[rally]

The book "The Radioactive Boy Scout" tells how David Hahn constructed his own breeder reactor as a teenager in his mother's garden shed !

Its fascinating reading if you can still find in a library.

The amazing thing is he was not only able to find out how to source his raw materials from ordinary places - Americium from old smoke detectors, Thorium from stock damaged gas lantern mantels which he ingeniously refined, but that the regulatory authorities and universities actually provided him with a lot of the information on how to do it !
He sent many letters to various people under various false names and guises, these letters were full of typos and poor grammar but were still replied to.

A very quick outline

The Americium produced alpha rays which when bombarded into Aluminium produced neutrons which in turn when bombarded the Thorium produced Uranium - but his Neutron gun wasn't powerful enough.

So he then used Radium from the paint used to illuminate old clock dials and refined it for his Alpha Ray source and used a piece of more efficient Beryllium as the target and now directed his fully functioning neutron gun at some Pitchblende ore (contains small amounts of Uranium) he had managed to get.

This was now becoming more radioactive by the day.

He then decided to make a Breeder Reactor and combined all of this Radium, Americium, Beryllium and Aluminum into an aluminium foil wrapped reactor core and surrounded this core with the Thorium and Uranium wrapped up in little foil packages and held together with duct tape and a blanket !

His Breeder Reactor worked.

By this stage his Gieger counter was detecting radiation half a suburban block away so he thought he better break it down into smaller pieces and take it away and got caught by the police only because there was report of a teenager stealing car tyres and he was driving around in the early hours of the morning.

The guys in moon suits came as part of a Radiation Response emergency and dismantled his now highly contaminated 'nuclear laboratory' which consisted of nothing much more than few old pots and pans and a milk crate in a small potting shed - total value probably $2.00 !

He was not charged and went to the Navy on a Sub, where he apparently wasnt allowed near the reactors.

Its worth reading.

Rally

Oops I now see Terry already posted a Wikipedia link for David Hahn - sorry