The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Each time Kenneth, Tiffany, or Nell visited the garage, there’d be something new: a pre–Geiger counter radio-assay electroscope; a radioactive Chinese army mortar sight; a thoriated camera lens; a check source for ion-chamber instruments used at the Nevada Test Site. Taylor bought and tacked up an official-looking yellow sign reading CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS. He exchanged his white lab coat for the canary yellow favored by nuclear technicians, and he purchased a yellow-orange Tyvek hazmat jumpsuit, which he hung from a nail on a rafter—“just in case,” he told his parents, “of any unusual incidents that might involve contamination.”

  Since the rocket-candy incident, Taylor had gotten increasingly adamant about safety—at least, from what his parents could tell. “It wasn’t just the facemask anymore,” Tiffany says. “He started wearing his gloves and respirator a lot too, and setting up all kinds of instruments.”

  For Tiffany and Kenneth, the silent, invisible creep of radiation was more unsettling than any of the explosions of Taylor’s pyrotechnic era. As bone-jarring as those could be, at least a parent could see and hear them. “What scared me,” Tiffany says, “was that you couldn’t tell by looking at any of this new stuff how dangerous it was. Taylor could explain it all, but I didn’t get most of it. Honestly, we didn’t know if it was safe or not.”

  Indeed, unless you were one of the few people who could recognize a Revigator, you’d never know what kind of damage this dapper, flapper-era thing was capable of. Likewise with the strange and ever-multiplying cache of rocks and metals and vials of liquid that increasingly crowded Taylor’s laboratory, some of which cast a glow into the corners of the garage at night.

  “I had a lot of faith in Taylor, and he seemed to know what he was doing,” Kenneth says. “But when he started bringing home more stuff and explaining what it was, we were getting pretty worried.”

  Near the end of Taylor’s visit with Lee Dodds at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Kenneth had confided to the professor that he had concerns about his son’s safety. Dodds, who’d spent the past three hours talking nuclear science with Taylor, looked Kenneth in the eye and said: “He knows what he’s doing.”

  After Dodds’s endorsement, Taylor ramped up his collecting and experimenting. Unlike David Hahn, Taylor made no attempt to hide anything; whenever the UPS man delivered something new, Taylor would explain it and show it off: an old GI compass, a bit of radiated graphite from a nuclear reactor, a gnomelike figurine made in Germany with a radioactive black glaze painted on the bottom. “It’s uranium trioxide,” he said, admiring it as he turned it over in his hands, “the same stuff they make nuclear fuel pellets out of.”

  When Tiffany and Kenneth questioned him about safety, Taylor spoke convincingly, if bafflingly, about time doses and distance intensities, of inverse-square laws and roentgen submultiples. He explained the different types of radiation and how they dictated the amount and kind of shielding necessary. For instance, alpha particles—the bound-up combination of two protons and two neutrons thrown off by uranium and its daughter elements—can easily be stopped by a sheet of paper or human skin, so they pose little external radiation threat. Higher-energy beta particles can travel through human tissue and cause serious damage, though they can be stopped by a few millimeters of aluminum. Gamma and x-rays carry the highest energy and are the most worrisome, since they can travel long distances and penetrate deep inside the body.

  With his newfound knowledge, Taylor insisted, he could master the furtive energy that seeped from his rocks and metals and other collectibles. “I know what I’m doing,” Taylor reassured his parents. “I’m the responsible radioactive Boy Scout.”

  But could an eleven-year-old, even one as science-savvy as Taylor, truly comprehend the consequences of a mistake? Acute radiation exposure—a devastating, one-time dose of ionizing radiation—is rare, but when it does happen, it can cause irreparable DNA damage and death. Chronic radiation syndrome—the result of long-term exposure to excessive radiation levels—is more common; it can lead to an increase in the likelihood of cancers and other radiation-induced diseases.

