, I need a message. Why didn't you just say to nobody who can climb a rope backwards

would ever do anything bad? So here you go. So then David and mind you, all of this is taking place in a garden shed behind his mom's house while he's about 16 or so. I just want to keep setting that scene. He takes the radioactive emerasyem and he sticks it in a lump of lead and he just hoax a tiny little hole in the lead. And voila, the small hole in the lead. And while the small hole in the lead focuses the decaying neutrons and David now had a crude neutron gun in his backyard.

Okay, I feel like you're being judgy. Tom, second amendment, basic freedoms. That's important. The bad guys are going to be the only one with new trunks, Thomas. That would be worth it. We need teachers armed with nuclear guns. That's official, that would make everybody safe. Also no more doors, man. Right, obviously. David really wanted to get his hands next on some uranium 235. Uranium 235 is used in nuclear weapons, by the way,

but he thought maybe he could just find some lane about in Michigan if he looked real hard. So he drove around with a Geiger counter looking for hot rocks. He managed to fill about a quarter of the trunk of his Pontiac with pitch blend, but it wasn't gonna be enough. So this fucking high school kid contacted a checklist of Vainian company that sells uranium to commercial and university buyers and he bamboozles them and is selling him a few samples of a black ore.

That's not exactly clear which kind, but it did contain small amounts of U-235 and U-238. How is this working? Somebody was like, oh, you got a note from your dad that it's for him and the cigarettes too. Great. Yeah, no, go ahead and Pull it for the next window. You're cool. Get your senior premium. So I feel like honestly, there's a certain point where every company in that entire country was happy to sell anything to anybody who didn't make a can I write you a checked joke, right? The or wasn't super useful to him in small amounts in its, you know, rock form. And he wanted to isolate it.

And the best way to do that would be to use nitric acid to separate the useless rock parts from the uranium bits. Hey, hey, hey, Tom, Sesse is getting a little bit instruction manually. You might as well get a few steps there. All right. So nitric acid though, that's used in making bombs. You can't just buy nitric acid. Well, that's used in making bombs.

You want to do a reverse sear on the nitric acid to get it perfect to make bombs. Spatch. Now, if you are a high school kid who nearly failed all of his classes, but is at the same time some kind of weird chemistry genius, you can just whip up your own, which he did. And he managed to use the nitric acid to turn the ore into a kind of slurry. But then I love this part.

He didn't really know what to do next. So he tried to purify it by pouring it through a coffee filter, which thankfully didn't work because if it had, he would have refined U235 and U238 in his backyard with a fucking cure. Yeah, the K and K cup stands for Killatun. It's a Killatun. I think I'd be most offended by the very part of that if you both. All right. David decided to go with his safety school radioactive isotope, thorium. Yeah.

If you've ever used a Coleman camping lantern, that little dangly sock thing, that's coated with thorium 232. What? So David, yeah. What? So David, very not at all suspiciously purchased thousands of these gas lantern mansels. And then used a board torch to reduce them to a big pile of ash, which meant he now kind of had the same problem that he had with the slurry. He had thorium, but it was all just like

mishmashed up into a pile of ash. David knew from reading his dad's old textbooks, he could use lithium to fix this problem, not gonna bore you with how. So we again, not at all suspiciously, bought a thousand dollars worth of lithium batteries. He used wire cutters to cut open the batteries and extract the lithium, and then he put all the thorium ash and the battery lithium

into a big aluminum foil ball, and he heated the whole fucking thing up over a bunch of it. Yeah, yeah, that's how he held it together. And somehow this worked very nicely. It's mom wouldn't let him use the nice foil, you know, the big metal one. He used the zippy ones, he used the folly ones that just flipped. He had now purified, Thorium 232, radiating its radiation at levels 170 times greater

than what would require licensing from the nuclear regulatory commission. He's just Christ. Again, it's mom shesh. What? I don't want to bring the tone down or anything, but the sad thing about this story isn't how bad a parent,

you have to be to miss this. The sad thing is how bad a parent parent you have to be to miss this. The sad thing is how bad a parent you have to be to miss a kid with this much natural curiosity and talent because you're watching fucking Jerry McGuire in theaters. All right, so I just want to say like if I had had access to a thousand dollars or more when I was 16, I feel like I would have done like at least something worthy of a citation Feeling under a sheifer, but then I'm like, oh, it's privilege. He was able to get that I couldn't have got up He worked a part-time job. You just worked a part-time job for a thousand dollars worth of it. Oh, he wasn't playing drugs The Arabian from Mitt Romney's dad. You're fine. You can do anything you work in this country

