The amazing story of the 16-year-old
who built a nuclear reactor in his shed.
By: Victoria Moore.
(As originally published in The Daily Mail 9th July 2004)
The sun was beginning its late-afternoon descent when Dottie Pease pulled into the road which led to her home in a quiet city suburb.
It had been a long day and, in her mind, she was already pulling off her shoes and collapsing on to the sofa. But as she neared her home, Dottie saw a scene so extraordinary it could have come straight from an episode of TV's X-Files.
Eleven men were swarming across her lawn in Pinto Drive, Detroit, while several others were running what looked like an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner across the grass.
Lined up close by were several black steel drums emblazoned with an instantly recognisable bright yellow symbol - the sign that warns of radioactivity.
Then, an even more bizarre scene: Dottie spotted three people, dressed in white biowarfare suits, using electric saws to dismantle the garden shed next door.
Her neighbour was Patty Hahn, a middle-aged divorcee and it was her teenage son, David, an unassuming, blond, freckle-faced schoolboy who was responsible for the bizarre events that afternoon of June 26,1995.
For this boy had done nothing less than build a mini nuclear reactor in the shed when aged just 16 - after earning a merit badge for his knowledge of nuclear energy from his local Boy Scout troop.
Radioactivity levels had risen so high that 40,000 residents of the suburb were deemed to be in danger. The authorities had called the full range of emergency services to deal with the dangerous material, and a massive clean-up operation was under way.
Now, the incredible story of how David created a nuclear reactor from smoke detectors, clothes brushes and paint chipped from clock dials is revealed in a fascinating book.
So who was this extraordinary young man and how did he manage to emulate some of the most groundbreaking - and dangerous - scientific experiments of the 20th century in a garden shed?
David was the only child of a mechanical engineer Ken, and doting housewife Patty. But within a few years of his birth she was diagnosed with depression and paranoid schizophrenia - problems that put an intolerable strain on the marriage.
When David was nine, his parents separated and his father won custody of his son.
Like many boys, David loved to create experiments with the aim of producing 'a magical reaction'. His in what earliest memory is of mixing the contents of the bathroom cabinet with his mother's ashtray.
After he added drain cleaner, the mixture began to snarl and bubble up. David panicked and flushed his experiment down the lavatory, promising him-self never to do anything so foolish again. Unfortunately, he didn't stick to his promise.
At first, his experiments were relatively harmless. He perfected a recipe for gunpowder which he detonated in the woods with his mother's new boyfriend, Michael.
Then a relative gave him a copy of The Golden Book Of Chemistry Experiments by Robert Brent. It became David's bible.
Nothing he read in it affected him more than the story of Marie and Pierre Curie, pioneers in the newly-discovered science of radioactivity, whom David worshipped with the intensity his friends reserved for sporting heroes.
Initially, his parents were charmed by their son's absorption in what seemed an educational pastime. Not least because they believed it would prevent David from repeating stunts such as the time he made his own batch of chloroform and ended up unconscious for an hour.
At school, he was viewed as an oddity and although he shone in science classes, he did not seem particularly bright. His spelling was atrocious.
Later, when the government workers in biowarfare suits were deployed to clean up the aftermath of his experiments, they found mis-spelled warnings on the inner walls of his mother's shed in red paint:
"CAUSHON" and "RADIOACTVE".
The shed became the centre of David's world and his parents were increasingly anxious about his introversion. They persuaded him to take weekend jobs at McDonald's, and loading furniture on to trucks. But David used the money to fund his experiments.
Despite his limited social life, he did have a girlfriend. Heather Beaudette, whom he met at a friend's house. Heather was pretty,
intelligent and untroubled by David's precocious interest in nuclear power, later saying: 'I didn't know anything about uranium, even that you weren't supposed to have it in the house.'
So David's weird activitiescontinued unchecked.
Ironically, it was his father's insistence that he immerse himself in Scouting as an antidote to his nerdish activities that fuelled David's interest in radioactivity.
