I've read excerpts from this book. This sounds awesome! Yeah, I'm a geek - and geeky stuff really gets to me.
When I was in the second grade, I won first place in a science fair explaining the nuclear properties of the three isotopes of hydrogen, and how they decay quickly by expunging radiation into the stable, non-radioactive hydrogen that surrounds us right now.
David Hahn knew none of this in the second grade. But, he had a voracious appetite for all things scientific. At the age of fourteen, he embarked on a mission that would make him infamous. He began to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's potting shed.
The scientific details are available in various places on the web, about how David acquired slightly radioactive thorium from lantern mantles and slightly radioactive americium from smoke detectors. He then concentrated these materials and built a reactor to turn them into uranium!
His mother's potting shed is now buried in a salt dome in Utah. It's high-level nuclear waste.
I'd really like to read this book. It's something I may have considered in my younger-dumber days, had I really put my mind to it. I wrote a bit about it in
my homeschool blog. Check it out!