He's seriously. I don't remember from the article. He's seriously. It's just like a regular like You know, you can do anything you want in this country. He's seriously, I don't remember from the article, he's seriously, it's just like a regular like, the kid part time job, like the ice colds. I don't like that, I'm like, if you're not buying drugs, then yeah, this, yeah. I don't even understand what that makes sense. Thank you. What David needed next was radium,

but that shit is dangerous as fuck, so it's not just lying around. And more, it used to be though, Radium for a while was used in luminous clock dials until a bunch of workers got face cancer from licking their paint brushes laced with Radium paint. But the products still existed out in the world and David said about trying to buy vintage clocks and shit like that and scrape off the paint. This was very slow going at first, but David was not to be deterred. He drove around town with his Geiger counter and he noticed as he drove past the vintage shop that the Geiger counter went absolutely bonkers. And inside the shop inside an old clock was a vial of radium paint left behind by a work of a fuck. He bought that clock full of

radium for 10 bucks. Just walks up to the counter and guys like, hey kid, is that a guy? Graturner? You have it. Hey, a guy is that face cancer you have on your fucking face, you're some of the clock. Now this too had to be purified and concentrated. Yeah, you don't want to start uncut radio, huh? Full of baby laxative, yeah. David went back to the hospital, did he visit it, did his atomic energy eagles scout badge? And this staff there were only two willing to continue

to help and they gave him a sample of barium sulfate. Why? Why? Why? I? Why? I want to talk to them. What did you talk to that person? So they've become buying the barium sulfate and the radium paint and again he tried his coffee filter trick which this time worked.

The solution passed through the filter and into the beaker below and it visibly glowed. He then dehydrated the liquid into crystalline salts and he had enough radium to make a much, much more powerful neutron gun. Again, in his mom's garden shed. Can some hero in this story just introduce this kid to a girl? At least, right, at least then he could get into radioactive dating.

Radioactive dating Eli. Eli. That's kind of about pussy. So he made that much more powerful neutron gun. He began bombarding his thorium and uranium powders with neutrons, hoping to generate some fission in his mom's shed, but it wasn't working. So David wrote back to his good old buddy at the nuclear regulatory commission who helped him figure out what the problem was. He is. You see the neutrons and he was, you know, blasting at the other isotopes were just moving

too quickly. So he needed a way to slow them down. And he brought a letter back to the kid. He was like, dear, Davey, your homemade neutron gun is actually too powerful. Here's how to fix it. I'm a nuclear scientist. What the fuck is about these people? Let's cause a maternity attention to tritium. Tritium is a radioactive material used in glow in theark gun and bow sites. And he just bought a bunch of sites from mail order catalogs, scraped off

the Waxi radioactive stuff inside of them and then returned him as defective. Wash, rinse, repeat, until he had collected enough tritium that he had what he needed. All right, so like nobody has ever, or will ever earn the right to nuke someone, but I feel like he comes the closest right And look it worked his neutron gun was producing a vision reaction in his mother's garden shed the materials

He was bombarding with his radium gun. We're getting more and more radioactive as he continued his experiments. He knew he didn't have anywhere near enough material to make a functioning breeder reactor, but he figured he'd keep trying and just see how close he could get. Using aluminum foil, he began to assemble a makeshift core for his nuclear reactor. And guys, if that sounds unsafe, I will also point out, and I'm not kidding here, he also used a fair amount of duct tape. So it wasn't all bad.

