At 2:40 in the morning on August 31, 1994, police in Clinton Township, Michigan, answered a call about a young man who seemed to be stealing tires from a parked car. They found a seventeen-year-old beside a burgundy Pontiac 6000 who said he was waiting for a friend. They did not believe him and searched the car. In the trunk was a toolbox, padlocked and sealed with duct tape for good measure. Around it lay more than fifty foil-wrapped cubes of grey powder, small disks and metal cylinders, a stack of gas-lantern mantles, mercury switches, a clock face, lumps of ore, fireworks, vacuum tubes, and jars of chemicals and acids. The driver asked them not to open the toolbox. It was radioactive, he said.

The officers thought it might be an atomic bomb. Sergeant Joseph Mertes wrote “a potential improvised explosive device” in his report and ordered the car towed to police headquarters, where it sat in the lot until the chief arrived. “It probably shouldn’t have been done,” Chief Al Ernst said later. “When I came in at 6:30 in the morning it was already there.” The Michigan State Police bomb squad came. So did the state Department of Public Health, whose instruments found americium and concentrated thorium, which one official noted is not found in nature, at least not in Michigan. That finding set off the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and by the end of the day state officials were on the phone with the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about a teenager’s car.

The teenager was David Hahn. He gave the police his father’s address and said nothing about his mother’s house, or about the potting shed behind it, for nearly three months.

Who ran it

David Charles Hahn was born on October 30, 1976, in Royal Oak, Michigan, and spent his childhood between two houses that could not have been more different. His father, Ken, was a General Motors engineer who worked long hours and radiated, in the words of the journalist who later knew the family best, “a coolness that, combined with his constant preoccupation, must have been confounding to a child.” Ken put it down to German ancestry. After the divorce he married Kathy Missig, another GM engineer, and it was Kathy who did the disciplining. David lived with them in Clinton Township. Weekends he spent in Golf Manor, a subdivision in Commerce Township, with his mother, Patty, who struggled with drink and with mental illness, and her boyfriend Michael Polasek, a retired forklift operator who liked the boy and understood nothing he said.

When David was ten, Kathy’s father, yet another GM engineer, gave him The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, a 1960 children’s book that promised a brave new world. “Chemistry means the difference between poverty and starvation and the abundant life,” it said. By twelve he was reading his father’s college chemistry textbooks. His mother would wake to find him asleep on the living-room floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He was a terrible speller and an indifferent student who nearly failed the state tests in mathematics and reading required for graduation, and aced the one in science. His physics teacher at Chippewa Valley High School, Ken Gherardini, remembered a pupil who was excellent on the rare occasions he cared. “His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the periodic table,” Gherardini said. “I don’t know about you, but my dream at that age was to buy a car.”

He was also, from early on, a hazard. By fourteen he had made nitroglycerine. Spills and small blasts pocked the walls of his bedroom and ruined the carpet, so his father and stepmother banished the chemistry to the basement. There, one day, he pounded a container of red phosphorus with a screwdriver. The house shook. They found him semiconscious on the floor with his eyebrows smoking, and for months afterwards an ophthalmologist picked fragments of the plastic container out of his eyes. Kathy forbade experiments in her home. So the work moved to the one place no adult went: his mother’s potting shed.

His parents, convinced by now that he was making and selling drugs, spot-checked the public library, where he was always exactly where he said he would be, surrounded by chemistry books. They locked him out of the house when they were away. Kathy searched his room and threw out whatever she found. None of it worked. At Scout camp he turned up with a face dyed orange by an overdose of canthaxanthin, blew a hole in a tent with his stockpile of magnesium powder, and was finally sent home for stealing smoke detectors to take apart. His girlfriend’s mother liked him, but warned him before dinner parties not to lecture the guests on the chemical composition of the food.

Ken Hahn’s explanation, years later, was brief. “I never saw him turn green or glow in the dark,” he said. “I was probably too easy on him.” His solution at the time was a goal he had never reached himself: Eagle Scout. David’s own explanation was briefer. “I was very emotional as a kid,” he said, “and those experiments gave me a way to get away from that. They gave me some respect.”