  The health risks of nonacute exposures are difficult to gauge. For example, the 1985 Chernobyl disaster in present-day Ukraine led directly to 31 deaths (28 from acute radiation exposure) and 203 hospitalizations. But the number of eventual casualties caused by the radiation plume that spread across Europe will never be known. Estimates vary from four thousand additional cancer deaths above the normal rate (according to the World Health Organization) to more than sixteen thousand (per the International Agency for Research on Cancer).

  Chronic exposures usually spur the body’s natural DNA-repair mechanisms to compete—not always successfully—with the damage done by the radiation that passes through living tissue. The dangers and safeguards are better known now, but illnesses due to long-term dust and radiation exposure were common through much of the twentieth century. More than six hundred American miners, including many Navajo in New Mexico, suffered early demises after years of breathing uranium dust and radon gas. In eastern Germany’s Ore Mountains, which supplied uranium for Soviet nukes, an estimated sixteen thousand miners were killed by the particles they breathed (though the health effects of coal mining are substantially more severe than uranium mining). Marie Curie’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie died of leukemia ten years after a vial of polonium broke open—but not before winning the family’s third Nobel Prize (jointly, with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, in 1935) for discovering artificial radioactivity, the process by which elements are made radioactive by bombardment with charged particles.

  The Curies never fully realized how dangerous their discoveries were. But there’s evidence that, as early as 1917, owners and scientists at the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, understood the risks of radium exposure. They took precautions—for themselves—while assuring the low-paid Radium Girls who painted watch dials that the radium paint was harmless. Supervisors told the women to lick the brushes to keep their points sharp. For laughs, some women painted their fingernails and teeth with the glow-in-the-dark material. When they began to suffer bone fractures, anemia, and necrosis of the jaw, some demanded investigations and compensation. Company officials instructed the medical professionals they hired to attribute the ailments to other causes. They also claimed that those who’d joined a lawsuit had contracted syphilis, in an attempt to smear their reputations.

  In terms of relative cancer risk, an absorbed dose of ten millirems (mrems) of ionizing radiation is equivalent to smoking 1.4 cigarettes, according to Idaho State University physicists. (“I think I’ve smoked a few cigarettes,” Taylor would joke at one point, “but I follow the ALARP rule—‘as low as reasonably possible.’ When it comes to radiation hazards, I’m an ALARPist, not an alarmist.”) For reference, a cross-country flight will give you a dose of about four mrems; a chest x-ray supplies between three and ten mrems; a set of dental x-rays produces a ten to forty mrem dose. Sleeping next to a friend for year (we are all radioactive) will give you a dose of about two mrems.

  Natural background radiation is all around us, and there’s little we can do about most of it. Humans have been immersed in radiation throughout our evolution; we’ve been showered from above by high-energy cosmic rays from the sun, supernovae, and pulsars. Particles from decaying elements in the Earth’s crust bombard us from below, and radon gas (the second-leading cause of lung cancer, after smoking, in the U.S. and many countries) seeps into caves and basements. Bananas and potassium salt substitutes are measurably radioactive, as are lima beans and Brazil nuts. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the average person is exposed to 360 mrems of background radiation each year from natural and manmade sources. That’s far lower than it was in earlier stages of human evolution, when our species developed mechanisms to repair radiation-damaged DNA.

  Manmade background radiation comes from nuclear test residue, medical devices, and coal-plant smokestacks, which spew fly a
sh containing thorium and uranium, dispersing far more radiation into the environment than nuclear power plants. Smoke detectors contain radioactive americium, and glow-in-the-dark emergency-exit signs, which are the most radioactive items the majority of people encounter in their daily lives, contain up to twenty-five curies of radioluminescent tritium, which emits low-energy beta particles.

  That’s not a problem—unless you take a sign apart and break open the vials of tritium while eating sunflower seeds, as one New Jersey teenager did. Tritium attaches to moisture-attracting tissue and can enter the bloodstream. State health officials, who moved quickly to decontaminate the boy’s home in a costly cleanup, estimated that the sixteen-year-old absorbed about eighty mrems of radiation.