Wait, really? Yes. Yes. So here I need to quote David directly, quote, it was radioactive as heck. The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time. Sorry, as heck. I you unit for radio activity man? You can't know. I know I transformed some radioactive materials, even though there was no critical pile,

I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent. And cool David, did you also know that you're not the incredible hope? Did you know that? So at this point, even Exploity David realized that he had made something very dangerous and he didn't really have any safety gear. So best part of this whole story right here, he consulted his friend Jim, another high school kid who was also inexplicably knowledgeable about nuclear reactors. And here I am flat out just stealing directly from the Harper's article I got this story

from Jim quote, warned him that real reactors use control rods to regulate nuclear reactions. Miller recommended cobalt, which absorbs neutrons, but does not itself become fissionable. Reactors get hot. It's just a fact, Miller, a nervous, skinny, 22 year old said during an interview at a Burger King where he worked as a cook. That's happening. And as weird as it is that the fry cook at Burger King knows that much about reactors, it explains a lot about the taste of their chicken strips. Oh, you mentioned this earlier. David needs to stop skipping chapters. He's just flipping through books about nuclear safety.

And he's like, okay, don't step the red phosphorus. Oh, nerd boring reactor. It's hot. Ma, ma, ma, ma, nobody cares. Okay. Here we go. Explodey apocalypse from your shed. Found it.

This is where I started. So following the advice of a high school buddy who would go on to work the broiler at Burger King. Jesus David bought some cobalt drill bits from the hardware store, which you tried to use as control rods for his home brew nuclear reactor, but they didn't work very well. David decided the whole thing was, you know, maybe getting a bit out of hand. It should begin disassembling his duct tape and aluminum foil working, potting shed nuclear reactor. He placed the thorium in a shoe box. He would say, and then he hit it in his mom's house. And he left the radium and a meriseum in the shed. And everything else, he stuck in the trunk of his Pontiac.

Huh. I don't think that's a good night in August. It's a good night in August. To block all that stuff. Okay. Okay. Late one night in August of 1994, the police were called because someone was spotted stealing tires in the neighborhood and the police encountered David. Now, they thought he was the tire thief.

They looked in his trunk and they saw a toolbox, shut with a padlock, and sealed with duct tape, and they also found a shitload of foil-wrapped cubes full of gray powder, small discs and cylinders, mercury switches, fireworks, vacuum tubes, clock faces, chemicals, and acids. The police thought maybe they were looking at a bomb at which point David told them, hey, don't open the toolbox, that's radio act.

Jesus what? And now the police thought they were dealing with a potential nuclear bomb. In a high school kids potty act in Michigan. So some cop had to call his boss and be like, hey, chief, so this kid has, we think a nuclear bomb. Also, he blew into the breathalyzer. It exploded in a mushroom cloud. What? What do we do now?

Protocol wise. Okay. The fact that built a mini nuclear reactor and was stupid enough to drive around with it in his trunk, existed in the same person is the weirdest part of this fucking story. Well, see, I was going to nominate police confronting a white kid and carrying what weapons he had on him. But yeah, no, that's a, you're.

No, that's true. Quite naturally, if you think you've found an atomic bomb, you do the only sensible thing, which is to then have that car slash bomb toad to the police headquarters. Right. I mean, nobody, nobody knew what the fuck to do next. The bomb squad was called, but so was the Department of Public Health to provide radiological assistance. And they of course found that the whole damn thing was hot as hell with radioactivity.

So then that triggered the federal radiological emergency response plan and soon did a apartment of energy in the EPA and the FBI and our old friends at the nuclear regulatory commission, they were all involved. Hey, David, I mean, kid, I've never seen before in my life. How are you? We're not pen pals. I don't know why I said that. Let's hear our pen pals, right?

