David Hahn was an ordinary American teenager who went to extraordinary lengths to obtain his boy scout badge – he built a nuclear reactor in his back yard.
There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that’s exactly what chemistry is: FINDING OUTABOUT THINGS—finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Every thing! (The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments)
Golf Manor is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, the kind of place where people five precisely because it is more than 25 miles outside Detroit and all the complications attendant on that city. The kind of place where money buys a bit more land, perhaps a second bathroom, and so reassures residents that they’re safely in the bosom of the middle class. Every element of Golf Manor invokes one form of security or another, beginning with the name of the suburb itself – taken from the 18-hole course at its entrance — and the community in which it is nestled, Commerce Township. The houses and trees are both old and varied enough to make Golf Manor neighborhood than a suburb, and the few features that do convey suburbia- a sign at the entrance saying, “We have many children but none to spare. Please drive carefully” — have a certain Back to the Future charm. Most Golf Manor residents remain there until they die, and then they are replaced by young couples with kids. In short, it is the kind of place where on a typical day, the only thing lurking around the comer is a Mister Softee ice cream van.
但1995年6月26日，不是典型的一天。问dottie pease。当她拒绝了Pinto Drive时，Pease看到了11名男子在她精心修剪的草坪上蜂拥而至。他们的注意力似乎集中在大型木制灌封棚上，依靠链节围栏将她的财产分成邻居的围栏。三个男人们曾经有过通风的月亮套装，并继续用电锯拆除灌封棚，像木头一样填充到大型钢桶中，以放射性的警告标志为主。暂停从未注意到隔壁房子的普通中的任何东西。
一个中年夫妇迈克尔Polasek和Patty Hahn，住在那里。在一些周末，他们被帕蒂的十几岁儿子大卫加入。然而，由于一群神经邻居蜷缩在一起，请暂时听到一个晚上醒来的一个居民声称，看看令人兴奋的棚子发光。“我很令人不安，”召回召回。“我打电话给我的丈夫。我说，Da-a-ve，有趣的西装有男人在这里走出去。你必须做点什么。“
What the men in the funny suits found was that the potting shed was dangerously irradiated and that the area’s 40,000 residents could be at risk. Publicly, the met in white promised the residents of Golf Manor that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) invaded their neighborhood. When asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who tried to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother’s potting shed as part of a boy scout merit-badge project.
大卫的故事似乎是值得注意的，但在FPA拒绝发出大卫的名字时，虽然一些当地记者了解它，但他和任何家庭成员都不同意接受采访。即使是联邦和州官员宣传清理的只是学会了一小部分发生的事情。然后，在1996年，Jay Gourley是华盛顿特区自然资源新闻服务的通讯员，遇到了一个关于案件的小型报纸项目，并联系了大卫哈恩。柯利后来通过了对我的研究，我随后采访了这个故事的主角，包括大卫 - 现在，弗吉尼亚诺福克的一个22岁的水手驻扎在诺福克。
I met David in the hope of making sense not only of his experiments but of him. The archetypal American suburban boy learns how to hit a fade-away jump shot, change a car’s oil, perform minor carpentry feats. If he’s a boy scout he masters the art of starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and if he’s a typical adolescent pyro, he transforms tennis-ball cans into cannons. David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with the crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor. then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.
