9 ms·

“Radioactive Boy Scout” who tried to build a homemade nuclear reactor dead at 39

135 points by Jaruzel 10y ago

Jaruzel 10y ago
The saddest bit is at the end of the Harper's[1] article which I originally read when it was published: -- Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a relatively small, enclosed space is most worrisome of all. Back in 1995, the EPA arranged for David to undergo a full examination at the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant. David, fearful of what he might learn, refused. Now, though, he’s looking ahead. “I wanted to make a scratch in life,” he explains when I ask him about his early years of nuclear research. “I’ve still got time. I don’t believe I took more than five years off of my life.” -- [1] http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/ http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout...
- codezero 10y ago
  In this vein does anyone know if there are treatments for radiation poisoning that aren't purely palliative?
  - tehbeard 10y ago
    I do recall a few years back a drug being refereed to as real life version of Rad Away from the Fallout game series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad
    - centizen 10y ago
      From the sounds of it, it's more like Rad-X from the same games. (Rad-X increases your radiation resistance, RadAway removes radiation poisoning)
      - gohrt 10y ago
        I wonder how the game and its impact would be different if they refused to make RadAway part of the game.
  - centizen 10y ago
    Unfortunately, radiation poisoning is an often irreversible process - it involves the destruction of cells, muscle and tissue at a molecular level in a way that our bodies never were designed to be recover from. Majority of medical practices in this space focus on removing ingested or inhaled radioactive particles, to prevent further damage over time and keeping the patient alive and in relative comfort.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment for electricity. You mean UV damage to the eyes from being exposed to arcs or thermal explosions or shock to heart or RF burns or ... and radiation is the same. Also some of the stuff he did was questionable purely chemically. So ... boring holes in lead, you're at least washing your hands before eating, right? Or the feeling I get from this guy, no. Or his refining process involving lithium metal, interesting but not advisable. I wonder what the guys "banana equivalent dose" was. He didn't get that much material, at least as reported by the press. A thousand times nothing is still nothing unless the true story is more interesting. From what I can find an unmolested smoke detector is about a tenth of a BED/yr so the mere presence of a thousand detectors in one room, if you sit in it for the entire year, is about the same as eating 100 bananas in that year, which I probably do! If you're sloppy and it stays outside your body its about the same. Unless you inhale it. He accumulated more "stuff" than the NRC feels safe to give out unlicensed, but the NRC is pretty pessimistic so he should have survived. And seemed to have done so, unsurprisingly.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Yes, plenty. So what are they?
      - VLM 10y ago
        To start there's triage. Go away and come back for cancer screening every five years. Stay here and we treat you. You're toast here's some painkillers. In between there's a wide mix of removing the cause and repairing the damage. This almost seems too obvious but there's obvious recent surface decontamination, wash it off. A test tube in the lab shattered, well get it all off you first of all. Only a step past that, if you chug heavy water you'll be encouraged to drink tap water to pee out the heavy water. Likewise if you ate something contaminated an hour or a day ago they'll give you stuff to make your digestive system explode out both ends. I donno if they'd feed you an expectorant for inhalation. There's no point if the exposure was months ago of course. There are peculiar specific treatments if you've been recently exposed to iodine isotopes from a bomb or very major plant accident they can flood your system with zero radioactivity clean iodine to convince your body to pee out 99% of your intake rather than adsorbing 100% of the bad stuff into your thyroid. Its like reducing your exposure by a factor of 100 just by popping some pills. There are other isotopes like that I can't remember. If you were doing radioactive labeling experiments obviously they'd flood your body with unlabeled clean stuff to make you pee the glowing stuff out. If its a bone-seeker there are mineral chleation treatments that are very hard on the skeleton but you'll pee out those isotopes which is better than having them irradiate you from the inside for decades. If you wipe out your bone marrow you're screwed unless you get a bone marrow transplant. In the short term they could pump units of blood into you. This works better if there's one victim per hospital than if there's an entire Japanese city and the hospital was vaporized, which is why not too much was done along these lines at the end of WWII. Similar to the above paragraph if you wipe out your digestive tract alongside 100K neighbors there's not much the hospitals can do, but if it was an unfortunate lab accident, you might be kept alive via IV until recovery. If its a surface burn I'm not sure what they'd do WRT preventative skin cancer, maybe skin graft it on general principles or wait and watch and see if a tumor forms. Obviously there's antibiotic treatment.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
