The Radioactive Boy Scout (1999) | Hacker News Reader

The Radioactive Boy Scout (1999)

dangerouslaboratories.org

87 pointsnapolux34 comments

Hahn died a year ago, age 39, likely due to fentanyl.

Wikipedia says he died of alcohol poisoning[1], however the actual medical examiner's report says, "intoxication by the combined effects of alcohol, fentanyl and diphrenhydramine."[2] It goes on to say that the blood alcohol concentration was 0.404 mg/dL. Unless there's a misplaced decimal point, that level is almost nothing; it's a trace of alcohol. The legal limit for drunk driving in all 50 states is 80 mg/dL, or two hundred times greater than what he had.

Diphenhydramine, also mentioned by the medical examiner, is an over-the-counter anti-allergy medicine. It is apparently used as an intensifier for opioids (like fentanyl).

So it seems his death was really caused by fentanyl. The medical examiner mentions alcohol only because he has to state all factors no matter how minor.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3517279-1-Page-Fax-F...

Heh, this story is always interesting when it comes up. The Harper's article is well-written, too. It just boggles the mind that this kid actually made a frickin' unshielded nuclear reactor core. He actually did it, the absolute madman.

I like how the police brought him in as a kid for having a nuclear device, he made a superfund site out of the whole deal, and he still grew up to work aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier. The Navy must have known, right? I wonder what those conversations must have been like.

Also, I am super not surprised that Wikipedia says, "He was inspired in part by reading The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments." That book is just goatshit insane; the '60s were clearly a silly time, because the 'also by this author' section includes The Golden Book of Wild Animal Pets. Which, uh...I don't know. I got nothing.

Anyways, it's public domain, but before you hand it to a young child be warned that it includes phrases like, "making Hydrogen in the lab," and "have a bottle of household ammonia to sniff if you get too strong a whiff of Chlorine." Yikes.

https://archive.org/details/GoldenBookOfChemistryExperiments

Comeon, making Hydrogen isn't that crazy, you just hook up a 9V battery to a glass of water.

Edit: skimmed the book. They first make Hydrogen through electrolysis (cool!). Then they make it from hydro-chloric acid (cool! also dangerous!).

Yeah, but most books don't go into detail for separating the resulting hydrogen and oxygen, testing for hydrogen by burning it, or observing the difference in using hydrogen and oxygen to burn things.

Sure, it's easy to observe, but be careful...

I do really like the book's can-do attitude, though.

Yeah, especially as it says your lab can be in your bedroom or basement. Generating larger amounts of flammable gas indoors and burning it is less sane.

As long as you have proper ventilation what's the real issue?

Yes, I may have investigated installing a chemical hood in my house, but it was all theoretical... for now.

Sheets of acrylic can make great housings for things like this; they're transparent, and a plastics shop will cut you panels to size for cheap. One example of an instrument you can make with acrylics is a gel electrophoresis box:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/labs/gel/build_gel_bo...

Some chemicals can dissolve plastics, but hey. It's cheap, sturdy, and easy to assemble. Acrylic cement has the consistency of turpentine and sets pretty quickly.

Hey, lost some seared tissue, rhymes with whats the real issue.

Hopefully nobody at home is an active smoker, either!

As a kid, I had this vintage science experiments book[0] that had that and helicopter-parent-forbidden chemistry experiments (ahh, the era before abuse of torts). Inverted test-tube semi-submerged, filled completely with water, over each electrode to see progress IIRC.

700 Science Experiments for Everyone 1958, UNESCO, Hardcover, 221 pp.

Really? That's high school chemistry in this part of the world

That's awesome - and it really isn't so dangerous as long as you are careful and do your experiments around others who also know what they're doing.

I actually love the sense of 'you can do anything' that this sort of education inspires. But, y'know, it's not the sort of thing I'd hand a 14-year-old before heading off for the weekend. And imagining what would happen if you brought this to your chemistry class today in the US is pretty amusing.

What's a typical high school chemistry experiment in the USA? Do the students do things, or does the teacher do everything?

Burning hydrogen was a standard method for testing its presence, from when I was about 11-12 in 1997.

Measuring the volume of one liter of water.

But, more seriously, it depends almost entirely on the highschool itself. I know of a range going from essentially no lab work to undergrad material with looser report grading - and I imagine that top flight magnet schools must have all sorts of amazing equipment.

