The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor - Hardcover

Silverstein, Ken

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037550351X ISBN 13: 9780375503511

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2004

Synopsis

Traces a young boy's obsessive fascination with science and nuclear physics, which eventually compelled him to misrepresent himself to the government and build a breeder reactor in his back yard, causing an environmental catastrophe in his quiet Detroit neighborhood. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

In The Radioactive Boy Scout Kevin Silverstein tells the story of how David Hahn, a 17-year-old aspiring Eagle Scout, had constructed the rudiments of a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard, thus contaminating himself and the immediate area with potentially deadly radioactive material. On June 26, 1995 the people of Golf Manor, Michigan returned from work to find a federal EPA crew dismantling a potting shed in Patty Hahn's back yard. In subsequent days the crew, wearing protective suits, carted away the refuse in sealed barrels emblazoned with radiation symbols. The EPA workers refused to disclose what was happening, only offering vague reassurance that everything was fine.

In his brief, briskly-paced account of the events, Silverstein weaves together science, history, and testimony from David Hahn and his family in a tale both frightening and tragic. For David to get so far, Silverstein shows that he had to be the victim of carelessness and neglect at all levels of society. David Hahn's parents were divorced and David used the separate households to conceal the magnitude of his work. His school teachers paid little heed when David, nicknamed Glow Boy by fellow students, suggested he was collecting radioactive substances. Most alarmingly, corporations and government agencies blithely supplied David with the materials and information he needed to expand his work to dangerous levels. Interspersed with his account of David, Silverstein exposes the culture of deceit surrounding the history of nuclear power, a culture that easily seduced an aspiring young scientist. David was left with little in the way of mentorship other than such one-sided testaments to the benefits of science as his trusted Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.

The book, which grew out of Silverstein's 1998 story in Harper's Magazine reads like a suspense novel blended with breezy accounts of America's history with the atom. It is, in some ways, a coda for the nuclear age. In his final pages, Silverstein shows that power production from nuclear reactors has slowly ebbed over the last decades, breeder reactors world-wide have been shut down, and public apprehension has finally out-stripped naïve scientific exuberance for atomic energy. But is the danger truly receding? Surprisingly, The Radioactive Boy Scout does not address any changes in security that have evolved from David's incident. In fact, Silverstein hints that David himself may still be dabbling with radioactive materials. --Patrick O'Kelley, Amazon.com

Review:

"Anyone who has ever wondered what the neighborhood geek might be brewing up in his backyard should read The Radioactive Boy Scout. This is a riveting and disturbing story about the power of the teenage mind--and the sparks that fly when a nuclear family melts down."
--David Kushner, author of Masters of Doom

"Amazing . . . unsettling . . . should come with a warning: Don't buy [this book] for any obsessive kids in the family. It might give them ideas."
-Rocky Mountain News

"An astounding story . . . [Silverstein] has a novelist's eye for meaningful detail and a historian's touch for context."
-The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Alarming . . . The story fascinates from start to finish."
-Outside

"Enthralling . . . [It] has the quirky pleasures of a Don DeLillo novel or an Errol Morris documentary. . . . An engaging portrait of a person whose life on America's fringe also says something about mainstream America."
-Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[Silverstein] does a fabulous job of letting David [Hahn's] surrealistic story tell itself. . . . But what's truly amazing is how far Hahn actually got in the construction of his crude nuclear reactor."
-The Columbus Dispatch

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 037550351X
• ISBN 13: 9780375503511
• Binding: Hardcover