logfromblammo 10y ago
The article is woefully lacking by not answering the question that everyone who starts to read the article must have on their mind: was the cause of his death related to radiation exposure?
- lithos 10y ago
  Unless it kills quickly there's almost never a way to tell. It just comes down to a stat(istics) off between competing arguments. In this case with a one person test group.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
    > Unless it kills quickly there's almost never a way to tell. Well, if he was e.g. struck by lightning just before he died, then the odds that cause of death is related to exposure to radiation years ago go way down. The article sadly doesn't even give anything to go on, or even mention the omission of anything about cause of death.
    - quinndupont 10y ago
      Indeed, all we need to satisfy our curiosity is "he died from X" where X is not unknown.
- PaulKeeble 10y ago
  He could have been hit by a car or slipped on a banana. This is the sort of lazy news article that we all hate in the world, the implication without the actual presentation of the facts. Ars is a terrible source of news, this isn't their first offence.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    It's not entirely their fault. The linked obituary doesn't list a cause of death either.
    - 10y ago
Declanomous 10y ago
The lack of details in the obituary make me think he took his own life. Regardless of how he died, Hahn's story taught me it was possible to learn and build without the latest and greatest tools and equipment. His approach to safety was concerning (to say the least), and he stole a lot of the nuclear material he used, but I think it's important to realize that amazing work can be done without millions in funding. This is probably not a huge revelation for the field of computer science, as even a powerful computer can be bought for relatively little. However, it's easy to look at the equipment used in the physical sciences and think that you need the same equipment to make a meaningful contribution to science. A world of possibilities opens up once you have the idea that you can make the equipment you need to run the experiments yourself. One of the things I love about the internet is that we can share our experiments and hacks with each other. There are a lot of great YouTube channels that are spiritually aligned with mentality behind Hahn's reactor. I'd personally recommend Applied Science, as well as Cody's Lab, and I'd be interested in hearing about any channels that other people find interesting.
- tptacek 10y ago
  His story is very sad. He joined the Navy after an young adulthood set adrift after the suicide of his mother. He was discharged and diagnosed schizophrenic. Ten years ago, he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors, and the court proceedings implied he'd gone off his medications.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    I'd heard parts of that story. He reminds me of one of the people who I went to school with. We shared a lot of hobbies, but his antisocial and self-destructive tendencies meant that I never could really consider him a friend. He was incredibly smart and capable, but he always acted like he had something to prove. He was expelled from high school for hacking, which unlike a lot of "expelled for hacking" stories, was entirely legitimate. He was doing some pretty impressive exploits on the network computers, but then he was also downloading information he had no business possessing. I was interviewed by the FBI about it, because I was president of the cs club, and he had been using our computers. During his expulsion he took the classes needed for college and applied to the CS program at a prestigious state school rather that coming back to high school. It was really impressive -- between the grades he had skipped before, and the grades he skipped going to college, he got in before he was old enough to drive. I don't think he ended up graduating from college. He is very capable, but he needed a mentor who was operating on the same level as him to help him develop emotional and social skills on par with his intellectual talents.
bitwize 10y ago
I got to the bit about the Enterprise and thought, they trusted that kid aboard a nuclear wessel?
- neaden 10y ago
  IIRC he was restricted from ever actually working a job that would have let him work with the nuclear reactor. Those navy ships are huge though, so there are plenty of other jobs that keep you far away.
  - iaw 10y ago
    And they have their own police too, right?
    - jsjohnst 10y ago
      Yes, there are MPs on board Navy carriers
      - digler999 10y ago