The badge

On May 10, 1991, five months short of his fifteenth birthday, David earned the Boy Scouts’ Atomic Energy merit badge. To get it he drew a diagram of nuclear fission, visited a hospital radiology unit to learn about the medical uses of isotopes, and built a model reactor out of a juice can, coat hangers, soda straws, kitchen matches and rubber bands. His scoutmaster, Joe Auito, said he was the only boy ever to earn it in the history of Clinton Township Troop 371.

The badge pamphlet had been prepared with the help of Westinghouse Electric, the American Nuclear Society and the Edison Electric Institute, and it read like it. “If America decides for or against nuclear power plants based on fear and misunderstanding, that is wrong,” it told the Scouts. More usefully, for David, it explained where radioactive materials could be found in ordinary life, americium in smoke detectors and thorium in the mantles of camping lanterns, and it listed the agencies a curious boy could write to for more. A Department of Energy booklet he obtained around the same time described the breeder reactor as a magic car: you set out with half a tank of gas, and when you get home the tank is full.

Barbara Auito, the scoutmaster’s wife and the troop’s treasurer, summed up what happened next in two sentences. “The typical kid would have gone to a doctor’s office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor.”

What he was trying to find out

The goal grew in three steps. At fourteen, the badge. At fifteen, what he called a neutron gun, a source that would let him “irradiate anything” he put in front of it. At seventeen, a model breeder reactor, drawn from a checkerboard schematic in one of his father’s college textbooks.

He understood the physics well enough to know its limit. A sustained chain reaction needs a critical mass, something like thirty pounds of enriched uranium, and he had no way to get it and said so. What he wanted to see was the step before that. Thorium-232 does not fission, but when a neutron strikes it, it becomes uranium-233, which does. A breeder reactor makes more fuel than it burns by exactly that trick, a core of fissile material surrounded by a blanket of fertile material slowly turning into fuel. David wanted to catch the turning happening. “No matter what happened,” he said, “there would be something changing into something. Some kind of action going on there.” When a state investigator finally asked him what he had been doing, he said he had been trying to make thorium into a form he could use to produce energy, and that he hoped the results would help him make Eagle Scout. His mother’s boyfriend remembered another motive. “He’d say, ‘One of these days we’re gonna run out of oil.’ He wanted to do something about that.”

He got his answers by mail. Writing as many as twenty letters a day, and signing them as a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School, which was in fact where he sat in class, he wrote to the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the American Nuclear Society, the Edison Electric Institute and the Atomic Industrial Forum, everyone the pamphlet listed. The nuclear society sent a teacher’s guide called “Goin’ Fission” with a cartoon Einstein on it. The NRC did better. Its director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, took up a correspondence with “Professor Hahn” and, according to the account David later gave, sent him tips on isolating radioactive elements, a list of the isotopes that can sustain a chain reaction, and one sentence that shaped everything after: “Nothing produces neutrons as well as beryllium.” When David asked about the risks, Erb assured him that the real dangers were very slight, since possessing any radioactive material in quantities or forms sufficient to pose a hazard requires an NRC licence. The agency also sent pricing data and the names of commercial suppliers. “The NRC gave me all the information I needed,” David said. “All I had to do was go out and get the materials.”

What he did

He took the pamphlet at its word, typed up a list of sources for fourteen isotopes, and went shopping.

Americium came from smoke detectors. He told the manufacturers he needed a large number for a school project, and one company sold him about a hundred broken units for a dollar apiece. He was not sure where in the detector the americium lived, so he wrote to BRK Electronics in Aurora, Illinois, and a customer-service representative named Beth Weber wrote back, happy to help with “your report”: each detector holds a tiny amount of americium-241 sealed in a gold matrix so that corrosion cannot release it. He pried the sources out and welded them into a single lump with a blowtorch.

Thorium came from lantern mantles. He bought them by the thousand from surplus stores and burned them to ash with the blowtorch. Then, remembering from one of his father’s books that lithium is greedy for oxygen, he bought a thousand dollars’ worth of lithium batteries, cut them open with wire cutters, packed the lithium and the thorium ash together in a ball of aluminum foil, and heated the ball over a Bunsen burner to pull the metal out of its oxide. He later claimed, and his chronicler repeated, that this purified the thorium to nine thousand times its concentration in nature and 170 times the level that requires a licence. No one measured it.