  Through the mid-2000s, tritium exit signs were openly bought and sold on online auction sites such as eBay. Then collectors noticed auctions suddenly canceled, reportedly because of NRC intervention. In March of 2014, auctions of slightly radioactive trinitite (the glasslike residue left on the New Mexico desert floor after the Trinity nuclear detonation in 1945) were abolished from the site. Uranium ore, which is more radioactive than trinitite, is still available, presumably because the NRC doesn’t place restrictions on small quantities of naturally occurring materials; only processed source material is subject to regulation.

  Few would argue that trade in radioactive material (or other dangerous substances) should be an unregulated free-for-all. But the arbitrariness and clumsiness of enforcement calls into question the decision-making process and the efficacy of regulation efforts. On eBay, the long-standing prohibition of radioactive materials is selectively enforced and often creatively violated, as savvy sellers find ways to substitute flagged keywords with inventive euphemisms. “The problem,” says one collector, “is that ‘radioactive’ describes anything and everything. Everything has some, whether it’s a large or small emission. But if you put the word ‘radioactive’ in a listing you can guarantee it will be closed down.”

  Collectors like William Kolb, who coauthored Living with Radiation: The First Hundred Years, say the threat from radioactive collectibles is wildly overblown. “What hobbyists tend to pass along is not that dangerous. The stuff a terrorist could actually do real damage with would be something collectors wouldn’t get near, like some of the old Third World medical machines.”

  In Goiânia, Brazil, in 1987, four people died and twenty were treated for radiation sickness after thieves stole and broke open an old radiotherapy source. In 2013, thieves in Mexico set off international nuclear-terrorism alerts when they hijacked a truck, unaware its cargo included a capsule containing three thousand curies of cobalt-60 from a decommissioned medical device. The hijackers got as far as opening its outer box before they heard a news report about the incident, freaked out, and dumped the contraband in a field outside Mexico City. Some of them raced to hospitals, fearing they’d been contaminated. But neither they nor the man who found the box and carried it home, hoping to sell it as scrap, got as far as opening the inner shielding. If anyone had opened it, even briefly, he would have been pierced by enough gamma rays to bring about a quick and almost certain death.

  Other events can result in high levels of radiation that cause acute radiation syndrome, including escaped radioactive waste, a breached reactor, a solar flare during space travel, a criticality accident that initiates an uncontrolled fission reaction, and a nuclear explosion. A huge number of acute radiation cases occurred in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Between 110,000 and 200,000 people died immediately from shock waves, intense heat, or radiation. Irradiated survivors staggered through the chaos, searching for relief from nausea, fever, hemorrhaging, and diarrhea. The most heavily dosed victims died within fourteen days from acute radiation syndrome. Those with lower doses survived longer; over the next five years an estimated 200,000 more died. Long-term survivors and their radiation-damaged offspring are known as hibakusha, or “explosion-affected people.” Among them are numerous cases of thyroid and breast cancer, leukemia, and children born with mental retardation and extremely small heads, a condition known as microcephaly.

  A few days after the Nagasaki bombing, one of the bomb’s makers became a radiation victim himself in the world’s first criticality accident. Working at night in the Los Alamos laboratory, scientist Harry Daghlian accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a sphere of plutonium. A flash of blue momentarily lit up the room as air particles ionized and deadly neutrons streamed through the scientist. He desperately tried to knock off the brick, then began working to disassemble the tungsten carbide pile to halt the reaction and save his coworkers. But it was too late for Daghlian; he died twenty-five days later. The following year the same plutonium sphere, which scientists nicknamed “the demon core,” went supercritical again during a botched experiment. Canadian physicist Louis Slotin shielded his coworkers and stopped the chain reaction by knocking the spheres apart, but he’d already absorbed nearly a thousand rads of gamma and neutron radiation; he died nine days later.

  Available medical accounts of the casualties at Los Alamos, where every detail was classified, are sparse. But two recent radiation deaths—one accidental and one intentional—are well documented.

