Home chemistry

Another day of relentless downpour, SO - here's a book my son has gone to some trouble and expense to acquire; it's quite hard to find and it was dispatched from California.
Since he has a degree in chemistry you might think it was a curious object of desire, being an outdated do-it-yourself chemistry book for youngsters.
Published in 1960, the manual provides illustrated instructions for 200 experiments and offers advice on how to set up a home laboratory.
And thereby hangs a tale.

In 1990 a 10-year old schoolboy in Michigan, David Hahn, was given a copy of this book and as a result chemistry became his passion. He spent all his available time in a shed, sometimes causing explosions. His father, concerned, set him the challenge instead of becoming an Eagle Scout which required 19 merit badges. At 14 he had gained a merit badge in Atomic Energy (!) and he set his sights on greater things.

Four years later police were alerted to a young man's suspicious behaviour and searched his car. What they discovered there  triggered a full-scale Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan.  The shed was found to contain radioactive contamination  up to 1000 times the normal levels of background radiation and was deemed to present an imminent danger to public health.
"After the moon-suited workers dismantled the shed, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed barrels that were trucked to the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were entombed with other radioactive debris."

David had been building a nuclear breeder reactor. Using a variety of cunning schemes and scams he had managed to get hold of materials such as radium, pitchblende, beryllium, thorium and americum and in using them exposed himself to harmful levels of radioactivity.

The story did not end there. David joined the Navy after the denouement of his experiment (and was assigned to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier..)
In 2007 he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors - which he knew to be a source of a radioactive isotope.

He was given a brief custodial sentence but more concern was aroused by the state of his face following the radioactive exposure he had experienced.

The full story of 'the radioactive boy scout' is here, and there is a book too.

After David Hahn's first brush with authority The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments was withdrawn from libraries and bookshops in the United States and placed on the 'Banned' list.  And now here it is in my kitchen!

I will be away from home for the next couple of days so I won't be commenting much, if at all,  although I'll try to keep the blips going.