The Radioactive Boy Scout

The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor
by KEN SILVERSTEIN (Author)

Hardcover: 240 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.89 x 7.34 x 5.78
Publisher: Random House; (March 2, 2004)
ISBN: 037550351X
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 4,470

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com: 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 ok. Ken Silverstein shows that things in Golf Manor were not, in fact, ok. David Hahn, a 17-year-old aspiring Eagle Scout, had constructed the rudiments of a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard and had contaminated himself and the immediate area with potentially deadly radioactive material. In his brief, briskly-paced account of the events, Silverstein weaves together science, history, and testimony from David and his family in a tale both frightening and tragic.

For David to get so far, Silverstein shows, 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. In the post 9/11 era, the prospect is even more frightening.
-------Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly: In the summer of 1995, a teenager in a Detroit suburb, a mediocre student with a relentless scientific curiosity, managed to build a rudimentary nuclear breeder reactor in a shed behind his mother's house, using radioactive elements obtained from items as ordinary as smoke detectors. He got so far along in his efforts that when the Feds finally caught up with him, the EPA used Superfund money (usually spent on the worst hazardous waste sites) to clean up the shed. Building on a Harper's article, Silverstein, an investigative reporter for the L.A. Times, fleshes out David Hahn's atomic escapades, and though it takes a while for the story to kick into gear, readers will be sucked in not just by how Hahn did it but how he was able to get away with it. His "pathologically oblivious" father comes in for the sharpest criticism, but Silverstein takes note of the teachers who failed to pick up on Hahn's cues (his friends called him "glow boy") and the Department of Energy official who offered crucial tips on creating a neutron gun. Silverstein also examines the pronuclear ideology Hahn picked up in the Boy Scouts (where he had earned an atomic energy merit badge) and dated government publications that touted nuclear power while glossing over setbacks in the troubled breeder reactor program. And though there's little mention of how easily terrorists could duplicate Hahn's feat, perhaps the accomplishment of one obsessed teen is scary enough in its own right.
-----Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist: Lighting fireworks, participating in scouting, hanging with a girlfriend: these normal boyhood activities belied the strangeness of Detroit-area teenager David Hahn. Silverstein recounts how Hahn, while a high-school student in the early 1990s, tried to assemble a breeder nuclear reactor in a garden shed. Seeking the origins of such audacity, the author extensively interviewed Hahn and worked backward from the day in 1995 when EPA personnel clad in ventilated moon suits took away Hahn's radioactive material. To Silverstein, Hahn was two things at once: a kid out of time who imbibed 1960-style nuclear optimism from a chemistry book published that year and a kid of the times, the product of divorce. Neither parents nor stepparents, consumed by work and personal problems, supervised young David, who, utterly heedless of danger, re-created the experiments of Marie and Pierre Curie with a monomania that fed his fantasy of going nuclear. Aghast at Hahn's recklessness but amazed by his mad-scientist resourcefulness, Silverstein regales readers with an irresistible tale. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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

Inside Flap Copy: 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.