5/24/2023 0 Comments The white pages michigan![]() It is, in some ways, a coda for the nuclear age. 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. 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. ![]() 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. Most alarmingly, corporations and government agencies blithely supplied David with the materials and information he needed to expand his work to dangerous levels. His school teachers paid little heed when David, nicknamed Glow Boy by fellow students, suggested he was collecting radioactive substances. David Hahn's parents were divorced, and David used the separate households to conceal the magnitude of his work. ![]() 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.įor David to get so far, Silverstein shows, he had to be the victim of carelessness and neglect at all levels of society. 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. Ken Silverstein shows that things in Golf Manor were not, in fact, ok. The EPA workers refused to disclose what was happening, only offering vague reassurance that everything was ok. In subsequent days, the crew, wearing protective suits, carted away the refuse in sealed barrels emblazoned with radiation symbols. On Jthe people of Golf Manor, Michigan returned from work to find a federal EPA crew dismantling a potting shed in Patty Hahn's back yard. 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. 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.Īn outrageous account of ambition and, ultimately, hubris that sits comfortably on the shelf next to such offbeat science books as Driving Mr. (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. Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the U.S. In The Radioactive Boy Scout, veteran journalist Ken Silverstein recreates in brilliant detail the months of David’s improbable nuclear quest. ![]() Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard garden shed. While working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David’s obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. 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.
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