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[Phys-L] Re: Stories from Harpers: Radioactive Boyscout



I believe this is a story that has enough true stuff to make you buy it,
but the overall nuclear science is way off.

Let's go down through it...

Does such a place as Pinto Drive, near a golf course, in Commerce
Township, Michigan exist? Yes. It took me about 15 minutes to find it,
but you can find it faster now that I found it. Call up Google Earth,
choose "Fly To" and type in the coordinates like this...

42 35 31.32 N, 83 27 22.51 W

and you will be taken right to the intersection of Pinto Drive and
Commerce Road, and just south of it is the Edgewood Country Club golf
course. I can't confirm it is called "Golf Manor" but the
high-resolution satellite photo shows a nice subdivision that could
easily be described just as author Ken Silverstein described it. But
that doesn't make the physics correct.

Does anyone know anything about Donald Erb and the US Dept of Energy?
There is a Donald Erb who is a well known musician/composer, and I have
actually met him. But I can't find anything about a Donald Erb that
works in nuclear energy or isotopes, etc. Every Google reference I find
is tied to the "radioactive boyscout." Maybe he's real but is in
hiding?

David Hahn bought a geiger detector kit from a place in Scottsdale,
Arizona? Yeah, could be. For example Electronic Goldmine in Scottsdale
has sold detector kits as well as GM tubes. But... "It was slow going
until one day, driving through Clinton Township to visit his girlfriend,
Heather, he noticed that his Geiger counter went wild as he passed
Gloria's Resale Boutique/Antique. The proprietor, Gloria Genette, still
recalls the day when she was called at home by a store employee who said
that a polite young man was anxious to buy an old table clock with a
tinted green dial but wondered if she'd come down in price. She would.
David bought the clock for $10. Inside he discovered a vial of radium
paint left behind by a worker either accidentally or as a courtesy so
that the clock's owner could touch up the dial when it began to fade."

Glorias RB/A exists, according to a Google listing, but David's
car-mounted Geiger detector "went wild" when he drove by? And he found
a vial of radium paint left inside an old clock? Radium watch-dial
paint is zinc sulfide scintillator irradiated by a radium salt. Let's
suppose there was such a vial and it contained 0.1 gram of radium. As
the radium decays to radon to polonium to lead to bismuth, etc. a
secular equilibrium is established. Almost all the radiation is alpha
or beta except the 214-Pb to 214-Bi and 214-Bi to 214-Po decays do emit
gammas. It is these gammas that I (and others) use to detect radon in
peoples' homes. Obviously David wouldn't have detected the alphas and
betas through the building, air, and his car. But the gammas, although
low energy, could conceivably be detected with the geiger tube. If
there was 0.1 gram of radium, that would be 0.1 Ci of radioactivity or
about 3.7x10^9 decays per second. Three gammas are emitted by 214-Pb
decay and three more by 214-Bi decay, but none of these are emitted 100%
of the time. Especially, the higher-energy gammas are not prevalent.
Anyway, we would have roughly 4x10^9 gammas distributed over a sphere of
area (4pi)r^2. The kind of GM-tube available in kits is roughly 2 cm by
3 cm cross-section at best (depending on how it was aimed relative to
the source) giving an area of (0.02m x 0.03m) = 6x10^-4 m^2. What was
the distance from his car on the street to the clock in the antique
shop? Ten meters? (4pi)r^2 at ten meters would be 1.26x10^3 m^2 and
this means at best the gammas hitting his detector would be a fraction
equal to 4.77x10-7, so he might have had about 4E9/4E-7 gammas hitting
his GM tube. Note that this does not take into account any attenuation
of these low-energy gammas by the walls of the building and the frame of
his car. A GM-tube is only about 1% efficient for gamma, so 1% of the
100/s hitting the tube would be detected, or about 1 count per second.
Not much above background, and if you are listening to the click as
background come in, they can cluster and often sound faster than one a
second followed by time gaps. And of course he was "driving by."

His detector went wild? Give me a break! And by the way, it would do
no good to provide a vial of paint to replenish the dial if it faded,
because radium-painted dials fade because of radiation damage to the ZnS
structure, so the vial of paint would fade the same as the clock face.
There would be absolutely no point in providing a vial of paint to use
when the paint faded. Besides, radium was rare and the paint would have
been too expensive to leave in clocks. If indeed there was such a vial,
it would have to have been left accidentally, which doesn't seem likely.
What would it be doing in the back of the clock case? Rather, it would
be out on the table where the painter was painting. And David certainly
did not detect it while he was driving by with a car-mounted GM
detector. This story has to be a complete fabrication.

How about the 241-Am from smoke detectors? "David contacted
smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a large number of
the devices for a school project. One company agreed to sell him about a
hundred broken detectors for a dollar apiece." Assuming a company would
be stupid enough to sell someone 100 broken detectors, you can make
about 5000 detectors from a gram of americium oxide. 100 detectors
would contain about 20 mg of americium oxide. Typically a thin source
is made by thermally diffusing the radionuclide onto/into a smooth metal
surface. I've made sources this way. Getting it diffused in is fairly
easy. Getting it back out? Forget it. You'd have to dissolve it off
then do microscale chemical purification.

In grad school I paid $200 for 20 mg of an oxide of a separated stable
isotope that needed to be reduced to metal and formed into a foil to use
as a target in a cyclotron beam. I stared into the glass vial
containing the miniscule 20 mg and I thought "How in the hell am I going
to do chemistry on something so small and get any recovery, let alone
enough to make a target. Fortunately there was a target-fabrication
expert who did it for me using some very sophisticated vacuum equipment.
But David separated or concentrated or purified (or whatever) about 20
mg of 214-Am from 100 smoke detectors using a blowtorch? No he didn't.
This is pure fabrication. If he did get some number of detectors and
remove the americium and heat it or dissolve or whatever, that could
indeed produce contamination detectable with good equipment, so it is
feasible that he made somewhat of a radioactive mess in a shed, and it
might have needed to be cleaned up. But that's nothing approaching a
reactor. And the story of his methods is crazy.

Beryllium is highly, highly toxic. It's manufactured and worked with in
special factories with air purification systems where employees go
through air locks and change clothes when entering/leaving. You can
indeed buy a 1" by 1" foil 0.1 mm thick for about $200. But David
swiped some from the chemistry department of a community college? I
don't think so. What would a community college be doing with beryllium?
Bluffton is a four-year small university offering a bachelors degree in
chemistry. We don't have any beryllium or beryllium compounds in our
chemistry building, would never use them in student labs, and we have no
intention of ever buying any. This has to be another fabrication.

I could keep going, but I've wasted enough of my Saturday on this. The
Harper's article and the book do exist. The author might be relating
the story as told to him by a real David Hahn. If so, Jack Uretsky is
correct... this is like the student who claimed to have been
investigated by the FBI. It's a fabrication. The student might have
disassembled some smoke detectors, might have scraped some radium paint
off a few old watches (which by the way are usually collectors items and
hard to come by), and he might have managed to get some thorium lantern
mantles. He might have gotten enough of this stuff and screwed around
with it enough to contaminate a small shed enough that it needed to be
cleaned up. But a reactor? No way. And the narration as we have it
has a lot of statements that can't be true.

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu
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