        fun fact: navy nuclear engineers are one of the few/only enlisted sailors that can lawfully refuse orders from anyone above them - all the way to an admiral - if they believe the order will compromise the safety of the reactor.
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    There's about 5,000 people on an Enterprise class carrier at any given time (per Wikipedia, max is just shy of 6k), so I agree, plenty of jobs.
tlrobinson 10y ago
This is a pretty sad story. I remember reading about him (when I was a Boy Scout, actually) and being impressed and inspired, in a way (despite the whole superfund site in his backyard thing...) Unfortunately he was later diagnosed as bipolar and paranoid schizophrenic. I have to wonder what he could have achieved otherwise.
FiatLuxDave 10y ago
So, I have complicated feelings about this. I'm only a few years older than David Hahn. In the early mid nineties, I was also building a nuclear reactor on the down-low. I got my first neutrons a few days before I turned 21. My name is even David as well. So, my friends would always compare me with him as soon as they heard his story. I've always felt a bit of kinship with him, particularly his desire to learn-by-doing about nuclear physics. I've also felt a bit of jealousy at the press he got, pity for the mess he got himself into, and I'm not sure what to name the feeling (sadness? derision?) for some of the mistakes that he made. I'm not sure that I would have done better at his age, trying to do what he was doing. There were things I did that were different from him, that I guess led me to a different fate. I made sure not to break any laws (deuteron colliders are under a different set of rules than radioisotopes). I went to college, which was probably easier for me than for him. I involved other people in my project, including getting VC funding. I sure never made a mess like he did. I also made some similar mistakes. I wasn't even aware that high voltage power supplies would make x-rays. I was shocked and scared when Spence, our 'adult supervision' engineer, brought in a Geiger counter and showed us that we were making a fair amount of x-rays. I learned a lot of radiation safety on-the-job, quickly. Without Spence, who knows how badly I would have irradiated myself before learning on my own? We always avoided publicity. Part of that was because we didn't want people freaking out that we were doing "nuclear stuff" in a rented office by the railroad tracks in Tallahassee. Our landlord knew, and was cool with it, but we were nervous about how the general public would react. So we kept things private. I used to feel that maybe it was a mistake to keep my fusion project so secret. It certainly didn't help my career to be a failed founder with no published papers, without even a press release to point to for my years of work. But when I look at how the mistakes that David Hahn made followed him his whole life, and which weren't all that different from mistakes I made in my youth, I think maybe my decision wasn't so bad. "Radiation Safety Officer" happens to be one of my job titles these days. Rest in Peace, David.
- echelon 10y ago
  Thanks for your personal story. It was fascinating. Do you think you could write about it at length in the future? I'd love to read more.
JoeDaDude 10y ago
To repeat a comment I posted elsewhere [1], ...it is tragic that a child and later teen with so much curiosity and interest in science was not able to get the guidance he needed to channel his drive into a more rewarding and productive life. I suspect many HN readers will see a lot of themselves in David, as did I, and wish things could have turned out differently. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951194
eth0up 10y ago
For Hahn, death is but a beltway 'round a life too slow. Though you'll probably haven't time to chat, I say he can be seen in passing - if one knows where to look: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how-to-build-your-own-particle-detector http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how-to-...
janj 10y ago
Is what he did similar to what this high school student is trying to do? https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/first-african-american-nuclear-fusor https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/first-afric... It's hard for me to understand the concept of building a nuclear anything on a residential property.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Fusors perform nuclear fusion, Hahn was experimenting with nuclear fission. The important differences are: - The fuels used. Fusion uses the lightest elements like hydrogen and helium, which can be non-toxic and non-radioactive (although it depends on the exact process being used). Fission uses the heaviest elements like uranium, which are very toxic and very radioactive. - Control of the reaction. Fusion reactions typically fizzle out if the device isn't powered up and controlled very precisely (this is what makes fusion difficult); they're nothing like hydrogen bombs. Fission reactions are typically spontaneous, caused by the radioactivity and arrangement of the materials in the reactor; control systems regulate this reaction, which would otherwise be pretty similar to an atom bomb.

