Harper’s Magazine ran a story in its November 1998 issue about a teenager who attempted to build a breeder reactor in his shed from scraps taken from smoke detectors and lantern mantles. I found the article online, and wondered if anybody knew if this actually happened – people seem to remember and quote this story as fact.
It’s got the signs of a good urban legend, but it also names names, so perhaps there’s something to it?
IIRC correctly, it was fact.
I seem to recall a number of news-organizations reporting upon it. He, of course, never came any closer to a weapon/reactor/breeder than anyone piling together a bunch of smoke-detector parts, but the radiation, again, IIRC made him gravely ill.
The article appeared in Reader’s Digest, too. I don’t recall all the details, but they seemed plausible – he found an old radium-clock with a spare bottle of radium paint inside. This wouldn’t help you build a reactor (Oliver Wendell Jones in Bloom County to the contrary notwithstanding), but it coulod expose you to dangerous levels of radioactivity.
The Golden Book of Chemistry that the article cites him as using was an excellent intro to chemistry – I have a copy from when I was a kid, and I learned more from that book than from my high school chemistry course. The book has incredible experiments, including how to make plastic. Or how to dissect batteries for the carbon rods and manganese dioxide. Of course, it also has you using stuff like carbon tetrachloride on a regular basis. Ifg you wrote that today, you’d be sued in no time.
Give a good wirter a few facts and combine them with a lot of ignorance and misinformation and you get a longwinded article to fill several pages of a magazine with something for a bored housewife to kill time.
Note that the shed was “dangerously irradiated.” It may have been irradiated by the low level radioactive materials which would present NO hazard. The problems was the conatamination of the radioactive materials themselves. The shed was DANGEROUSLY CONTAMINATED.
Smoke detectors commonly contain a very very small amount of polonium required to ionize smoke particles and sound the alarm.
Attempting to build a reactor with such is one thing, actually building one is quite another.
BS, Ignorance, and Misinformation abounds!
Speaking of which, smoke detectors commonly use americium-241, not polonium.
I must have it! It will be the perfect complement to my Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants.
My smoke detector is out of date. I’ll have to replace the polonium with amaicium-241 asap!
There was a documentary about this on British TV not too long ago. It was certainly presented as fact, and apparently the “reactor” he had constructed did work.
production company homepage: http://www.eagletv.co.uk/home/index.htm
This also sounds suspiciously a lot like the plot of a really bad movie from the 80’s - about a kid who builds an atomic bomb as his school science project. John Lithgow was in it. I still think this story is hooey and I’m going to get to the bottom of this.
Cardenio, the movie was The Manhattan Project
And of course, the kid was played by Corey Feldman. The climax of the movie occurs when the Feds discover his “laboratory” and he’s forced to defend it with a homemade 1920’s style death ray.