Radioactive boy Scout

[BOLTRIPPER]

I do remember this and always did wonder what happened


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...arly-visited-by-fbi-for-a-decade-father-says/

 

[pmclaine]

Interesting. Never heard the story. Thank you for the push to educate myself.

 

[hlee]

So... What were you doing at 14?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson

 

[pmclaine]

So... What were you doing at 14?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson

I bet he is pulling a ton of gash...

 

[sirhrmechanic]

I loved that story when it came out. Just goes to show you what a motivated Scout can do!

Cheers,

Sirhr

 

[hlee]

Improperly dispose of radioactive material?
create a superfund site?
expose himself to dangerous levels of radioactivity?
or, die from alcohol poisoning?

while he did amass a not insignificant amount of radioactive material, he did not ever actually create a breeder reactor. I'm not exactly sure where to draw inspiration...

 

[sirhrmechanic]

He had a vision... he went for it.

Perhaps his judgment was not exactly the best. But they never explained that when it came to his Atomic Merit badge.

Back in the late 1990's PBS had a great series called Stephen Hawking's Universe. It featured a grad student who used junkyard parts to build his own cyclotron. Also amazing.

You have to love the innovative mind. Even if a bit mis-guided.... this kid did something amazing! I mean... how many Superfund sites have you created???

Cheers,

Sirhr

 

[pmclaine]

Apparently when he ditched the Amercium sourced from smoke detectors for thorium from coleman lantern mantels he actually started to produce some dangerous material....

http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/t...ive-boy-scout/

His blueprint was a schematic of a checkerboard breeder reactor he’d seen in one of his father’s college textbooks. Ignoring any thought of safety, David took the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead casings and, after another round of filing and pulverizing, mixed those isotopes with beryllium and aluminum shavings, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil. What were once the neutron sources for his guns became a makeshift “core” for his reactor. He surrounded this radioactive ball with a “blanket” composed of tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape.

David monitored his “breeder reactor” at the Golf Manor laboratory with his Geiger counter. “It was radioactive as heck,” he says. “The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of assembly. 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.”

Finally, David, whose safety precautions had thus far consisted of wearing a makeshift lead poncho and throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes following a session in the potting shed, began to realize that, sustained reaction or not, he could be putting himself and others in danger. (One tip-off was when the radiation was detectable through concrete.) Jim Miller, a nuclear-savvy high-school friend in whom David had confided, 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 twenty-two-year-old, said during an interview at a Burger King in Clinton Township where he worked as a cook. David purchased a set of cobalt drill bits at a local hardware store and inserted them between the thorium and uranium cubes. But the cobalt wasn’t sufficient. When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors down from his mom’s house, David decided that he had “too much radioactive stuff in one place” and began to disassemble the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets in a shoebox that he hid in his mother’s house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac.

After a stint in the Navy and Marine Corps he got back into stealing smoke detectors and it was thought he was building again. This is his booking photo after being arrested for stealing the detectors....

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Apparently harvesting radioactive material without PPE is unhealthy for your skin.

 

[Maser]

So... What were you doing at 14?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson

That's a guy?!

 

[Dirty D]

Time, distance and shielding. He had too much of one and not nearly enough of the other two.

 

[Greg Langelius *]

Just goes to show...

Just because you got the means; doesn't mean you gotta use them.

Kinda reminds me of that Kim Jung Unf*ckly guy. He needs to have some object lesson grade harms come to him. Give him a real set of rules to live by, or not...

Greg

 

[Sendit6.5]

Crazy story. There was a college student back in the 70's (yep, I'm just old enough to remember hearing this story) who built a workable nuclear bomb -minus the nuclear material. Of course, he was under the guidance of renowned physicist Freeman Dyson. It attracted some pretty serious attention from the men in black, to say the least.

This radioactive Boy Scout story brought back the memory. Hadn't thought about that story in years! I read a book about it in HS, in the early 80's. Lol.

http://historybuff.com/in-1970s-princeton-student-invented-atomic-bomb-in-class-1-7grDYyPRDyZp


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