135 points by Jaruzel 10y ago

The saddest bit is at the end of the Harper's[1] article which I originally read when it was published: -- Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a relatively small, enclosed space is most worrisome of all. Back in 1995, the EPA arranged for David to undergo a full examination at the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant. David, fearful of what he might learn, refused. Now, though, he’s looking ahead. “I wanted to make a scratch in life,” he explains when I ask him about his early years of nuclear research. “I’ve still got time. I don’t believe I took more than five years off of my life.” -- [1] http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/ http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout...

codezero 10y ago
In this vein does anyone know if there are treatments for radiation poisoning that aren't purely palliative?
- tehbeard 10y ago
  I do recall a few years back a drug being refereed to as real life version of Rad Away from the Fallout game series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad
  - centizen 10y ago
    From the sounds of it, it's more like Rad-X from the same games. (Rad-X increases your radiation resistance, RadAway removes radiation poisoning)
    - gohrt 10y ago
      I wonder how the game and its impact would be different if they refused to make RadAway part of the game.
- centizen 10y ago
  Unfortunately, radiation poisoning is an often irreversible process - it involves the destruction of cells, muscle and tissue at a molecular level in a way that our bodies never were designed to be recover from. Majority of medical practices in this space focus on removing ingested or inhaled radioactive particles, to prevent further damage over time and keeping the patient alive and in relative comfort.
- VLM 10y ago
  Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment for electricity. You mean UV damage to the eyes from being exposed to arcs or thermal explosions or shock to heart or RF burns or ... and radiation is the same. Also some of the stuff he did was questionable purely chemically. So ... boring holes in lead, you're at least washing your hands before eating, right? Or the feeling I get from this guy, no. Or his refining process involving lithium metal, interesting but not advisable. I wonder what the guys "banana equivalent dose" was. He didn't get that much material, at least as reported by the press. A thousand times nothing is still nothing unless the true story is more interesting. From what I can find an unmolested smoke detector is about a tenth of a BED/yr so the mere presence of a thousand detectors in one room, if you sit in it for the entire year, is about the same as eating 100 bananas in that year, which I probably do! If you're sloppy and it stays outside your body its about the same. Unless you inhale it. He accumulated more "stuff" than the NRC feels safe to give out unlicensed, but the NRC is pretty pessimistic so he should have survived. And seemed to have done so, unsurprisingly.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Yes, plenty. So what are they?
    - VLM 10y ago
      To start there's triage. Go away and come back for cancer screening every five years. Stay here and we treat you. You're toast here's some painkillers. In between there's a wide mix of removing the cause and repairing the damage. This almost seems too obvious but there's obvious recent surface decontamination, wash it off. A test tube in the lab shattered, well get it all off you first of all. Only a step past that, if you chug heavy water you'll be encouraged to drink tap water to pee out the heavy water. Likewise if you ate something contaminated an hour or a day ago they'll give you stuff to make your digestive system explode out both ends. I donno if they'd feed you an expectorant for inhalation. There's no point if the exposure was months ago of course. There are peculiar specific treatments if you've been recently exposed to iodine isotopes from a bomb or very major plant accident they can flood your system with zero radioactivity clean iodine to convince your body to pee out 99% of your intake rather than adsorbing 100% of the bad stuff into your thyroid. Its like reducing your exposure by a factor of 100 just by popping some pills. There are other isotopes like that I can't remember. If you were doing radioactive labeling experiments obviously they'd flood your body with unlabeled clean stuff to make you pee the glowing stuff out. If its a bone-seeker there are mineral chleation treatments that are very hard on the skeleton but you'll pee out those isotopes which is better than having them irradiate you from the inside for decades. If you wipe out your bone marrow you're screwed unless you get a bone marrow transplant. In the short term they could pump units of blood into you. This works better if there's one victim per hospital than if there's an entire Japanese city and the hospital was vaporized, which is why not too much was done along these lines at the end of WWII. Similar to the above paragraph if you wipe out your digestive tract alongside 100K neighbors there's not much the hospitals can do, but if it was an unfortunate lab accident, you might be kept alive via IV until recovery. If its a surface burn I'm not sure what they'd do WRT preventative skin cancer, maybe skin graft it on general principles or wait and watch and see if a tumor forms. Obviously there's antibiotic treatment.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

logfromblammo 10y ago

The article is woefully lacking by not answering the question that everyone who starts to read the article must have on their mind: was the cause of his death related to radiation exposure?

