Looking around at different stuff on the how stuff works website and ran across a link to this article: The radioactive boy scout: when a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor. Now I've tried quite hard to link this with it's supossed source on Harper's Magazine and havn't been able to tie it. But that's not why I'm writing.

Over the years I've studied quite a bit of chemistry, atomic theory, etc, and come to know quite a few things. And based on what they talk about in the article, I can't see any reason why the described method wouldn't work. I mean, a radium paint radiation source, acting upon the thorium and uranium targets though a neutron converter would definately create bigger isotopes. And I've known about the radioactive isotopes in smoke detectors for ages now. I mean, how better to build a smoke detector than to use ionizing radiation in conjunction with an electron source. Heck, I've even developed schematics for a geiger counter based on the reverse smoke detector effect (i.e. trapping smoke in a chamber, placing two plates in the chamber, electrifying the plates, and then measuring the current flow through the smoke junction.

What bothers me though, is that the article inadvertantly contains enough technical information to build your own makeshift breeder reactor. I'm lazy, and don't have the attention span required to build a crystal radio, but someone with a bit more motivation could easily use the instructions to build their own reactor. The boy in the article really only needed three things to get started, the radium paint, the thorium from the lantern covers, and the lithium from the batteries. The remaining components are freely availible (Beakers, bunsen burners, aluminum foil) from places like Hobby Lobby and Safeway. All of the other stuff he used where "the things that didn't work." A person who would want to irradiate a place could take the direct route to his final result and bypass all of the steps that he took in the middle and go straight to a breeder reactor. Which is a wonderfull way of killing and maiming hundreds. Just invision making several of these devices (Which at the start are only mildly radioactive), and then placing them about a neighborhood. As the breeder converted more and more of the thorium into U-233, the amount of radiation in the area would grow enourmously.

But heck, am I any better? I provided a link to the directions, and then suggested a way to use it as a weapon of terror... It's actually kind of concerning to even consider the ramifications of this kind of thing.




- posted by Jim The Cactus @ 1/09/2004 09:00:01 PM | Permalink | (1) Comments. Add your own!