The Radioactive Boy Scout
Rated • 184 reviews • bizarre • dangerouslaboratories.org
This is an incredible account - maybe it is a "thinly disguised how-to guide" as one reviewer says, or maybe it is an incredible tale of how some people just rise to a savant-like level when something grabs them, and maybe it is just bullshit.
"David held a series of after-school jobs at fast-food joints, grocery stores and furniture warehouses, but work was merely a means of financing his experiments. Never an enthusiastic student, he fell behind in school, scoring poorly on state math and reading tests (he did, however, ace the test in science).
Wanting radium for a new gun, David began visiting junkyards and antique stores in search of radium-coated clocks. He'd chip paint from them and collect it.
It was slow going until one day, while driving through Clinton Township, he says he came across an old table clock in an antique shop. In the hack of the clock he discovered a vial of radium paint. He bought the clock for $10.
Next he concentrated the the radium and dried it into a salt form. Whether he fully realized it or not, he was putting himself in danger.
The NRC's Erb had told him that "nothing produces neutrons from alpha reactions as well as beryllium." David says he had a friend swipe a strip of beryllium from a chemistry lab, then placed it in front of the lead block that held the radium. His cute little americium gun was now a more powerful radium gun.
David had located some pitchblende, an ore containing tiny amounts of uranium, and pulverized it with a hammer. He aimed the gun at the powder, hoping to produce at least some fissionable atoms. It didn't work. The neutron particles, the bullets in his gun, were moving too fast.
To slow them down, he added a filter, then targeted his gun again. This time the uranium powder appeared to grow more radioactive by the day."
