Saturday, April 3, 2021

Building a Breeder Reactor at Home

I watched this video about a teenager who built a functioning breeder reactor in the garden shed.  Eventually it became a Superfund site.  He served on the USS Enterprise but not in the reactor section.  Tragic ending.  Like many really brilliant people (such as my older brother) he eventually had a schizophrenic breakdown and died young of an alcohol Fentanyl mixture. Still fascinating what a smart kid who was a terrible student could do: making plutonium at home.  There is enough detail there to make a truly scary YouTube video.


  1. Great discussion of this at Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World podcast.

  2. Not functioning. He really didn't know what he was doing.

    YOu can read the story: The Radioactive Boy Scout" for details. But basically he collected radioactive stuff (americium from smoke detectors and old radium watch hands) and never got anything to fission nor transmute. He simply ued the wromg materials...He did concetrate his sources enough to require a cleanup, however.

    1. This is the story I remember. If the Pravda now is that he was actually making a functional breeder reactor, it's as bad a story as Inherit the Wind, which told the story backwards, and now that story is the accepted history.

  3. Yep - it's fiction. Nobody is going to build a functioning reactor, much less a breeder, in a shed. It takes a lot of uranium to make any reactor, for a start.