Uranium came hard. He drove hundreds of miles of upper Michigan with a Geiger counter, assembled from a mail-order kit and screwed to the dashboard of the Pontiac, looking for hot rocks, and came home with a quarter of a trunkload of pitchblende from the shore of Lake Huron. He wrote to a firm in Czechoslovakia that sells uranium to universities, claiming to be a professor buying for a research laboratory, and received a few samples of black ore. He pulverised it with a hammer, made his own nitric acid by heating saltpeter and sodium bisulfate and bubbling the fumes through water, boiled the ore in the acid until it looked like a dirty milkshake, and poured it through a coffee filter. He had the solubility wrong. Whatever uranium was there stayed in the filter.

Radium came from the glow of old dials. He haunted junkyards and antique shops for radium-painted clocks and dashboard instruments and chipped the paint into pill bottles. One day, driving through Clinton Township to see his girlfriend, the counter on his dashboard went wild as he passed a shop called Gloria’s Resale Boutique. Inside was an old table clock with a green-tinted dial, which he bought for ten dollars. Inside the clock was a vial of radium paint, left behind decades earlier so the owner could touch up the numbers. He left the proprietor a note, misspelled, asking to be told about any other luminous clock: “I will pay any some of money to obtain one.” To concentrate what he had, he got barium sulfate from the X-ray ward of a local hospital, where staff remembered the polite boy from his merit-badge visit, mixed it with the paint chips, filtered the brew into a beaker that began to glow, and dried it to crystals.

Beryllium, the element Erb had named, came from the chemistry department of Macomb Community College. A friend who went there stole him a strip. Tritium, which boosts nuclear weapons, came from the glowing sights sold for guns and bows. He bought them from sporting-goods stores and catalogues, scraped out the waxy luminous compound, and sent the sights back for repair under a string of false names, collecting a little more tritium each time. Cobalt, for control rods, came as a set of drill bits from the hardware store, on the advice of a friend who told him that reactors get hot, it’s just a fact.

His protection was a lead poncho he made himself, a gas mask his mother noticed him wearing, and the habit of throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes after a night in the shed, which often ended at two in the morning. He handled radium and nitric acid with coffee filters and pickle jars. He knew what radium does. In his own notes he wrote that the real danger lay in the radioactive properties of these elements, which migrate to the bone marrow and interfere with the making of blood. “Less than one-millionth of a gram can be fatal,” he wrote. Then he kept going.

The build

The first gun was americium. He put the lump inside a hollow block of lead with a pinhole pricked in one side, so that alpha particles would stream out, and set a sheet of aluminum in front of it; aluminum struck by alphas gives off neutrons. Neutrons carry no charge and a Geiger counter cannot see them, so he had no way to know whether the gun worked until he remembered that paraffin struck by neutrons throws off protons. He aimed the gun at a block of wax, the counter ticked, and he decided it was working.

It was too weak to do what he wanted, so he built a second gun around the radium crystals, packed into another lead block, with the beryllium strip in front of it. Now he had a neutron source, and he began bombarding his thorium and his uranium powders. The thorium seemed to grow more radioactive. The uranium did nothing. “Professor Hahn” wrote to his friend at the NRC, who explained that the neutrons were too fast for the uranium and would have to be slowed with water, deuterium or tritium. Water would have done. David smeared the tritium wax over the beryllium instead and watched for weeks as, by his reading of the counter, the uranium powder grew hotter by the day.

Then he built the reactor. He took the radium and the americium out of their lead housings, filed and pulverised them, mixed them with beryllium and aluminum shavings, and wrapped the mixture in foil. That was the core. Around it he stacked tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, alternating with cubes of carbon, and held the whole thing together with duct tape. That was the blanket. The cobalt drill bits went in between the cubes. One retelling calls it shoebox-sized; the original account gives no dimension at all.

“It was radioactive as heck,” he said later. “The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of assembly. I know I transformed some radioactive materials. Even though there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent.”

What happened

Week by week the counts rose. Then they kept rising with nothing switched on, because nothing in the shed had a switch. The radiation became detectable through concrete. Then his dashboard counter began picking up the shed from five doors down his mother’s street. He had built a source he could not turn off, and for the first time it frightened him. He decided he had “too much radioactive stuff in one place” and took the reactor apart. The thorium pellets went into a shoebox hidden in his mother’s house. The radium and the americium stayed in the shed. Most of the rest went into the trunk of the Pontiac, where the police found it.

