Get a load of this kid.
>David Hahn was an eagle scout from Michigan who built a nuclear reactor in his mom’s potting shed. What you’re about to read may shock you, as it is more easy to obtain radiological materials than one may imagine. Just for a little introduction, he created two neutron guns and a breeder reactor. A breeder reactor can be best compared to a car that produces a self-sustaining fuel cycle that never runs out. Whereas with regular reactors, they require a lot of fuel to stay active, but with breeder reactors, they produce more Plutonium as it is fed by a critical mass of 30 lbs of enriched Uranium to produce a sustained nuclear reaction. And since obtaining even enough Uranium-238 (natural Uranium ore that is abundant in the Earth’s crust) is a tricky endeavor as digging it up would require a lot of resources and is almost impossible to do without anyone noticing, you sure as hell wouldn’t be able to obtain enough to convert into enriched Uranium-235, since you would need a gas centrifuge which would require an entire industrial project and access to some of the strongest industrial grade metals that could spun at extremely fast speeds without breaking in a heavy duty factory during a complex multi-stage process. So that leaves you with two other options: Plutonium-239 and Uranium-233. Uranium-233 can not only be used to fuel a nuclear reactor, but to also make a nuclear bomb (in fact, U233 could also be used in a gun-type set-up (think the Little Boy bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima) in the same way U235 could). Plutonium would require a reactor to produce, as it is made from U238 during a multi-stage beta decay process going from Uranium-238 -> Uranium-239 -> Neptunium-239 -> Plutonium-239. So for the reactor, you would want to use U233, which is what David Hahn did.
>The first thing he created was a neutron gun. He had ordered 100 broken smoke detectors from a smoke detector company that sold broken ones for a dollar a piece, to which he claimed was for “a science project”. He had also stolen some from his camp during his time in the boy scouts and had also bought some from a different company that sold water damaged smoke detectors and other defective smoke detectors. Once receiving them, unsure as to where the Americium-241 was located inside, he had wrote a message to a different facility that manufactured smoke detectors, asking them where they were located. They told him that there was a golden matrix inside to prevent corrosion, to which he found and removed to retrieve the Americium button from. Once removing the buttons from over 100 smoke detectors, he then welded them into the shape of a rock with a blowtorch and placed it inside a hollowed out lead cube that was drilled through for the alpha emitter to emit through on one side. He then placed aluminum foil over it, and now he could turn metals radioactive using this neutron source.
>But then he needed something better. So he created a second neutron gun, this time for the production of Uranium-233. He started going to junkyards and peeling off the paint chips from dashboards and clocks that were painted with a radioactive paint that makes the numbers glow in the dark (Radium-226) and stored them in pill bottles. Eventually, he found an antique store that was selling the antique clocks after his geiger counter was picking up large amounts of radiation from the location. That was where he found a large bottle of Radium paint that the collectors left on the shelf. He took it and also bought a Radium clock from the store before leaving with it to use for his second neutron gun. He then took some Barium Sulfate that he got from a hospital’s radiology unit that he received while earning his eagle scout’s merit badge, heated it until it liquified and mixed in the paint chips and Radium paint before pouring it through a coffee filter inside a beaker. The glowing substance at the bottom of the beaker he found to be the purified Radium substance that he was looking for, so he dehydrated it until it formed into a crystalline salt, which he placed in the center of the hollowed out lead block.
>The next thing he needed was something to slow down the neutrons. So he took a Beryllium strip that he got from a community college’s chemistry department that he received from a friend who worked on delivering supplies there to “swipe” it for him, to which he placed over the hole with Tritium wax that he smeared over the strip that he got in trace amounts from glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights that he bought from sporting goods stores. He had removed the tritium contained within a waxy substance inside the sights before returning it under various different pseudonyms, so that they could “fix” it just so he could obtain another tiny amount of tritium to collect for him to smear his Beryllium strips with. Once he had enough, he beamed his Radium through the strips at some Thorium-232 that he got from old Coleman camping lantern mantles that contain Thorium Dioxide that he purified by heating the mantles into ash using a blowtorch before then combining the ash with lithium from $1,000 worth of lithium batteries that he shoplifted, placing them both over a sheet of aluminum foil and balling it up before then placing the aluminum ball inside a tin can filled with cooking oil over a Bunsen Burner, essentially frying it to starve the Thorium dioxide of it’s oxygen component to get the purified Thorium-232.
>The Thorium-232 would then become Tho-233, then Protactinium-233 and then Uranium-233 after the Th-232 absorbs a neutron. To tell if the neutron gun was working, he simply tested the results with his geiger counter and saw that it got increasingly more radioactive over time. That showed that it was working.
>He had also bought some black ore — either pitchblende or Uranium Dioxide, from a university in the Czech Republic that sold to professors and collectors after he had hiked for hundreds of miles scouring through mining sites and lakes but could only find a truckload worth of pitchblende at Lake Huron which wasn’t radioactive enough for what he was looking for. Once obtaining the ore, he then crushed it into a powder with a hammer before mixing it with nitric acid that he made from saltpeter and sodium bisulfate, boiling it, shaking it up until he was left with what looked like a “dirty milkshake” before attempting to strain it through a coffee filter, only to find that it got stuck to the filter. After making his Uranyl Nitrate for the reactor, he had tested it by beaming his new Radium filled neutron gun at it to make it more radioactive in hopes that a reaction would take place.
>Once he was finished with that, he had put together all that he made for his new breeder reactor.
>He first made the core by taking his Radium crystalline salts and Americium from his Americium buttons, filed and pulverized them into a powder over a sheet of aluminum foil, then added some aluminum and Beryllium strip shavings over the sheet of foil before balling it up to serve as the core. He then surrounded this core with a “blanket” of cubes arranged in an alternating checkerboard pattern. For the outer layer of the cube, he had used Thorium Dioxide from the Thorium ash, Thorium-232 from the Thorium strips and carbon cubes in a 3-square checkerboard pattern, and for the cubes that surround the core, he used Uranium from either the Uranyl Nitrate or Uranium-233 and Thorium-232 or Thorium Dioxide and for the cubes that go between the core and outer wall, he used Thorium Dioxide and Uranyl Nitrate.
>After he had put this cube reactor together, he then strapped it all together in duct tape and added two cobalt drill bits to the top to act as the control rods so that the reactor wouldn’t overheat. Cobalt absorbs neutrons without becoming fissible itself.
>While the reactor failed to reach criticality, however it’s main purpose was to see what kind of reactions he would be able to produce using all of his hard work and research.
