The True Story Of A Boy and his Backyard Nuclear Reactor, by Ken Silverstein, Random House, N.Y., 2004, 209 pgs., 2004
Reviewed by Doug Baker (Thanks Doug - SGL)
If the spirit of Roderick Mac Arthur—who thought up the award to honor his father, with his father’s money-- were to settle on the awards selection of another “genius” Mac Arthur fellow, “ to give greater freedom of choice to the creative individual who vibrates to his own iron string.”, David Hahn would be funded as a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. Jim Clark would ring the boy’s chimes in his quest
For the next new profitable thing.
David Hahn swam in a tide pool so controlled that only two per cent remainder out as an Eagle Scout. The boy’s interests were what Buckminister Fuller would call, “elemental”. The Boy earned an Atomic Energy Merit Badge.
If the boy couldn’t spell well in English, it didn’t stand in his way of being a linguist of the old school, knowing his A B C’s—atomic, biological and chemical. He built from scratch a working neutron gun, made alcohol for his Boy Scout camp councilors, and isolated melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) that could have been taken into the market place, amped his rocket fuel so his rockets reached greater heights than an ordinary off -the-hobby-store-shelf rocket would, and he made chlorine gas—to skim the top of his cauldron of achievements.
Ken Silverstein has written a wonderful book without once using the “A” word showing how the boy followed his bliss as an alchemist.
He understood reduction, distillation, the use of temperature and pressure to midwife change. According to David, “I’d imagine an atom of uranium that had been sitting around, in all practicality, for eternity. Then a stray neutron enters it, and a new birth takes place. When one element is transformed into another, the universe is slowly recycling itself.”
The boy understood nature is structured like a language. And he understood the importance of time and temperature as the cosmos got cooler and more complicated moving from “The Big Bang” to our number one element, hydrogen and as more time passed to the whole periodic table of the cosmic elements.
The boy became an elemental collector. As best he could he gathered samples of the elements including in America, the illegal radioactive ones. Like the old alchemist the boy couldn’t see quarks, nucleons, atoms, molecules, or cells; but he could and did use his powers and skill to get something pure and change it. The boy may not have read Latin but he understood,
Lucretius, who wrote: “But atoms, our basic stuff, can claim more patterns of change whence countless things may be created.”
At age 16 and a half the boy could have been a poster boy for John Bradshaw’s On The Family or an incarnation of John D.’s, or Sun Tsu’s art of the Indirect approach to get what you want as he attempted to bring his model breeder reactor to life.
When the pluses of radioactivity increased the boy worried that he didn’t have a shut off valve. “With his Geiger counter picking up radiation five doors down the block, David saw no choice but to oversee an emergency shutdown of his baby reactor.”
The EPA took David’s lab—a pottery barn and the soil under it and buried it Utah’s Salt Desert along with other radioactive garbage from the authorized atomic bomb factories and nuclear power plants and radioactive industrial and mining sites.
“Some local scout leaders attempted to deprive David of his Eagle Scout status…’He lied, stole stuff, and put people in jeopardy.’” They didn’t understand that David was as devoted to his experiments as John D. was to his and to fly like an Eagle you don’t birdy like a chicken.
After high school joined the Navy and learned to smoke on the USS Enterprise where his ship mates nicknamed him, the Nuclear Kid.
Silverstein notes, “government scientists still worried that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have seriously shortened his life span.”
Last year David reenlisted in the navy. With dark matter and dark energy abroad in the cosmos, “given the central role of the atom in his emotional and intellectual life, it’s almost certain that David has reached a fork in his nuclear road, not its end point.”