What followed was a cleanup of the wrong things. David told the police nothing useful and did not mention the shed. It was Thanksgiving Day before Dave Minnaar, the Department of Public Health’s radiological expert, sat him down and got him to admit there was a laboratory behind his mother’s house. By the time state surveyors reached it on November 29, 1994, Patty Hahn, warned by Ken and Kathy and terrified that the government would take her home, had already gone through the shed and thrown most of what she found into the household trash: the neutron gun, the radium, thorium pellets far hotter than anything the officials ever saw, and several quarts of radioactive powder. It went to a landfill and was never traced. “The funny thing is,” David said, “they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff.”

The garbage was bad enough. The surveyors found pie pans, jars of acid, Pyrex cups and milk crates contaminated with what the reports called “excessive levels” of americium-241 and thorium-232. One vegetable can read fifty thousand counts a minute, about a thousand times background. They satisfied themselves that nothing had leaked outside the shed, sealed it, and wrote to the EPA that the place begged for a controlled remediation beyond the state’s authority or resources, because David, as the memo put it, was not an NRC-licensed operation. The EPA’s team arrived on January 25, 1995, and its action memo found “an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health or welfare or the environment,” with actual or potential exposure to nearby residents and the risk that wind, rain or fire could carry the contamination off the property.

Five months later, on June 26, 1995, a neighbor named Dottie Pease counted eleven men on her lawn, three of them in ventilated suits, and telephoned the boy who had caused it. “Da-a-ve, there are men in funny suits walking around out here. You’ve got to do something.” Over three days the men cut the potting shed into pieces with electric saws, packed the wood and everything in it into thirty-nine steel drums marked with the radiation symbol, and loaded the drums onto a truck for Envirocare, a low-level waste dump in the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah, where they were buried. The bill was about sixty thousand dollars. The EPA’s database still carries the property, 2776 Pinto Drive, as the Union Lake Radiation Site: a removal action, never added to the Superfund list, closed with no further remedial action planned.

The official assessment said the backyard’s plants and animals showed no harm, and that forty thousand people in the surrounding area could have been put at risk over the years David worked, from radioactive dust and radiation. No dose was ever published, and every later retelling of that figure traces to the same single sentence. The EPA arranged for David to be examined at the nearby Fermi nuclear plant. Afraid of what he would learn, he refused. “I don’t believe I took more than five years off of my life,” he said three years later. Its scientists were less sure.

After

He fell into a depression. At school they called him Radioactive Boy, and the principal confiscated the Valentine’s balloons his girlfriend sent him in case they held gas. Some local Scout leaders tried to deny him his Eagle rank on the grounds that his merit-badge hobby had endangered the community. They failed, and he was made an Eagle Scout shortly after the shed came down. His parents put him in Macomb Community College to study metallurgy; he skipped the classes and spent his days in bed or driving in circles around the block. Within a few years his mother killed herself in the Golf Manor house. His parents gave him a choice between the armed forces and the street, and a Navy recruiter who would not stop calling settled it.

He enlisted in 1997 and served aboard the carrier Enterprise, a nuclear-powered ship. What he did there depends on who is telling it: routine duties as an undesignated seaman in the earliest account, an interior-communications electrician in a later one, a sniper and helmsman in his father’s. None of the accounts puts him near a reactor. There was a spell in the Marines, and a medical discharge.

In November 1998 the journalist Ken Silverstein found him, a beefier version of the clean-cut boy in the photographs, dispassionate and polite until the conversation turned to his nuclear adventures, and told the story in Harper’s under the title that stuck. A book followed in 2004, a British television documentary in which David re-enacted some of his methods for the camera, and, over the years, a film option and a long tail of podcasts. Nearly everything anyone knows about what happened in the shed comes from the five hours David spent talking to Silverstein.

