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The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frighteningly True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor
Ken Silverstein
New York: Villard Books, 2004
209 pp., $13.95, paperback
ISBN: 0-8129-6660-0

On June 26, 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) invaded the small community of Golf Manor, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. They came in protective moon suits and proceeded to tear down a wooden potting shed and use industrial strength vacuums to clean up the backyard's grass and the empty swimming pool over the next three days. The remains were sealed into barrels with bright yellow radiation warning stickers on them. Residents, as well as reporters, were kept in the dark about the clean-up. Years later, many of the residents still did not know why the EPA came in as they did. What they didn't know was that the contents of the shed triggered the government's Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, the protocol for dealing with any public exposure to radiation. The root cause of this emergency -a Boy Scout and a coveted atomic-energy merit badge.

The Boy Scout in question in Ken Silverstein's book The Radioactive Boy Scout is David Hahn. David's father Ken makes him join the Boy Scouts, hoping it will help him learn discipline, and also lead him away from his experiments with odd colored hair and explosives - pastimes that would worry most parents, but David's parents are oddly unconcerned. There are two merit badges that help spur David on with his experiments: Chemistry and Atomic Energy. The work involved in getting these two badges is relatively easy, but it only further spurred his interest in all things science/nuclear. The Chemistry merit badge required identifying ten household chemicals and their uses -spurring his desire to get one of each element on the periodic table, including the radioactive elements. But it was after getting the Atomic Energy badge that led him into trying to make his own nuclear reactor - something he came close to succeeding in the backyard of his mother's Golf Manor home.

Armed with addresses from the Boy Scouts pamphlet on nuclear energy, David began his research. David wrote letters to the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the American Nuclear Society, and others - either posing as a teacher at the local high school, to posing as a Doctor doing research. He was able to gather both information and the basic parts to create the most basic nuclear reactions from purchasing smoke detectors to get Americium, buying uranium ore "samples" from the Czech Republic, getting gas-lantern mantles which contained Thorium, and purchasing antique glow-in-the-dark clocks for the Radium painted on their dials.

With all the help at his disposal, David attempted to make a basic reactor -- with no on/off switch. When his experiment started emitting radiation at higher and higher levels did he realize things were out of his control, and he had to dismantle his reactor and dispose of it -leading to the EPA's cleanup and permanent disposal of David's shed and most of its contents.

How could this all happen? A combination of many factors that Silverstein explores further in The Radioactive Boy Scout, including what David Hahn doing now. This is a story that explores both the history of nuclear energy, and the story of David Hahn's quirky intelligence and the directions it took him in. It is both compelling and scary, making you wonder "What if...?"

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