我已经看到了大卫的童年照片，他看起来完全正常，甚至天使，金发和榛子的眼睛，而且他长大了，巨石四肢和桃子模糊胡子。尽管如此，当我去诺福克去见他时，我期待了一些辉煌或痴迷的身体表现。但我所看到的只是在图片中的清洁小孩的甜菜版本。虽然礼貌，大卫的方式奇怪地看跌，直到我们开始讨论他的核冒险。然后，持续五个小时，照明浅谈卷烟，以强调，大卫热衷于他的后院实验室劳动。他告诉我，他如何使用咖啡过滤器和泡菜罐来处理镭和硝酸等致命物质，并且他泄露了他所用的各种封面和别名获得放射性物质。害羞和与绘制的少年，大卫对他的项目唯一的几个朋友，永远不要让任何人见证他的实验。他的育种者反应器保护是一种手段 - 尽管逃离青春期的创伤一致。
In The Making of The Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes notes that the Psychological profiles of pioneering American physicists are remarkably similar. Frequently the eldest son of an emotionally remote, professional man, he – almost all were men – was a voracious reader during childhood, tended to feel lonely and was shy and aloof from Classmates.(Tie Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments)
David’s parents, Ken and Patty Hahn divorced when he was a toddler. Ken is an automotive engineer for General Motors, as is his second wife, Kathy Missig. David lived with his father and stepmother in suburban Clinton Township, about 30 miles north of Detroit. Ken Hahn worked extraordinarily long hours. With close-cropped hair and a proclivity for short-sleeved dress shirts, Ken radiates a coolness that, combined with his constant preoccupation, must have been confounding to a child. Yet for all his starchiness, it was Kathy who was David’s chief disciplinarian.
David spent weekends and holidays with his mother and her boyfriend, Michael Polasek, an amiable but hard-drinking retired fork-lift operator. Golf Manor is demographically similar to Clinton Township, but the two households could not have been more different emotionally. Patty Hahn committed suicide in the house in 1996, but Michael still lives there surrounded by pictures of her. He keeps five cats and a spotless household, and looks like a member of the retro rock Sha Na Na.
Despite the fact that David was shuffled between households, his early years were seemingly ordinary. He played baseball and soccer, and joined the boy scouts. An abrupt change came at the age of 10, when Kathy’s father, also an engineer for GM, gave David The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. The book promised to open doors to a brave new world and offered instructions on how to set up a home laboratory. David swiftly became immersed and by the age of 12 was digesting his father’s college chemistry textbooks without difficulty. When he spent the night at Golf Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the living-room floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
在他父亲的房子里，大卫在他的小卧室里设立了一个实验室。他买了烧杯，Bunsen燃烧器，试管，以及常见于儿童化学集中的其他物品。但是，大卫尚未进行典型的青少年实验。到14岁，他曾制造过硝酸甘油。
大卫的父母钦佩他对科学的兴趣，但被垃圾和爆炸般的爆炸们令人震惊，这是哈恩家庭的常规活动。大卫摧毁了他的卧室后，墙壁被痘，地毯沾沾自喜地说，它必须被撕掉 - 肯和凯西让他的实验放在地下室。
这是大卫。科学让他escape into something he was a success at, while sublimating a teenager’s sense of failure, anger and embarrassment into some really big explosions. 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 and always a horrific speller, David fell behind in school. During his junior year at Chippewa Valley High School—at a time when he was secretly conducting nuclear experiments in his back yard—he nearly failed state math and reading tests required for graduation (though he aced the test in science). His scientific preoccupation left less and less time for friends, though throughout much of high school he did have a girlfriend, Heather Beaudette, three years his junior. Heather says he was sweet and caring but not always the perfect date. Heather’s mom, Donna Beaudette, puts it this way: “He was a nice kid and always presentable, but [in the days before her second wedding] we had to tell him not to talk to anybody. He could eat and drink but, for God’s sake, don’t talk to the guests about the food’s chemical composition.”
Not even his scout troop was spared David’s scientific enthusiasm. He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning. One summer, he was expelled from scout camp when he stole a number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his experiments.
Up to this point the most illicit of David’s concoctions were fireworks and moonshine. But, convinced that David’s experiments and erratic behavior were signs that he was making and selling drugs, Ken and Kathy began to spot-check the public library, where David told them he studied. Invariably he would be there as promised, surrounded by a huge pile of chemistry books. But Ken and Kathy were not assuaged, and, worried that he would level their home, they prohibited David from being there alone. Kathy began routinely searching David’s room and disposing of any chemicals and equipment she found hidden under the bed and deep within the closet. David was not deterred. One night, as Ken and Kathy were sitting in the living room watching TV, the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it. He was rushed to hospital to have his eyes flushed, and even months later had to make regular trips to an ophthalmologist to have pieces of the plastic phosphorus container plucked from his eyes.