lithos 10y ago
Unless it kills quickly there's almost never a way to tell. It just comes down to a stat(istics) off between competing arguments. In this case with a one person test group.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
  > Unless it kills quickly there's almost never a way to tell. Well, if he was e.g. struck by lightning just before he died, then the odds that cause of death is related to exposure to radiation years ago go way down. The article sadly doesn't even give anything to go on, or even mention the omission of anything about cause of death.
  - quinndupont 10y ago
    Indeed, all we need to satisfy our curiosity is "he died from X" where X is not unknown.
PaulKeeble 10y ago
He could have been hit by a car or slipped on a banana. This is the sort of lazy news article that we all hate in the world, the implication without the actual presentation of the facts. Ars is a terrible source of news, this isn't their first offence.
- paulmd 10y ago
  It's not entirely their fault. The linked obituary doesn't list a cause of death either.
  - 10y ago

Declanomous 10y ago

The lack of details in the obituary make me think he took his own life. Regardless of how he died, Hahn's story taught me it was possible to learn and build without the latest and greatest tools and equipment. His approach to safety was concerning (to say the least), and he stole a lot of the nuclear material he used, but I think it's important to realize that amazing work can be done without millions in funding. This is probably not a huge revelation for the field of computer science, as even a powerful computer can be bought for relatively little. However, it's easy to look at the equipment used in the physical sciences and think that you need the same equipment to make a meaningful contribution to science. A world of possibilities opens up once you have the idea that you can make the equipment you need to run the experiments yourself. One of the things I love about the internet is that we can share our experiments and hacks with each other. There are a lot of great YouTube channels that are spiritually aligned with mentality behind Hahn's reactor. I'd personally recommend Applied Science, as well as Cody's Lab, and I'd be interested in hearing about any channels that other people find interesting.

tptacek 10y ago
His story is very sad. He joined the Navy after an young adulthood set adrift after the suicide of his mother. He was discharged and diagnosed schizophrenic. Ten years ago, he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors, and the court proceedings implied he'd gone off his medications.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  I'd heard parts of that story. He reminds me of one of the people who I went to school with. We shared a lot of hobbies, but his antisocial and self-destructive tendencies meant that I never could really consider him a friend. He was incredibly smart and capable, but he always acted like he had something to prove. He was expelled from high school for hacking, which unlike a lot of "expelled for hacking" stories, was entirely legitimate. He was doing some pretty impressive exploits on the network computers, but then he was also downloading information he had no business possessing. I was interviewed by the FBI about it, because I was president of the cs club, and he had been using our computers. During his expulsion he took the classes needed for college and applied to the CS program at a prestigious state school rather that coming back to high school. It was really impressive -- between the grades he had skipped before, and the grades he skipped going to college, he got in before he was old enough to drive. I don't think he ended up graduating from college. He is very capable, but he needed a mentor who was operating on the same level as him to help him develop emotional and social skills on par with his intellectual talents.

bitwize 10y ago

I got to the bit about the Enterprise and thought, they trusted that kid aboard a nuclear wessel?

neaden 10y ago
IIRC he was restricted from ever actually working a job that would have let him work with the nuclear reactor. Those navy ships are huge though, so there are plenty of other jobs that keep you far away.
- iaw 10y ago
  And they have their own police too, right?
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    Yes, there are MPs on board Navy carriers
    - digler999 10y ago
      fun fact: navy nuclear engineers are one of the few/only enlisted sailors that can lawfully refuse orders from anyone above them - all the way to an admiral - if they believe the order will compromise the safety of the reactor.
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  There's about 5,000 people on an Enterprise class carrier at any given time (per Wikipedia, max is just shy of 6k), so I agree, plenty of jobs.

tlrobinson 10y ago

This is a pretty sad story. I remember reading about him (when I was a Boy Scout, actually) and being impressed and inspired, in a way (despite the whole superfund site in his backyard thing...) Unfortunately he was later diagnosed as bipolar and paranoid schizophrenic. I have to wonder what he could have achieved otherwise.

