Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science.
While he was 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 model nuclear
reactor in his backyard garden shed.
Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor
design from the U.S. government and from industry experts. Following
blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled
together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation. His
wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an environmental emergency
that put his town's forty thousand suburbanites at risk. The EPA ended
up burying his lab at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah. This offbeat
account of ambition and, ultimately, hubris has the narrative energy of
a first-rate thriller.