What the men in the funny suits found was that the potting shed was dangerously irradiated and that the area's 40,000 residents could be at risk. Publicly, the men in white promised the residents of Golf Manor that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the Environmental Protection Agency briefly invaded their neighborhood. When asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.You've got to have some admiration for his cleverness and his determination, that's for sure. Incidentally, the book mentioned in the article (The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments) can be found in PDF form here, among other places (it's virtually impossible to find a hard copy, and those that do exist cost hundreds of dollars from rare book dealers). I remember that book as a kid; the library at my junior high had a copy, and I did a number of the experiments therein. Many of them, however, would not be considered suitable material for a kids' book in this day and age. For that matter, back in the 1970s I received a chemistry set for Christmas one year, and one of the experiments involved the making of hydrogen sulphide - a gas which, dose for dose, is more toxic than hydrogen cyanide. Of course, at the levels I made it the main risk was its characteristic rotten-egg smell, but I still doubt that you'd see such an experiment in a modern chemistry set.
As for Mr. Hahn's experiments, those thinking of following in his footsteps should check out his picture here.
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