FiatLuxDave 10y ago

So, I have complicated feelings about this. I'm only a few years older than David Hahn. In the early mid nineties, I was also building a nuclear reactor on the down-low. I got my first neutrons a few days before I turned 21. My name is even David as well. So, my friends would always compare me with him as soon as they heard his story. I've always felt a bit of kinship with him, particularly his desire to learn-by-doing about nuclear physics. I've also felt a bit of jealousy at the press he got, pity for the mess he got himself into, and I'm not sure what to name the feeling (sadness? derision?) for some of the mistakes that he made. I'm not sure that I would have done better at his age, trying to do what he was doing. There were things I did that were different from him, that I guess led me to a different fate. I made sure not to break any laws (deuteron colliders are under a different set of rules than radioisotopes). I went to college, which was probably easier for me than for him. I involved other people in my project, including getting VC funding. I sure never made a mess like he did. I also made some similar mistakes. I wasn't even aware that high voltage power supplies would make x-rays. I was shocked and scared when Spence, our 'adult supervision' engineer, brought in a Geiger counter and showed us that we were making a fair amount of x-rays. I learned a lot of radiation safety on-the-job, quickly. Without Spence, who knows how badly I would have irradiated myself before learning on my own? We always avoided publicity. Part of that was because we didn't want people freaking out that we were doing "nuclear stuff" in a rented office by the railroad tracks in Tallahassee. Our landlord knew, and was cool with it, but we were nervous about how the general public would react. So we kept things private. I used to feel that maybe it was a mistake to keep my fusion project so secret. It certainly didn't help my career to be a failed founder with no published papers, without even a press release to point to for my years of work. But when I look at how the mistakes that David Hahn made followed him his whole life, and which weren't all that different from mistakes I made in my youth, I think maybe my decision wasn't so bad. "Radiation Safety Officer" happens to be one of my job titles these days. Rest in Peace, David.

echelon 10y ago
Thanks for your personal story. It was fascinating. Do you think you could write about it at length in the future? I'd love to read more.

JoeDaDude 10y ago

To repeat a comment I posted elsewhere [1], ...it is tragic that a child and later teen with so much curiosity and interest in science was not able to get the guidance he needed to channel his drive into a more rewarding and productive life. I suspect many HN readers will see a lot of themselves in David, as did I, and wish things could have turned out differently. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951194

eth0up 10y ago

For Hahn, death is but a beltway 'round a life too slow. Though you'll probably haven't time to chat, I say he can be seen in passing - if one knows where to look: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how-to-build-your-own-particle-detector http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how-to-...

janj 10y ago

Is what he did similar to what this high school student is trying to do? https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/first-african-american-nuclear-fusor https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/first-afric... It's hard for me to understand the concept of building a nuclear anything on a residential property.

chriswarbo 10y ago
Fusors perform nuclear fusion, Hahn was experimenting with nuclear fission. The important differences are: - The fuels used. Fusion uses the lightest elements like hydrogen and helium, which can be non-toxic and non-radioactive (although it depends on the exact process being used). Fission uses the heaviest elements like uranium, which are very toxic and very radioactive. - Control of the reaction. Fusion reactions typically fizzle out if the device isn't powered up and controlled very precisely (this is what makes fusion difficult); they're nothing like hydrogen bombs. Fission reactions are typically spontaneous, caused by the radioactivity and arrangement of the materials in the reactor; control systems regulate this reaction, which would otherwise be pretty similar to an atom bomb.