Three decades ago, Michigan was shocked by a cautionary tale about how a teenager’s curiosity turned into a federal cleanup operation. With an experiment, David Hahn turned his backyard radioactive, and he was dubbed the “Nuclear Boy Scout”.
In 1994, Michigan was the kind of quiet suburb where the loudest thing you’d hear was a lawn mower… until one day, 17-year-old Boy Scout David Hahn tried to recreate a nuclear reactor in his mom’s shed. The teenager was obsessed with chemistry and inspired by The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. When he received a merit badge in Atomic Energy, Hahn decided to build a “breeder reactor” in his backyard shed.
Hahn quickly began gathering whatever radioactive material he could find. He extracted americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lantern mantles, radium from old clock dials, and lithium from batteries. And with a stack of library books, he turned household junk into a mini-Manhattan Project. However, he never meant to harm anyone.
Hahn turned his backyard into a dangerous lab
David Hahn lined his backyard shed with foil and turned it into a “lab” for his experiment. Soon, it registered radiation levels 1,000 times higher than normal background readings. Alarmed, the boy decided to end his project. But before he could, police found the strange materials in his car during a routine stop. The authorities were alerted, and prompted the FBI to intervene.
On June 26, 1995, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, FBI, and Environmental Protection Agency barged into Hahn’s backyard. In full hazmat suits, they dismantled the shed, bagged the soil, and buried everything at a Utah radioactive-waste site. Luckily, authorities didn’t charge Hahn with terrorism and deemed it a reckless curiosity.
After his experiment was halted, Hahn lost his ground
The EPA treated Hahn’s experiment like a low-level nuclear incident and spent months decontaminating the area. The story went viral after Harper’s Magazine dubbed David Hahn the “Radioactive Boy Scout,” a name that would follow him for life. But soon after, things took an unfortunate turn for the little genius.
Hahn’s mother committed suicide in 1996, and he had separated from his then-girlfriend, leaving him depressed. But upon encouragement from his father and stepmother, he enlisted in the Navy. Hahn was assigned to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise as an undesignated seaman. Four years later, he enlisted in the Marine Corps but was honorably discharged on medical grounds a few years later.
David Hahn’s troublesome later years and death
In 2007, after the FBI received a tip about Hahn’s alleged possession of a second neutron source, he was called for a personal interview at their office. At this point, Hahn had already been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was abusing drugs. An individual close to Hahn was also interviewed, who expressed concern for his mental and physical health.
A few months later, David Hahn was charged with larceny for stealing a number of smoke detectors from his apartment building. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail, but it was delayed while he underwent medical treatment in the psychiatric unit of Macomb County Jail (via Fox News).
Sadly, Hahn accidentally died due to intoxication from alcohol, fentanyl, and diphenhydramine on Sept. 27, 2016. He was only 39 at the time, and his case remains one of the strangest examples of untrained genius crossing the line between brilliance and disaster.
