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BOY SCOUT When a Teenager Attempts to Build a Breeder Reactor by Ken Silverstein

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BOY SCOUT When a Teenager Attempts to Build a Breeder Reactor by Ken Silverstein REP 0 R T THE R-LL\DIO-LL\CTIVE BOY SCOUT When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor By Ken Silverstein neighborhood than a subdivision, and kind of place where, on a typical day, There is hardly a boyar a girl alive the few features that do convey subdi- the only thing lurking around the cor- who is not keenly interested in vision-a sign at the entrance saying ner is a Mister Softee ice-cream truck. finding out about things. And "We have many children but But June 26, 1995, was not a typical that's exactly what chem- none to spare. Please drive care- day. Ask Dottie Pease. As she turned istry is: FINDING OUT fully"-have a certain Back down Pinto Drive, Pease saw eleven ABOUT THINGS- men swarming across her carefully finding out what things manicured lawn. Their attention are made of and what seemed to be focused on the back yard changes they undergo. of the house next door, specifically on What things? Any thing! a large wooden potting shed that Every thing! abutted the chain- -The Golden Book of Chemistry link fence dividing Experiments her property from her neighbor's. olf Manor is the kind of Three of the men place where nothing un- had donned venti- G usual is supposed to happen, lated moon suits the kind of place where people live and were proceed- precisely because it is more than 25 ing to dismantle miles outside of Detroit and all the the potting shed complications attendant on that city. with electric saws, The kind of place where money buys stuffing the pieces a bit more land, perhaps a second bath- of wood into large room, and so reassures residents that steel drums emblazoned with ra- they're safely in the bosom of the mid- dioactive warning signs.Pease had dle class. Everyelement of Golf Manor never noticed anything out of the invokes one form of security or an- ordinary at the house next door. other, beginning with the name of the A middle-aged couple, Michael subdivision itself-taken from the 18- Polasek and Patty Hahn, lived there. hole course at its entrance-and the On some weekends, they were joined community in which it is nestled, ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: BOY SCOUT by Patty's teenage son, David. As she ATOMIC ENERGY MERIT BADGE, DAVID Commerce Township. The houses and huddled with a group of nervous neigh- HAHN'S COPY OF THE GOLDEN BOOK OF trees are both old and varied enough to bors, though, Pease heard one resident CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENTS, DAVID HAHN make Golf Manor feel more like a claim to have awoken late one night to see the potting shed emitting an eerie to the Future charm. Most Golf Manor glow. "1waspretty disturbed," Pease re- Ken Silverstein's last articie for Harper's Magazine,"The Boeing Formation," appeared residents remain there until they die, calls. "I went inside and called my hus- in the May 1997 issue. He lives in Washing- and then they are replaced by young band. I said, 'Da-a-ve, there are men in ton, D.C. couples with kids. In short, it is the funny suits walking around out here. REPORT 59 You've got to do something.'" Commission into providing him with What the men in the funny suits crucial information he needed in his You-Scientist! found was that the potting shed was attempt to build a breeder reactor, and -The Golden Book of Chemistry dangerously irradiated and that the then he obtained and purified ra- Experiments, Chapter 10 area's 40,000 residents could be at risk. dioactive elements such as.radium and Publicly, the men in white promised thorium. nThe Making of theAtomic Bomb, the residents of Golf Manor that they I had seen childhood photographs Richard Rhodes notes that the had nothing to fear, and to this day of David in which he looked perfect- Ipsychologicalprofilesofpioneering neither Pease nor any of the dozen or ly normal, even angelic, with blond American physicists are remarkably so people I interviewed knows the hair and hazel-green eyes, and, as he similar. Frequently the eldest son of real reason that the Environmental grew older, gangly limbs and a peach- an emotionally remote, professional Protection Agency briefly invaded fuzz mustache. Still, when I went to man, he-almost all were men-was a their neighborhood. When asked, most meet him in Norfolk, I was anticipat- voracious reader during childhood, mumble something about a chemical ing some physical manifestation of tended to feel lonely, and was shy and spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the brilliance or obsession. An Einstein aloof from classmates. Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was or a Kaczynski. But all I saw was a David's parents, Ken and Patty provoked by the boy next door, David beefier version of the clean-cut kid in Hahn, divorced when he was a tod- Hahn, who attempted to build a nu- the pictures. David's manner was odd- dler. Ken is an automotive engineer clear breeder reactor in his mother's for General Motors, as is his second potting shed as part of a Boy Scout wife, Kathy Missig, whom he married merit-badge project. soon after the divorce. David lived with It seems remarkable that David's his father and stepmother in a small story hasn't already wended its way split-level home in suburban Clinton through all forms of journalism and Township, about thirty miles north of become the stuff of legend, but at the Detroit. Ken Hahn worked extraordi- time the EPA refused to give out narily long hours for GM. With close- David's name, and although a few lo- cropped hair and a proclivity for short- cal reporters learned it, neither he nor sleeved dress shirts, Ken radiates a any family members agreed to be in- coolness that, combined with his con- terviewed. Even the federal and state stant preoccupation, must have been officials who oversaw the cleanup confounding to a child. When asked learned only a small parr of what took about his undemonstrative nature, Ken place in the potting shed at Golf attributes it to his German ancestry. Manor because David, fearing legal Yet for all his starchiness, it was Kathy repercussions, told them almost noth- who was David's chief disciplinarian. ing about his experiments. Then in David spent weekends and holidays 1996, Jay Gourley, a correspondent with his mother and her boyfriend, with the Natural Resources News Ser- ly dispassionate, though polite, until Michael Polasek, an amiable but hard- vice in Washington, D.c., came across we began to discuss his nuclear ad- drinking retired forklift operator at a tiny newspaper item about the case ventures. Then, for five hours, light- GM. Golf Manor is demographically and contacted David Hahn. Gourley ing and grinding out cigarettes for em- similar to Clinton Township, but the later passed on his research to me, and phasis, David enthused about laboring two households could not have been I subsequently interviewed the story's in his backyard laboratory. He told more different emotionally. Patty protagonists, including David-now me how he used coffee filters and pick- Hahn committed suicide in the house a twenty-two-year-old sailor stationed le jars to handle deadly substances a few years ago, but Michael still lives in Norfolk, Virginia. such as radium and nitric acid, and there surrounded by pictures of her. I met with David in the hope of he sheepishly divulged the various ("She was a beautiful person," he says. making sense not only of his experi- cover stories and aliases he employed "She was my whole life.") He keeps ments but of him. The archetypal to obtain the radioactive materials. A five cats and a spotless household, and American suburban boy learns how shy and withdrawn teenager, David looks like a member ofSha Na Na. to hit a fadeaway jump shot, change a had confided in only a few friends Despite the fact that David wasshuf- car's oil, perform some minor carpen- about his project and never allowed fledbetween households, his early years try feats. If he's a Boy Scout he mas- anyone to witness his experiments. were seemingly ordinary. He played ters the art of starting a fire by rubbing His breeder-reactor project was a baseball and soccer, joined the Boy two sticks together, and if he's a typ- means-albeit an unorthodox one- Scouts, and spent endless hours ex- ical adolescent pyro, he transforms of escaping the trauma of adolescence. ploring with his friends. An abrupt tennis-ball cans into cannons. David "I was very emotional as a kid," he change came at the age of ten, when Hahn taught himself to build a neu- told me, "and those experiments gave Kathy's father, also an engineer for tron gun. He figured out a way to dupe me a way to get away from that. They GM, gave David The Golden Book of officials at the Nuclear Regulatory gave me some respect." Chemistry Experiments. The book 60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 1998 promised to open doors to a brave new world-"Chemistry means the differ- ence between poverty and starvation and the abundant life," it stated with unwavering optimism-and offered in- structions on how to set up a home laboratory and conduct experiments ranging from simple evaporation and filtration to making rayon and alco- hol. David swiftly became immersed and by age twelve was digesting his fa- ther's collegechemistry textbooks with- out difficulty.When he spent the night at Golf Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the living- room floor surrounded by open vol- umes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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