I took chemistry in high school last year, so I can answer this. Some of our most exciting labs were

- identifying different metal oxides by the color of their flames over a bunsen burner

- paper chromatography to identify a the "crime suspect" who wrote a "ransom note" based on different pens

- made brass pennies with zinc dust, copper pennies, and a hot plate

- made our own chalk

We did all the labs on our own except for the brass pennies, because it was way more efficient to stir the pennies up all at once in the zinc powder than individually.

I really enjoyed that class, but I do go to a school that prides itself in math and science, and our football team loses every time :)

OK, so for comparison. When I was:

About 11-13:

- Separating the chlorophyll from grass (simmer in ethanol). Apparently the standard school experiment is then to do chromatography to show different pigments absorb different wavelengths, but I don't remember this bit.

- Flame tests for metal oxides would be here, although not the theory.

- Acids/bases and indicators. Making and testing for gases (oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide). So mostly seeing who could make the most hydrogen from magnesium + hydrochloric acid, in order to make the loudest "pop" sound when it was lit.

14-16:

- Burning magnesium powder to reduce iron oxide to iron; the thermite reaction used to weld railways tracks. I think we had to calculate the atomic mass of oxygen afterwards. Presumably related to studying reactivity of metals.

- Teacher demoed making hydrogen from natural gas over a nickel (?) catalyst. Memorable for the explosion at the end, which I'm certain is what he intended.

16-18:

- Making lead oxide, the bright yellow colour that used to be the one used to paint lines on roads. Probably to study different oxidation states, since lead has different colours.

- Making an ester (carboxylic acid and an alcohol), the flavour used in old sweets [candy] that smells a bit like pears. I think this was practise for the practical exam, which I've forgotten. We probably had to measure the purity at the end.

- We misbehaved making the ester, so the other class got to pour concentrated sulphuric acid on sugar, but the teacher demoed it to us. (The sugar turns to carbon.)

- The "concentrated" sulphuric, nitric and hydrochloric acid bottles, plus the ammonia solution. Other than a test for ammonia gas, I don't remember the purpose of this.

This was 1996-2004-ish. I have no idea how the sports teams performed, that's not really a thing in England.

Damn, that sounds like way more fun. I really missed out!

My high school chemistry was a year of learning the names of glassware and many experiments of just measuring water. We did one titration at the end.

once, we got to watch the teacher go into the back room and get two chemicals, mixing them together and we watched it change colors. then back to usual. Didn’t even learn dimensional analysis til undergrad.

Its actually a perspective thing. If you are powerfull, and huamnity forms your "maschine"- anything overreaching, or doing unexpected things, that might be put as your "fault", will be viewed as a dangerous error.

With great power, comes great deformation of what constitutes good and bad.

Knowledge that ammonia can counteract chlorine is quite useful. I'm not sure if I would do an experiment involving lethal amounts of chlorine but that knowledge statistically increases lifespan.

"Fire Burns and hurts" is an early lesson for many people, in a vaguely similar way, reading a crazy book like that is a shortcut past the more life-ending lessons.

Link to the original article, which is still online: https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scou...

So this should probably be marked (1998)

And looks like the article was discussed five (!!) years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611583

And then Ars brought it up a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957768

The half-life on this story is pretty long.

To repeat a post I made earlier [1]: It is tragic that a child and later teen with so much curiosity and interest in science was not able to get the guidance he needed to channel his drive into a more rewarding and productive life. I suspect many HN readers will see a lot of themselves in David, as did I, and wish things could have turned out differently.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951194

There is that, but it also appears that he had a poorly managed mental illness - this is as much a part of the sad outcome as anything else.

He's dead now :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

Another related good read is "The Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting, and How to Make a Star".

There's always Taylor Wilson, Colin Furze and others to carry the torch of mischief. :D

There's also an interesting documentary with Hahn going through some of the methods he used, called 'The Nuclear Boy Scout'.

Wow, interesting is kind of an understatement. I found it a bit disturbing. The guy is still basically asking for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Uuex4VZPE

Edit: Looks like he died in 2016 of alcohol poisoning. :(

Just read the Wikipedia entry.

"Hahn died on Tuesday, September 27, 2016, at the age of 39. At the time, he was a resident of Shelby Charter Township, Michigan.[1][14]Hahn's father has since confirmed that the cause of death was alcohol poisoning.[15]"

It could of been so much different...

A real life Rick

I... why? There was no need to compare this talented guy with an over-the-top, megalomaniacal and egocentric scientist from a sci-fi cartoon.

Did not mean it as an insult

A kid on Ars Technica did something similar.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=155929

I remember reading this in Readers Digest way back in the early 90s.

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