He was determined to earn as many merit badges as possible and win the coveted 'Eagle' status, and he began to work towards his atomic energy badge - the U.S. scout movement was, at the time, determinedly pro-nuclear.
Scout leaders taught him to use Geiger counters to measure levels of radioactivity. These showed him how radioactive materials were used in everyday items, such as glow-in-the-dark clocks which contained radium.
Inspired by these, David set himself a new task - he dedicated himself to collecting a sample of every chemical element, including the 34 radioactive elements.
He procured polonium from electrostatic clothes brushes.
Americium-241 (a cancer-causing radioactive isotope) came from smoke detectors. Thorium - so dangerous that any individual or company possessing it is required by law to have a licence - he found in the mesh covers of gas lamps in camping shops. For the uranium-bearing ores, which he considered the most precious of all, he wrote off to a company in the Czech Republic, enclosing a postal order for about £100, then sat back and waited for the goods to arrive through his letterbox.
Information came from all manner of scientists and public bodies to whom David often wrote - under the guise of 'Professor Hahn' - with his technical queries.
BY THE summer of 1994, David was ready to put his grandest plan yet into action and build a nuclear reactor.
He had read about 'breeder' reactors - so-called because they produce more fuel than they consume - in his father's old college textbook, and was excited at the idea of creating such a perpetual energy machine.
The size of a shoe-box, and weighing about 21b, David's reactor utilised tin foil and was held together with duct tape.
It contained the highly radio- active chemical elements radium, americium and thorium. It failed to generate nuclear energy but, in
David's own words, 'it was radio-active as heck'.
Only at this stage did the schoolboy scientist realise he had forgotten to incorooratp one vital piece of equipment - an 'off' switch. With his geiger counter picking up radiation as far away as five doors down the street, even David had to admit he had a crisis on his hands.
He quickly decided to dismantle his reactor and packed it into his car with the intention of disposing of the components. But, by chance, he was picked up by police responding to a call about a young man stealing tyres.
When they searched the boot of his car, the officers were astonished to find a red toolbox containing a strange grey powder. David calmly warned them it was 'radioactive'.
He was arrested and put in jail while the police considered how they could charge him. He gave his address as his father's house - which is indeed where he lived - and it was tested for radiation, but levels were found to be normal.
David didn't mention his 'labora-tory', the garden shed at his mother's house 30 miles away.
WHEN he told police where he had obtained the radioactive material - the everyday items and mail order from Eastern Europe - they conceded they had no real grounds to hold him and were forced to let him go.
But one man at Detroit's Department of Public Health remained anxious about the true extent of David's activities. Months later, he called the teenager, only to be told: "He's at his mum's."
The penny finally dropped. In the shed, the authorities found radiation levels 1,000 times higher than normal background levels.
Indeed, the debris from David's experiments was considered so dangerous that it was taken to a special dumping ground in the middle of the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah.
Extraordinarily, no official punishment was meted out. It was left to David's dad, who grounded him for two weeks and confiscated his car keys. In fact, but for two devastating events that occurred a year or so later, David may have continued with the experiments he loved so much.
The first blow came when his girlfriend. Heather, tired of dating a mini-Einstein, broke off their relationship.
Then, a more profound and terrible shock came in February 1996, when his mother, Patty, still struggling with mental illness, shot and killed herself in the kitchen.
In David's own words: 'All hope vanished from my life then.'
His scientific dreams relegated to the back burner, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy to try to shake himself out of his despondency. After completing his four-year naval tour of duty (leaving the service with a
rank of petty officer, third class) he returned home to Clinton Town-ship, New Jersey.
He remained ardently pro-atomic and planned to pursue further studies in nuclear chemistry. He spent some time in Canada mining uranium, but failed to obtain a degree in applied sciences.
He seemed to have lost all focus. As he did while at school, he returned to a series of unsatisfactory dead-end jobs before deciding to re-enlist with the Armed Forces.
Today, aged 27, he is a U.S. Marine with just one, as yet unfulfilled, poignant ambition: "To be happy - like when I was a kid"
