who remembers the so called "radioactive boy scout"? As a kid he attempted to build a breeder reactor in his moms shed. Now 31, He was arrested for stealing smoke detectors. They have both Lithium and americanium in them. He was attempting another one in his apartment building.

The whole story can be found various places including: http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

At 17 this kid decided to build a model breeder reactor, a nuclear reactor that not only generates electricity, but also produces new fuel. According to him:

"His model would use the actual radioactive elements and produce real reactions. His blueprint was a schematic in one of his father's textbooks.

Ignoring safety, David mixed his radium and americium with beryllium and aluminum, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil, forming a makeshift reactor core. He surrounded this radioactive ball with a blanket of small foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, tenuously held together with duct tape.

"It was radioactive as heck," David says, "far greater than at the time of assembly." Then he began to realize that he could be putting himself and others in danger.

When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac.

At 2:40 a.m. on August 31, 1994, Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was meeting a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car.

They opened the trunk and discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape. The trunk also contained foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, and mercury switches. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David said was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.

The discovery eventually triggered the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state officials would become involved in consultations with the EPA and NRC.

At the shed, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a Pyrex cup, a milk crate and other materials strewn about, contaminated at up to 1000 times the normal levels of background radiation. Because some of this could be moved around by wind and rain, conditions at the site, according to an EPA memo, "present an imminent endangerment to public health."

After the moon-suited workers dismantled the shed, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed barrels that were trucked to the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were entombed with other radioactive debris.

"These are conditions that regulations never envision," says Dave Minnaar, radiological expert with Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality. "It's simply presumed that the average person wouldn't have the technology or materials required to experiment in these areas."

David Hahn is now in the Navy, where he reads about steroids, melanin, genetic codes, prototype reactors, amino acids and criminal law. "I wanted to make a scratch in life," he explains now. "I've still got time." Of his exposure to radioactivity he says, "I don't believe I took more than five years off my life."

So Spider this was all in 1994 and now he was caught trying to make a new bomb?

Ooops thinking of another thread.... I meant rambill!!!!

Sorry.

NOT A BOMB, A REACTOR. A very "dirty" one from the sound of it.
From my weak understanding of nuclear psyics, it would appear to me that he has been trying to create fuel for a reactor by bombarding some available items such as americaminum and lithium with a neutron source, thereby creating uranium fuel. He was trying to enrich fuel, is another way of saying it.
See why i collect daily background radiation levels and have since the 70s?