“Radioactive Boy Scout” who tried to build a homemade nuclear reactor dead at 39

Maybe some other place. This is David Hahn's thread, not mine.

Well, the penetrating depth depends upon the voltage, and there needs to be space for the electrons to accelerate (this means vacuum or air, dialectric insulation in the air gap cuts it down). Anything above around 15 kV has 'potential' for x-rays which can penetrate beyond your skin and do some damage. We were working with 180 kV power supplies, with a 10 inch vacuum-filled free fall distance for the electrons, so we got a goodly amount of rays.

You can get x-rays off of Tesla coils, spark gaps, etc., but usually the dose rate is fairly low. It is worth measuring though, especially if you will be exposed for a long time or its close to your body. Typically it will be below around 1/100th of your yearly exposure limit per hour. So, if you are playing with one for an hour, no biggie. If you are planning on putting one on your 40 hour/week work desk, think again.

I once made a helmet for Halloween with a pair of Tesla Coils, one on each side of my head. The helmet was conductive, and it would look like the sparks from the coils were going through my head. This was not what I would call 'safe' (body-mounted high voltage can go badly wrong), but it was a lot of fun for one night. I made sure to keep the voltage below 20 kV, and reduced my exposure time by only running it when I wanted to impress people (mainly cute girls).

Hi. Newbie here, but I've been following this story. It sounds rather tragic.

This might be slightly off-topic, but is there any possibility that someone could conceivably "weaponize" an x-ray or gamma-ray emitter, e.g., for a terrorist plot?

I came across this article about an earlier half-baked plan from 2012. Some white supremacist had "allegedly planned to use a remote-controlled X-ray weapon hidden inside a van to vaporize Muslims in upstate New York and launch an attack on the White House." This seems to be stretching the limits of plausibility. (Obviously, this wouldn't have been some science fiction "disintegration gun.")

https://news.vice.com/article/this-kkk-guy-tried-to-build-an...

However, let's assume that we had some James Bond super-villain who had unlimited resources and a stable of highly-trained engineers and Nobel physicists as his minions. Would it be within the realm of plausibility to build such a thing? Or would this still be complete science fiction?

More specifically, could an emitter be be made that generates x-rays or gamma rays in a non-directional way so that everyone in the vicinity received a lethal radiation dose over the course of a few minutes? How much electricity would this take, and what type of potential range might it have? Would buildings or car doors tend to block the radiation? Would the victims somehow sense that they were being irradiated (e.g., a burning sensation)?

I'm not looking for technical blueprints or anything, of course. It's just a thought experiment. (Hi, NSA!)

I think once you start getting potentials over 10 kV, the Schottky effect starts to give minor x-ray emissions.

The more major or typical source is from tubes. Most tubes at high voltages will emit x-rays, even if that is not their intent, from an emitted electron striking the anode. This is why CRT TVs usually used thick leaded glass, to block the x-ray emissions.

You can read the book about The Radioactive Boy Scout:

https://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Boyscout-Story-Nuclear-Re...

But IIRC the everyday items were smoke detectors with Americium and uranium from old painted clock dials. I think he found a full vial of dried uranium paint hidden inside some random old clock at an antique store.

Based on the details like deuterium fusion with high voltage, my guess would be that FiatLuxDave built a variant of a Fusor. It is a challenging project but not out of the reach of a dedicated high school student.

http://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/

First nuclear reactor was basically a pile of graphite brics with nuclear fule placed at calculates positions.

You get to critical reactor with just assembling materials of correct chemical composition to a correct geometric configuration.

The most difficult part is probably acquiring the nuclear material.

I've never built one, though :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

The physics what we are looking at is the fact that neutron capture requires neutrons that go at a very specific speed. So, the nuclear fule creates some initial neutrinos that go fast, the carbon slows it down to a sufficient speed that they are captures by rest of the fuel, which then causes more chain reactions.

This is the reason reactors are a bit delicate - not enough neutrinos or wrong speed - no reaction. Too much - booom.