On the first of August 2007, at thirty, he was arrested at his apartment complex in Clinton Township after a maintenance worker saw him lift a smoke detector off a hallway ceiling. Sixteen were missing. Police evacuated the building and called the bomb squad, which found nothing hazardous, and then the FBI, because of who he was. A captain said the department was “a tad bit concerned” and did not want “any other radioactive sites to pop up.” The police said his face was covered in open sores and speculated aloud about radiation. His father said the search tore up walls and furniture to find a handful of smoke detectors and no dangerous radiation at all. Silverstein, who knew him, called the response a Keystone Cops affair and said he was confident David wasn’t out to harm anyone. He pleaded guilty to attempted larceny from a building and was sentenced to ninety days, held in abeyance for six months while he was treated at a Veterans Administration hospital, with orders to stay off drugs and alcohol and to take his medication. An FBI informant that year described heavy drug use, missed medication and paranoia. No diagnosis has ever been published.

David Hahn died in Shelby Township on September 27, 2016, at thirty-nine. The medical examiner ruled the death accidental, from the combined effects of alcohol, fentanyl and diphenhydramine, with a blood-alcohol level that would be fatal on its own. His father learned that he had been found in a restroom about twenty minutes after he was last seen. “There was no way to revive him,” Ken Hahn said. David lived half a mile from his father at the time, was taking three classes, and was working toward certification as a mechanic. Veterans’ check-ups had found no lingering effect from the radiation. “I’m proud of my son and I’m very sad that he’s gone,” his father said. “He could have done a lot more in this world.” He was buried at Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly, Michigan. For seven weeks, until someone posted the funeral notice online, no newspaper noticed.

What it taught

Start with what it did not do. It did not come close to a chain reaction, and no one serious, David included, ever said it did. Physicists who later went through the account found a good deal of it implausible: that a hundred smoke detectors could be welded into a lump of anything, that a community college kept beryllium in a drawer, that a vial of radium paint had sat in a ten-dollar clock for fifty years, that a counter on a dashboard could go wild at a shop across the street. One called it hokum on its face. They accepted the parts that matter: thorium from mantles, radium scraped from dials, and a shed so contaminated that men in suits had to saw it apart. The device the reviews called a reactor was a crude neutron source wrapped in fertile powder, and the legend that grew around it, that the boy “got a reactor running” or came “really damn close,” is not supported by the one account everything rests on.

What the record does support is enough. A teenager with no supervision assembled a neutron source and could not turn it off. He handled purified radium, which seeks bone, as dried crystals in a wooden shed with the door shut, for months, and so did the mother who swept it up. The hazard was never the mushroom cloud the officers imagined in the trunk. It was breathing.

The people closest to it drew the lessons themselves, and they are still the right ones.

The rules assumed he could not exist. Every radioactive item he bought was legal, and still is. A smoke detector carries about a microcurie of americium and gives its owner a dose smaller than a cross-country flight. A lantern mantle carries a quarter of a gram of thorium. The regulations that exempt these products from licensing were written, and after this case reviewed and kept, one item at a time; no rule contemplated a boy with a hundred of the one and thousands of the other in a shed. Dave Minnaar, the state’s radiological expert, did not learn about the neutron guns or the radium until Silverstein told him, three years after his own agency sealed the shed. “These are conditions that regulatory agencies never envision,” he said. “It’s simply presumed that the average person wouldn’t have the technology or materials required to experiment in these areas.” The NRC official who answered the letters was no fool; everything he is quoted as saying was true and public. He simply answered a title. The system verified credentials and never once checked understanding, and understanding was the only thing the boy had.

Invisible hazards do not teach. A burn teaches. An explosion that leaves plastic in your eyes teaches. David had both, and the lesson he took from them was to be careful with fire. Radiation gave him nothing to be careful of. It does not hurt, smell, or glow, whatever the neighbors said they saw at night, and the books he learned from were written in a decade that treated the danger as a footnote to the promise. The philosopher of science Janet Stemwedel, reviewing his story for parents, put the point exactly: a self-directed learner working from a “ruthlessly optimistic” text can reach the conclusion that there is no potential for harm, and the knowledge gaps that let that happen are on both sides, the child’s and the adults’. He trusted his books. His counter, when it finally spoke, told him only that it was too late.