I'm just establishing that. Give me back my conflicts. A David was questioned, but he was not cooperative. And it wasn't at all clear what the crime, if any, was. And David's parents, fearing for their son, went home and threw most of David's shit just in the garbage. Oh no. It wasn't until two months later in November of that year that David finally admitted that he had a backyard nuclear lab and radiological experts assess the shed situation. There they

found radiation a thousand times higher than what would be expected for normal and this was shed after And this this thousand times this is after he had taken everything out of the shed and his parents had thrown most of his shit in the weekly Bid a sculpture up in the like sir. It gonna need you to move the ah concrete dome over is that a concrete and yes the weekly business cops are up in the lecture going to need you to move the, uh, concrete dome over. Is that a concrete and yes, and the molten elephants. What? What happened? So eventually the shed in the backyard of David's mom's house was declared an EPA super fun to say.

Jesus Christ. And the cleanup process began though again, most of the good stuff had already been just carted off to the land. You're the coolest kids in your high school if you get an EPA super fun site to happen to be, right? In the 90s. No, no, no, no, actually this turns out poorly for him, but so the site cleanup costs $60,000. And the entire shed was carefully dismantled and each piece of the site cleanup costs six, so the site cleanup costs $60,000.

And the entire shed was carefully dismantled and each piece of the shed sealed in drums to be carted off and buried in the middle of the great Salt Lake desert. The EPA estimated that David's experiments had posed a risk to 40,000 nearby residents. Yeah, say what you will about your neighborhood weirdo, but the guy who walked around my hometown in a scuba suit, didn't irradiate everyone's balls by accident. He just elected all his old shit and went to the very next to ET cartridges, most right. Yeah. After the fiasco David spiraled into a depression. He briefly enrolled in the local

community college, but failed out for lack of attendance. And his father's insistence, David joined the Navy and was stationed on board the USS Enterprise, a nuclear power power. Come on, Gary. But only go where okay. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be Tom? Uh turns out that having kids without any apparent interest in science is sometimes a good thing Are you ready for the quest? I am indeed All right, I got one for you Tom. What should the movie about David Han be called?

Hey Gamma's boy B graphite club. See the Muppets take the Manhattan Project. It says, it's good. Right? Silly and Murphy is the one human. Everybody else is a Muppet or or D gone Fission. Oh, it's the muppet steak. The man had always going to be the muppet desk.

That is correct. Yeah. All right, Tom. David's story has a sad but apropos ending that I can't help but notice that you left out a in 2007. The FBI got a tip that David had started another nuclear reactor in his fridge. B, they decided he wasn't an immediate threat and asked him to come in for an interview

when he had the time. Puh. C, that investigation revealed that he'd been stealing smoke detectors and told friends that people were shocking his genitals with their mind. Puh. D, he went to jail for 90 days for stealing said smoke detectors, where it was diagnosed

and treated for paranoid schizophrenia. E, E, OG done fentanyl in 2016. Oof, oof. What question are you answering right now, Tom? What is the question of those things happened and we're sad? All of the above. Yeah, so I love to react. Yeah. All of the above. Yes. So I love it. Yeah.

All right, Tom, now do funny. Tom, you ready? Yeah. Interrogative thing for you. You ready? This is part of the question. You're right. Because the other one question is,

I have a question. I'm sorry. It's the framing of the show. Which of the following? What? Which of the following, Tom, is the best music for the David Han movie soundtrack? Hey, vanilla ice tope Now I am become mega death see

Kids on the block or D nice fall out boy. Oh shit. Oh Shit now I am become mega-doubt is so good. it's so good, but I think it's deep, fallout boy. Oh no, it was B now I am becoming mega-doubt. So damn it. Oh wow. Well, it turns out that the Muppets win, so Noah, you're the winner. Fuck, yeah, yeah, I want Cecil to do the next essay. Okay.

Alright, well for Heath, Eli, Tom, and Noah, I'm Cecil. Thank you, Neaphrang, and I will see you next week, and by then, I will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, check out my YouTube Cooking Channel season, Liberally, where I'll be posting a new video every Friday for the next couple of months to check it out. And if you'd like to help, keep this show going. Give me a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod, or you could leave us a five star review everywhere And where you can,

like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect to the Sun social media, or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod.com. to come back? Nah, I'm gonna play a little longer. I used to love this game. Okay, yeah. Hey Noah. Yeah, I'm glad you found drugs instead of palm stuff. Me too, man. Me too.