It wouldn't be inconceivable for a determined person with some electronics experience to make a cyclotron [1], which is a neutron gun that can produce radioactive material. Not sure if "reactor-in-my-garage" folks are doing this, or if the material it produces can be used in any subequent reactions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron#Usage

It's 'relatively' easy to build fusion chambers - people do so in their own homes. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

I'd heard parts of that story. He reminds me of one of the people who I went to school with. We shared a lot of hobbies, but his antisocial and self-destructive tendencies meant that I never could really consider him a friend. He was incredibly smart and capable, but he always acted like he had something to prove. He was expelled from high school for hacking, which unlike a lot of "expelled for hacking" stories, was entirely legitimate. He was doing some pretty impressive exploits on the network computers, but then he was also downloading information he had no business possessing. I was interviewed by the FBI about it, because I was president of the cs club, and he had been using our computers.

During his expulsion he took the classes needed for college and applied to the CS program at a prestigious state school rather that coming back to high school. It was really impressive -- between the grades he had skipped before, and the grades he skipped going to college, he got in before he was old enough to drive.

I don't think he ended up graduating from college. He is very capable, but he needed a mentor who was operating on the same level as him to help him develop emotional and social skills on par with his intellectual talents.

Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment for electricity. You mean UV damage to the eyes from being exposed to arcs or thermal explosions or shock to heart or RF burns or ... and radiation is the same.

Also some of the stuff he did was questionable purely chemically. So ... boring holes in lead, you're at least washing your hands before eating, right? Or the feeling I get from this guy, no. Or his refining process involving lithium metal, interesting but not advisable.

I wonder what the guys "banana equivalent dose" was. He didn't get that much material, at least as reported by the press. A thousand times nothing is still nothing unless the true story is more interesting. From what I can find an unmolested smoke detector is about a tenth of a BED/yr so the mere presence of a thousand detectors in one room, if you sit in it for the entire year, is about the same as eating 100 bananas in that year, which I probably do! If you're sloppy and it stays outside your body its about the same. Unless you inhale it.

He accumulated more "stuff" than the NRC feels safe to give out unlicensed, but the NRC is pretty pessimistic so he should have survived. And seemed to have done so, unsurprisingly.

Unfortunately, radiation poisoning is an often irreversible process - it involves the destruction of cells, muscle and tissue at a molecular level in a way that our bodies never were designed to be recover from. Majority of medical practices in this space focus on removing ingested or inhaled radioactive particles, to prevent further damage over time and keeping the patient alive and in relative comfort.

I do recall a few years back a drug being refereed to as real life version of Rad Away from the Fallout game series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad

It's even more shoddy reporting if, as some commenters are suggesting, he in fact took his own life (which seems especially likely if he was indeed bipolar). Turning tragedy into a sensationalist story purely for the sake of it.

It's not entirely their fault. The linked obituary doesn't list a cause of death either.

He died in a small town, relatively. So any day of the week someone killed themselves in LA, but not rural nowheres-ville, so the lack of XYZ in nowheres-ville kinda proves something.

His internet public memories page was full of relatively close friends and relatives in shock. So your situation or an accident. The police would be involved either way. I pulled the police log for the week of his death of all police calls in that city and found nothing logged along the lines of any bodies being found or violent crime or whatever. As near as I can tell the only interesting thing that happened in the town where he died on the day he died was a very major traffic accident, the worst thing to happen in town in weeks before and after. There was a twitter-worthy hours long road closing due to a major (aka fatal) car accident. Absence of finding anything proves nothing, perhaps they intentionally censor suicide calls or it has to be considered that "suicide by car" is not unknown, but I would not be surprised if he died in that specific car accident.

The spots on his skin are believed to have been caused by the radiation exposure.

> Unless it kills quickly there's almost never a way to tell.

Well, if he was e.g. struck by lightning just before he died, then the odds that cause of death is related to exposure to radiation years ago go way down. The article sadly doesn't even give anything to go on, or even mention the omission of anything about cause of death.

There's about 5,000 people on an Enterprise class carrier at any given time (per Wikipedia, max is just shy of 6k), so I agree, plenty of jobs.

And they have their own police too, right?