Crap - RIP: David Charles Hahn

| 1 Comment

From Tributes.com:

David was born on October 30, 1976 and passed away on Tuesday, September 27, 2016.

David was a resident of Shelby Township, Michigan at the time of his passing.

Visitation will be on Saturday from 11am until 3 pm with a Funeral service 2 pm at the Wasik Funeral Home Inc. 49150 Schoenherr Rd. N. of 22 Mile Shelby Twp. Interment at Great Lakes National Cemetery.

Only 39 years old. David was known to most people as The Radioactive Boy Scout - from the November 1998 issue of Harpers:

The Radioactive Boy Scout
When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor
Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, the kind of place where people live precisely because it is more than 25 miles outside of Detroit and all the complications attendant on that city. The kind of place where money buys a bit more land, perhaps a second bathroom, and so reassures residents that they’re safely in the bosom of the middle class. Every element of Golf Manor invokes one form of security or another, beginning with the name of the subdivision itself—taken from the 18 hole course at its entrance—and the community in which it is nestled, Commerce Township. The houses and trees are both old and varied enough to make Golf Manor feel more like a neighborhood than a subdivision, and the few features that do convey subdivision—a sign at the entrance saying “We have many children but none to spare. Please drive carefully”—have a certain Back to the Future charm. Most Golf Manor residents remain there until they die, and then they are replaced by young couples with kids. In short, it is the kind of place where, on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the corner is a Mister Softee ice-cream truck.

But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day. Ask Dottie Pease. As she turned down Pinto Drive, Pease saw eleven men swarming across her carefully manicured lawn. Their attention seemed to be focused on the back yard of the house next door, specifically on a large wooden potting shed that abutted the chain-link fence dividing her property from her neighbor’s. Three of the men had donned ventilated moon suits and were proceeding to dismantle the potting shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces of wood into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs. Pease had never noticed anything out of the ordinary at the house next door.

The Harpers article goes into a lot of detail about David's experiments - here are two paragraphs:

Now seventeen, David hit on the idea of building a model breeder reactor. He knew that without a critical pile of at least thirty pounds of enriched uranium he had no chance of initiating a sustained chain reaction, but he was determined to get as far as he could by trying to get his various radioisotopes to interact with one another. That way, he now says, “no matter what happened there would be something changing into something—some kind of action going on there.” 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.”

Quite the story and sad to see a life cut so short.

1 Comment

Is there any word on cause of death?

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on November 13, 2016 6:26 PM.

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