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Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science, and his basement experiments--building homemade fireworks, brewing moonshine, and concocting his own self-tanning lotion--were more ambitious than those of other boys. While 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 nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard garden shed.In The Radioactive Boy Scout, veteran journalist Ken Silverstein recreates in brilliant detail the months of David's improbable nuclear quest. Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the U.S. government and from industry experts. (Ironically, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was his number one source of information.) Scavenging antiques stores and junkyards for old-fashioned smoke detectors and gas lanterns--both of which contain small amounts of radioactive material--and following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation. His unsanctioned and wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an environmental catastrophe that put his town's forty thousand residents at risk and caused the EPA to shut down his lab and bury it at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah.An outrageous account of ambition and, ultimately, hubris that sits comfortably on the shelf next to such offbeat science books as Driving Mr. Albert and stories of grand capers like Catch Me If You Can, The Radioactive Boy Scout is a real-life adventure with the narrative energy of a first-rate thriller.From the Hardcover edition.
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Previews available in: English
Showing 5 featured editions. View all 5 editions?
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1
The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor
January 11, 2005, Villard
Paperback
in English
0812966600 9780812966602
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2
Radioactive Boy Scout
January 2005, Tandem Library
Library binding
in English
1417654805 9781417654802
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3
The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor
March 2, 2004, Random House
in English
037550351X 9780375503511
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5
The Radioactive Boy Scout
2004, Random House Publishing Group
Electronic resource
in English
1588363562 9781588363565
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"David Hahn's earliest memory seems appropriate in light of later events; it is of conducting an experiment in the bathroom when he was perhaps four years old."
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- Created June 17, 2010
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July 29, 2012 | Edited by VacuumBot | Updated format 'electronic resource' to 'Electronic resource' |
April 29, 2011 | Edited by OCLC Bot | Added OCLC numbers. |
June 19, 2010 | Edited by ImportBot | Added new cover |
June 17, 2010 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from marc_overdrive MARC record |