然后凯西禁止大卫在家里试验。所以他将他的行动基础转向他的母亲在高尔夫庄园棚子。Patty Hahn和Michael Polasek都赞赏David在他在新实验室中度过的无尽的工作时间，但他们都没有想到他的想法。
很少有人遵守他在做什么。在大学里采取化学课程的Ken Hahn可以追随大卫告诉他的一些东西，但以为他夸大了关注。“我从来没有看到他在黑暗中变成绿色或发光，”他说。“我可能太容易了。”
It probably didn’t feel that way to David. Although Ken is immensely proud of David’s experiments now that they have a certain notoriety, at the time they represented a breakdown in discipline. As fathers are wont to do, Ken felt the solution lay in a goal that he didn’t himself achieve as a child — Eagle scout. As teenagers are wont to do, David subverted that goal.
In addition to showing “scout spirit,” Eagle Scouts must earn 21 merit badges. Eleven are mandatory, such as first aid and citizenship in the community. The final 10 are optional; scouts can choose from dozens of choices, ranging from American business to woodwork. David elected to earn a merit badge in atomic energy. His scoutmaster, Joe Auito, says he’s the only boy to have done so in the history of Clinton Township Troop 371. David’s atomic-energy merit-badge pamphlet was brazenly pro-nuclear, which is no surprise since it was prepared with the help of Westinghouse Electric, the American Nuclear Society, and the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group of utility companies, some of which run nuclear power plants.
David was awarded his atomic-energy merit badge on May 10, 1991, five months shy of his 15th birthday. To earn it he made a drawing showing how nuclear fission occurs, visited a hospital radiology unit to learn about the medical uses of radioisotopes (radioactive elements that disintegrate and emit other particles and energy), and built a model reactor using a juice can, coat hangers, soda straws, kitchen matches and rubber bands. By now, though, he had far grander ambitions. As Auito’s wife and troop treasurer, Barbara, recalls, “The typical kid [working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor’s office and asked about the x-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor.”
什么是饲养员反应堆？这种简单的描述来自于从能源部获得的大卫（DOE）：“想象一下，你有车并开始长途驾驶。当你开始时，你有一半的气体。当你回家时，你的油箱已经满了。饲养员反应堆就像这个魔术车。饲养反应器不仅产生电力，而且还产生新的燃料。“
所有反应器，常规和育种者，依赖于天然放射性元素的临界桩 - 通常是铀-335或钚-239 - 作为持续的反应链的“燃料”称为裂变。核工业用来吹嘘育种者作为国家能源需求的神奇解决方案。1961年，政府在爱达荷的测试网站上开设了两位实验育种者。在1963年的大型粉丝中，底特律爱迪生开设了全国第一，唯一的商业育种饲养厂。以下十年，国会为田纳西州的Clinch River饲养反应堆拨款数十亿美元。希望在尼克松年的原子能委员会主席Glenn Seaborg跑得很高，预测育种者将成为新兴核经济的骨干，钚可能是廉政行合者，以替代金币作为我们货币体系的标准。“
这种乐观主义被证明是无人物的。第一个爱达荷州饲养员必须在遭受部分核心崩溃后关闭;第二种饲养员产生电，但没有新的燃料。Fermi Plant - 距离克林顿镇仅有60英里 - 受到机械问题，事故和预算超支的困扰。1966年，在冷却系统发生故障后，植物的核心遭受了部分崩溃;六年后，它被永久关闭。
如果他知道这些挫折大卫并没有阻止。His inspiration came from the nuclear pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Antoine Henri Becquerel, the French physicist who, along with Pierre and Marie Curie, received the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1903 for discovering radioactivity; Frederic and Irene Joliet-Curie, who received the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1935 for producing the first artificial radioisotope; Sir James Chadwick, who won the Nobel prize in physics the same year for discovering the neutron; and Enrico Fermi, who created the world’s first sustainable nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step leading to the production of atomic energy and atomic bombs. Unlike his predecessors, however, David did not have vast financial support from the state, no laboratory save for a musty potting shed, no proper instruments or safety devices, and, by far his chief impediment, no legal means of obtaining radioactive materials. To get round this last obstacle, David utilized a number of cover stories and concocted identities, plus a Geiger counter kit he ordered from a mail-order house in Scottsdale, Arizona, which he assembled and mounted to the dashboard of his burgundy Pontiac 6000.
大卫没有想到这个主意,试图构建一个信徒eder reactor when he began his nuclear experiments at the age of 15, but, in a step down that path, he was already determined to “irradiate anything” he could. To do that he tried to build a “gun” that could bombard isotopes with neutrons. He wrote to a number of groups listed in his merit badge pamphlet — the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the American Nuclear Society, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Atomic Industrial Forum, the nuclear-power industry’s trade group — in the hope of discovering how he might obtain, from both natural and commercial sources, the radioactive raw materials he needed to build his neutron gun. By writing up to 20 letters a day and claiming to be a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School, David says that he obtained “tons” of information from these groups, though none proved to be more helpful than the NRC. The agency’s director of isotope production and distribution offered him tips on isolating certain radioactive elements, and imparted a piece of information that would prove to be vital to his plans: “Nothing produces neutrons as well as beryllium. “When David asked about the risks posed by such materials, the official assured “Professor Hahn” that the “real dangers are very slight, “since possession” of any radioactive materials in quantities and forms sufficient to pose any hazard is subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or equivalent) licensing.”
The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not fiery helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff… But curiously tide has been said about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely, “How difficult Are these things to manufacture?”(George Orwell, You and the Atom Bomb, 1945)
Armed with information from his friends in government and industry David typed up a list of sources for 14 radioactive isotopes. Americium-241, he learnt from the boy scout atomic-energy pamphlet, could be found in smoke detectors; radium-226 in antique luminous dial clocks; uranium-238 and uranium-235 in a black ore called pitchblende; and thorium-232 in gas lanterns.
为了获得Americium-241，David联系了烟雾探测器公司，并声称他需要大量的学校项目设备。一家公司同意为美元销售约100个破碎的探测器。大卫不确定美洲 - 241所在的地方，所以他写到伊利诺伊州奥罗拉的Brk Electronics。一个名叫Beth Weber的客户服务代表回来说她很乐意帮忙。她解释说，每个探测器只包含一小千张美的americ-241，它密封在金色矩阵中，我留在韦伯的尖端中，大卫提取了美洲组件，然后用喷孔焊接它们。
很快，他的中子枪，原油但有效，他准备好照射。他本可以集中精力转变以前的非放射性因素，而是在决定中，这表明他的个性和工具到他后来试图建立一个育种反应堆，他想用射击放射性机会来增加制造它们的机会可变。他认为铀-335用于原子武器，将提供“最大的反应”。他写信给捷克斯洛伐克公司，将铀卖给商业和大学买家。声称成为核研究实验室的购买材料教授，他获得了少量黑色矿石样品 - 两种纤维素或二氧化铀，两者含有少量铀-235和铀-238。然而，他错误地体现了铀的溶解度，随后将他的注意力转向钍-232，这是一个具有非常高的熔点的元素。由他的优秀徽章小册子和他父亲的化学书籍辅助，他找到了一种纯化钍的方法，至少9000倍，所发现的水平和需要NRC许可的水平的170倍。
接下来，大卫开始为改进的照射枪准备镭，并开始访问垃圾场和古董商店，寻找覆盖覆盖的仪表板或钟表。一旦他找到这样的物品，他就会从仪器中涂上芯片，并在丸小瓶中收集它。直到，有一天，通过克林顿乡驾驶才能探望他的女朋友，希瑟，他注意到他所注意到他通过格洛丽亚的转售精品/古董而疯狂地疯狂。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 found a vial of radium paint leftbehind 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.
