Full name: The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor

Author: Ken Silverstein Year: 2004 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Science, Non Fiction, Biographies, History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781841152295 9780812966602 1841152293 0812966600

Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science. While he was working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David's obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his backyard garden shed. Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the U.S. government and from industry experts. Following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation. His wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an environmental emergency that put his town's forty thousand suburbanites at risk. The EPA ended up burying his lab at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah. This offbeat account of ambition and, ultimately, hubris has the narrative energy of a first-rate thriller. Similar books: Phineas Gage by John Fleischman Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky Why Is Snot Green? by Glenn Murphy Guinea Pig Scientists by Leslie Dendy The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower Leonardo da Vinci by Kathleen Krull Isaac Newton by Kathleen Krull Headstrong by Rachel Swaby The Strange Case of Dr. Couney by Dawn Raffel Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot The Story of More by Hope Jahren Rocket Men by Robert Kurson Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz