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Chargement... The Radioactive Boyscout: The True Story of a Boy Who Built a Nuclear Reactor in His Shed (original 2004; édition 2004)par Ken Silverstein (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreThe Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor par Ken Silverstein (2004)
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. This cautionary tale of a teenaged Michigan chemistry enthusiast who managed to construct a rudimentary nuclear reactor in his shed incorporates digressions about tangents such as the quest for the breeder reactor, America's enthusiasm for radioactive consumer products a century ago, and a history of the atomic bomb. These are necessary to bring the book up to a scant 200 pages; the teen's story is interesting enough, but really only worthy of a long magazine article in and of itself. The author clearly finds the episode troubling, and quite rightly so; our mad scientist was thwarted quite by accident during a routine traffic stop when the police found an aggregation of junk he had in his trunk and thought it might be a bomb, and, even then, it took authorities months to discover the reactor, and the secrecy-obsessed EPA cleanup crew came within a couple of hours of destroying the radioactive shed without media showing up. Both the main story and the digressions are interestingly related, and the author explains the chemistry involved in the story very clearly, directly, and briefly.
Like Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, which sprouted from The New Yorker, The Radioactive Boy Scout originated as a mesmerizing magazine story (published in Harper's) and has been padded to book-length. Do we really need a mini-history of nuclear power plants? Still, Silverstein, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, keeps the narrative snappy, with many telling details and just the right touch of sensationalism to remind readers that what Hahn accomplished was truly surreal. Journalist Ken Silverstein gathered material from extensive interviews with David and his family and from police and EPA reports about this backyard experiment. The story appeared as a Harper's Magazine article in 1998, and now Silverstein has expanded it into some 200 pages. Though David's character is overshadowed by the science, Silverstein's details of atomic history are fascinating. Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science, and his basement experiments were far more ambitious than those of other boys. While working on his Atomic Energy merit 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 model nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard garden shed. Ken Silverstein re-creates in brilliant detail the months of David's improbable nuclear quest. 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. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)621.483092Technology Engineering and allied operations Applied physics Heat engineering Nuclear Engineering Nuclear Safety and Waste BiographiesClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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In my opinion this book was a book about a boy who dreamed about something and made it real. This book inspired me to think you can make things that people think you can’t. He built a nuclear reactor in his backyard no normal person could do that in fact most scientist could not do that. I think I like to be a chemical scientist when I grow up just because of this book. I think that the way he did things was not safe, though but they are probably cooler than what normal people do. I sometimes think to myself who would do that but I also think that was cool and he is really smart but not cautious of his safety.