  In 1999, two technicians were processing fuel at a facility northeast of Tokyo. While Masato Shinohara poured uranyl nitrate solution through a filter, Hiroshi Ouchi held the funnel. Though regulations required them to use a container specially shaped to prevent criticality, it had been set aside years earlier and replaced with an easier-to-handle bucket.

  Suddenly, workers heard a loud crack and saw a burst of blue light. This light, often reported by observers of criticality accidents, is emitted when excited ionized atoms or molecules in the air fall back to unexcited states, producing an abundance of blue light. (This is also the reason airborne electrical sparks, including lightning, often appear blue.) A burst of neutrons penetrated the men’s bodies and set off the radiation-alert siren. Ouchi and Shinohara ran into the next room, where Ouchi vomited and passed out.

  When high-energy particles zap living tissue, they alter its atomic structure, stripping electrons away from atoms and molecules and breaking the chemical bonds that bind elements together. Once this chemical glue is gone, the cells essentially fall apart. Ouchi had regained consciousness by the time he arrived at the hospital; his face was slightly red and swollen, and his hand looked mildly sunburned. Doctors at first thought they’d be able to save him. But as authorities organized a suicide team to contain the out-of-control reaction, Ouchi’s condition deteriorated. The neutron beams had converted sodium molecules inside his body into radioactive sodium-24 isotopes, which attacked the actively dividing cells in his blood, intestinal mucous membranes, and skin.

  When doctors saw the first micrographs of the chromosomes in his bone-marrow cells, they gasped. What had once been long, orderly chains were now fragmented and scattered. With their DNA-repair mechanisms overpowered, Ouchi’s mangled cells began, essentially, to commit suicide. His hair came out, and bodily fluids began streaming from his eyes, which sprang open every time the medical team tried to close them. As skin fell away from his body, fluids seeped out almost as fast as the team could replace them intravenously.

  Ouchi’s overwhelmed doctors reached out to experts around the world. But there were few precedents and no proven treatments for acute radiation poisoning. Mindful of a Japanese folk legend that a gift of a thousand origami cranes will grant the recipient a wish, his family stayed at his side folding paper birds as Ouchi became increasingly incoherent, calling for his mother and his home village. As his body lost its capacity to produce platelets, Ouchi dropped out of consciousness, his eyes finally closing. On the eighty-third day, after surviving longer than any criticality victim had, he finally passed away.

  What happened to Ouchi was a preventable accident. Not so with the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a forty-three-year-old Russian dissident and former KGB agent whose tea was spiked with polonium d
uring a November 2006 meeting with two other Russians in a bar in London’s Grosvenor Square.

  The highly ionizing particles emitted by polonium-210 can be blocked by skin or even a few inches of air. But once inside the body, alpha particles demolish the cells they encounter—whose contents, including the polonium, are absorbed by surrounding cells, creating an ever-expanding swath of devastation. Polonium-210, an almost pure alpha emitter, may well be the most toxic substance on earth; by weight, it’s about two hundred and fifty thousand times more poisonous than hydrogen cyanide, the Nazis’ favored poison. Litvinenko ingested just a speck of polonium, but it was many times more than the maximum safe body burden of seven-trillionths of a gram.

  The Soviet Union apparently began using radiation as an assassination weapon in 1957, and today nearly all of the one hundred grams or so of polonium-210 made each year are produced at a repurposed weapons facility on the Volga River. Polonium-210 kills with devastating effectiveness, then departs the body quickly and leaves little trace—its half-life is only 138 days—which makes it a nearly perfect poison.

  Litvinenko, an enemy of Russian president Vladimir Putin, vomited that evening, and his temperature dropped. Emergency-room doctors diagnosed a stomach infection and sent him home. Two days later he was back in the hospital, where baffled doctors administered antibiotics after tests found nothing conclusive.

  As Litvinenko’s condition deteriorated, his heart raced, pushing blood through radiation-swollen arteries and veins. Each beat delivered another blood-borne payload of radiation-emitting cells into his organs and eventually into his bone marrow, where corrupted cells produced ever more radioactive blood.