He was a scout in the Boy Scouts of America. Hahn did his experiments without anyone knowing. He did them in a backyard shed at his mother's house in Commerce Township, Michigan. While he never actually was able to build a reactor (what he built was a neutron source), Hahn got the attention of local police when he was stopped for a different reason. The police found things in his vehicle that troubled them. He warned that it was radioactive. His mother's property was cleaned up by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ten months later as a Superfund cleanup site. Hahn attained Eagle Scout rank shortly after his lab was dismantled.