A ban with no alternative moves the work out of sight. Every adult in the story responded to an accident by forbidding the next experiment, and every ban moved the work one room farther from supervision: bedroom, basement, shed. The result was not fewer experiments. It was experiments no one could see. The counter-example arrived a decade later. A boy named Taylor Wilson read Silverstein’s book at eleven and told his parents, “I’m the responsible radioactive boy scout. I know what I’m doing.” His parents resisted the urge to steer him somewhere safer. His father borrowed a Geiger counter from an emergency-management office and asked a friend who was a nuclear pharmacist to review the boy’s safety practices. When Taylor turned up at the University of Nevada in Reno wanting to build a fusion reactor, the physicist Ronald Phaneuf’s first thought was “Oh my lord, we can’t let him do that,” and his second was “but maybe we can help him try to do it here.” At fourteen Taylor achieved fusion in a university laboratory, with neutrons, verified by people who knew how to verify it. Tom Clynes, who followed him for years and wrote the comparison, gave the honest answer to what separated the two boys: “mostly, support.” He also conceded that Taylor, refused, “probably would have gone underground” too. A rational society, he wrote, would know what to do with a kid like that. In 1991 it knew what to do with David Hahn: give him a badge and a pamphlet.

The cleanup is the experiment nobody plans. The most radioactive material in this story was never in a barrel. It was carried out of the shed by a frightened woman and put at the kerb with the trash, because the one adult who finally acted on the danger acted alone and in fear of losing her house. An experiment’s risk does not end when the experimenter stops. It ends when the material does, and that is the one part of the plan no one in this story wrote down, from the boy with the lead poncho to the agencies that measured the shed after the worst of it was gone.

Check the story before you learn from it. The Journal exists to recount other people’s experiments, and this one comes with a warning about recounting. Every number that circulates, the forty thousand neighbors, the thousand-times-background, the sixty thousand dollars, the hundred detectors, descends from one magazine article built on one long interview with a twenty-two-year-old sailor who had every reason to make the shed sound bigger than it was. The EPA’s own record confirms an address, a removal, and thirty-nine drums; it has never confirmed a dose. Retellings have since turned one hot vegetable can into “nearly every object in the shed,” a removal action into a Superfund site, and a neutron source into a reactor. The lessons above survive that correction. The legend does not, quite.

David’s own verdict, offered in 1998, was modest and, as far as the physics goes, probably true: there was no critical pile, and some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent. In the same conversation he said what he had really wanted. “I wanted to make a scratch in life.” He made one. It is in the EPA’s database, at a street address in Commerce Township, under a name that is not his.

Sources

• Ken Silverstein, “The Radioactive Boy Scout,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1998. The original account, built on five hours of interviews with Hahn and on interviews with his family, neighbors, Scout leaders, police and state officials, with police and EPA documents quoted. Nearly every detail of the methods, materials and letters comes from here, by way of Hahn himself. harpers.org
• Ken Silverstein, The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor, Random House, 2004.
• Ken Silverstein, “Radioactive Hysteria: G-men raid home, seize smoke detectors,” Harper’s, August 6, 2007, on the 2007 arrest. harpers.org
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, site record for the Union Lake Radiation Site, EPA ID MI0001091214, Commerce Township, Michigan: a removal action, not a National Priorities List site.
• Michael Edmiston and Jack Uretsky, discussion of the physics of the account on the PHYS-L physics-teachers list, January 2006. phys-l.org
• Tim Rauschenberger, review of the book, Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 2004. csmonitor.com
• Janet Stemwedel, “Book review: The Radioactive Boy Scout,” Scientific American blogs, July 31, 2012. scientificamerican.com
• Tom Clynes, “The Boy Who Played With Fusion,” Popular Science, February 14, 2012, on Taylor Wilson. popsci.com
• Health Physics Society, “Ask the Experts,” on the americium in smoke detectors, and the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Health Physics Museum on thorium lantern mantles and the NRC’s 2001 review of consumer-product exemptions. hps.org, orau.org
• Associated Press reports of August 4 and October 4, 2007, on the arrest and sentencing, and World Nuclear News, August 3, 2007. world-nuclear-news.org
• Ars Technica, November 14, 2016 and March 14, 2017, on Hahn’s death and his father’s account of it. arstechnica.com
• Wasik Funeral Home, obituary of David Charles Hahn, 2016.