To concentrate the radium, David secured a sample of barium sulfate from the Fray ward at a local hospital (staff there handed over the substance because they remembered him from his merit-badge project) and heated it until it liquefied. Whether David realized it or not, by handling purified radium he was truly himself in danger. Nevertheless, he proceeded to acquire another neutron emitter to replace the aluminum used in his previous neutron gun. His cute little americium gun was now a more powerful radium gun. David began to bombard his thorium and uranium powders in the hope of producing at least some fissionable atoms. He measured the results with his Geiger counter, but while the thorium seemed to grow more radioactive, the uranium remained a disappointment.
再一次，“哈恩教授”跳上行动，写信给他在NRC的老朋友讨论这个问题。NRC有答案。大卫的中子对铀的中子太“快”。
He would have to slow them down using a filter of water, deuterium, or tritium. Water would have sufficed, but David liked a challenge. Consulting his list of commercially available radioactive sources, he discovered that tritium, a radioactive material used to boost the power of nuclear weapons, is found in glow-in the-dark gun and bow sights, which David promptly bought from sporting goods stores and mail-order catalogues. When he had enough, he smeared the substance over the beryllium strip and targeted the gun at uranium powder. He monitored the results with his Geiger counter over several weeks, and it appeared that the powder was growing more radioactive by the day.
现在17，大卫袭击了建设模型饲养反应堆的想法。
His blueprint was a schematic of a chequerboard breeder reactor he’d seen in one of his father’s college textbooks. Ignoring any thought of safety, David took the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead casings to form makeshift “core” for his reactor. He monitored his “breeder reactors” at the Golf Manor laboratory with his Geiger counter. “It was radioactive as heck,” he says.
Finally, David, whose safety precautions had thus far consisted of wearing a makeshift lead poncho and throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes following a session in the potting shed, began to realize that, sustained reaction or not, he could be putting himself and others in danger. When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors down from his mother’s house, he decided he had “too much radioactive stuff in one place” and began to disassemble the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets a shoe box that he hid in his mother’s house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac 6000.
废物处理。如果你可以直接将废物直接倾倒进入厨房流失（不进入水槽），你还是对的。如果没有，请将其收集到塑料桶中，以在完成后抛出。(The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments)
1994年8月31日上午2:40，克林顿乡警方致电有关一名年轻人在住宅区发现的年轻人的呼吁，显然是从汽车偷走轮胎。当警察到达时，大卫告诉他们他在等着见面。令人难以置信，官员决定搜索他的车。当他们打开靴子时，他们发现了一个带有挂锁的工具箱，并用管道胶带密封。靴子还包含超过50个神秘灰色粉末，小盘和圆柱形金属物体，灯笼，汞开关，时钟面，矿石，烟花，真空管和什锦的化学品和酸的套管包裹多维套管。该警察由工具箱特别震惊，大卫警告他们是放射性的，他们担心是一个原子弹。
For reasons that are hard to fathom, Sergeant Joseph Mertes, one of the arresting officers, ordered the car, containing what he noted in Lois report to be “a potential improvised explosive device,” to be towed to police headquarters. “It probably shouldn’t have been done, but we thought the car had been used in the commission of a crime,” Police Chief Al Ernst now says sheepishly.
The police called in the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad to examine the Pontiac, and the State Department of Public Health (DPH) to supply radiological assistance. The good news, the two teams discovered, was that David’s toolbox was not an atomic bomb. The bad news was that David’s trunk did contain radioactive materials, including concentrations of thorium — “not found in nature, at least not in Michigan” — and americium. That discovery automatically triggered the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state officials soon were embroiled in tense phone consultations with the DOE, EPA, FBI and NRC.
