Nuclear Boy Scout: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build a Nuclear Reactor | 122
Teenagers nowadays. No respect for their elders. I mean, as teens in our day we were walking uphill (both ways) to school in the snow. We didn’t have cellphones, we had pagers. If we needed a nuclear reactor, we built it in our backyard! Well, not all of us – but this week’s subject certainly tried. David Hahn was just another suburban kid, up until he MacGyver’d up a breeder reactor in his mom’s shed using not much more than a bunch of smoke detectors and old clocks. This week we dive into the how, where, and why of David Hahn – affectionately known as the Nuclear Boy Scout. Plus, we learn why Conspiracy Bot has a thing for Wheel of Fortune (hint: it’s the repartee), we learn how many smoke detectors you can buy without raising an eyebrow (hint: it’s a lot), and for some reason C-Bot actually helped with this week’s show (hint: it involves homemade nuclear power). All of that and more on the podcast that’s never built a nuclear reactor, but that definitely reacts nuclearly (is that a word?) on occasion – Hysteria 51.
Special thanks to this week’s research sources:
Research Assistant – Raymond Walden IV
Books:
The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor by Ken Silverstein
Video:
The Nuclear Boy Scout (2003) –documentary by Bindu Mathur
The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij1ohDmme3s
Websites:
CS Monitor - https://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0316/p16s03-bogn.html
Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
The Daily Mail - https://dailym.ai/2HvWXyH
Harper's Magazine - https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/
Fox News - https://www.foxnews.com/story/radioactive-boy-scout-charged-in-smoke-detector-theft
FBI - https://vault.fbi.gov/david-hahn/David%20Hahn%20Part%2001%20of%2001/view
ARS Technica - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/radioactive-boy-scout-died-of-alcohol-poisoning-not-radiation-father-says/
Dangerous Laboratories - https://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
The News Stack - https://thenewstack.io/memories-life-radioactive-boy-scout/
Tributes - http://www.tributes.com/obituary/show/David-Charles-Hahn-103989982
The Boy Scouts of America – https://www.scouting.org/
Mysterious Universe – https://bit.ly/2sP25DW
Homeland Security News Wire – http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/no-boy-scout-cannot-build-backyard-nuclear-reactor
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