With the police, David was largely uncooperative. He provided his father’s address but didn’t mention his mother’s house or his potting-shed laboratory. It wasn’t until Thanksgiving Day that Dave Minnaar, a DPH radiological expert, finally interviewed David. David told Minnaar that he had been trying to make thorium in a form he could use to produce energy and he hoped “his successes would help him earn his Eagle Scout status” David also admitted to having a back-yard laboratory.
11月29日，国家放射专家调查了灌封棚。他们发现铝饼盘，罐子，酸瓶杯，牛奶板条箱和其他材料围绕，其中大部分污染了随后的官方报告称为放射性物质的“过度水平”。But although Minnaar’s troops didn’t know it at the time, they conducted their survey long after David’s mother, alerted by Ken and Kathy and petrified that the government would take her home away as a result of her son’s experiments, had ransacked the shed and discarded most of what she found, including his neutron gun, the radium, pellets of thorium that were far more radioactive than what thehealth officials found, and several quarts of radioactive powder. “The funny thing is,” David now says, “they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff.”
After determining that no radioactive materials had leaked outside the shed, state authorities sealed it and petitioned the federal government for help. The NRC licenses nuclear plants and research facilities and deals with any nuclear accidents that take place at those sites. David’s, of course, was not an NRC-licensed operation, so it was determined that the EPA, which responds to emergencies involving lost or abandoned atomic materials, should be contacted for assistance.
环保局官员抵达高尔夫庄园1月25日1995, to conduct their own survey of the shed. Their “action memo” noted that conditions at the site “present an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health or welfare or the environment” and that there was “actual or potential exposure to nearby human populations, animals, or food chain.” A cleanup took place between July 26 and 28, 1995 at a cost of about $60,000. After the moon-suited workers dismantled the potting shed with electric saws, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed barrels placed aboard a semi-trailer bound for Envirocare, a dump facility located in the middle of the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David’s experiments were entombed along with tons of low-level radioactive debris from the government’s atomic-bomb factories, plutonium production facilities and contaminated industrial sites. Last May, I made the 90-mile drive from Detroit to Lansing, where Dave Minnaar works in a state environmental agency. Because Patty Hahn had cleaned out the shed before Minnaar’s men arrived on the scene, he never knew that David had built neutron guns or that he had obtained radium. Nor did he understand, until I told him, that the cubes of thorium powder found by the police were building blocks for a model breeder reactor. “These are conditions that regulatory agencies never envision,” says Minnaar. “It’s presumed that the average person wouldn’t have the technology or materials required to experiment in these areas.”
“真正的危险......是在这些元素的放射性属性中。（有些人）迁移到骨髓，只能辐射干扰红细胞的产生。不到1000百万克的克可能是致命的。“(From David’s notes)
David went into a serious depression after the federal authorities shut down his laboratory. Years of painstaking work had been thrown in the garbage or buried. Students at Chippewa Valley had taken to calling him “Radioactive Boy,” and when his girlfriend, Heather, sent him Valentine’s Day balloons at his high school, they were seized by the principal, who feared they had been inflated with chemical gases that David needed to continue his experiments. In a final indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit badge activities had endangered the community.
1995年秋季，肯和凯西要求大卫注册了Macomb Community College。他主修冶金，但跳过他的许多课程，并且在床上的大部分时间都花了很多日子，终于在他们的街区周围驾驶，肯和凯西给了他阿姨：加入武装部队或走出房子。他们叫当地招聘办公室，将代表送到他们的房子或几乎每天打电话，直到大卫终于发挥了。1997年完成了训练营后，他驻扎在核动力的USS企业航母运营商上。
Alas, David’s duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, he stays up studying topics that interest him — currently steroids, melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship’s eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer. Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a small, enclosed place is most worrisome of all.
返回1995年，EPA安排了大卫在附近的费米核电站进行全面检查。大卫，害怕他可能学到的东西，拒绝了。然而，现在，他展望未来。“我想在生活中划伤，”当我向他提出他的核查研究时，他解释道。“我还有时间。我不相信我休息了五年多的弱点。“
