Wyoming teen builds nuclear reactor in dad's garage
journalstar.com
journalstar.com
A Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor, to be specific. Fairly cheap. Really, authentically produces hydrogen fusion... but not much of it (neutron flux is very low) and it can't run very long before the accelerator grids overheat. It's basically a spherical particle accelerator, and doesn't come anywhere close to achieving breakeven. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
Tom Ligon wrote an article for Analog in 1998 describing how a high school student could build one for a science fair: http://fusor.net/newbie/files/Ligon-QED-IE.pdf
Quite a few people have built operational fusors, including many high school students: http://fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13&p=512
A teenager built a fusion reactor FFS. I had trouble making coffee this morning.
This is the Maker top 1% - and should be celebrated, not compared poorly to other similar attempts.
You appeared to see it as negative...fascinating.
Lessons from a marriage.
In fact, carefully replicating other people's complicated experiments is what science is about. If you want to pretend that you're being original take up structural knitting or something.
The original comment's context was very useful because it tells us that the article isn't about some crazy and dangerous attempt to build a fission reactor by hoarding radioactive waste (see: scary link from patio11) but about an experiment that has been legitimately accomplished by high school students in the past and which is rather less dangerous (because it doesn't start irradiating nearby objects, like your body, until you throw the switch... and you don't need to leave it turned on much longer than it takes to read a Geiger counter and high-five somebody.)
It was a much smaller community, then. And it was, perhaps more so than today, supportive -- genuinely supportive.
But it was about information. And support was not about obligatory glad-handing or pats on the back. Some of it could be fairly critical, at times. Informatively critical and in the interest of improvement, for the target of criticism and for the community at large. "Constructive" criticism, I guess.
Not that I perceived the comment that started this sub-thread as being critical. (Except perhaps -- if one chose to take it that way -- of what might be a hyped news headline. Not the student.)
I really appreciate the context that comment provides. If I'd known that when I was a student, maybe I would have had another interesting thing to try out.
Well, it depends on his budget, and what equipment he had already. If you have unlimited money, you can build a fusor straight from a Cole-Parmer catalog.
Buy a vacuum chamber, bolt a turbopump on it, connect a roughing pump to that, bolt the thermoelectric vacuum gauge on, bolt a off-the-shelf HV passthrough to the chamber, plug in the HV psu, pump it down to 1 micron, backfill it with deuterium, flip the switch, bask in the neutron radiation. Easy.
The only thing that requires actual fabrication is the grids, which a competent welder can make in 20 minutes with a MIG and some bent stainless welding rod. Everything else is pure COTS.
If he didn't have $50k, then it could have been almost arbitrarily hard. A 40 year old two-stage mechanical pump+diffusion pump can do the high vacuum required, if you don't have the money for a modern setup-- only if you keep them flawlessly maintained, (including frequent oil changes, to replace the gunk that dissolves into it) and don't mind 24 hour pumpdown times. You can build your own chamber instead of using commercial flange hardware, if you've got a week of free time. You can kludge together a 75K HV PSU by running a couple microwave oven transformers in series, in a vat of transformer oil to keep them from arcing over.
Either this fusor was high-dollar legos, or it was an epic year-long engineering job. We don't know, because the article is a lot more interested in bureaucratic trivia rather than the fusor itself.
(There's a sad coda at the end where the kid did not learn the lesson about the wisdom of scratch-building nuclear reactors out of foil and smoke detectors.
A modified version (accelerating electrons instead of fuel ions, using magnetically shielded and actively cooled superconducting accelerator grids) shows some promise for actual power production: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
On a more serious note, I suppose one of these devices could be used as part of an apparatus for doing a novel experiment.
There were no details about his fusion reactor (the thing I actually wanted to read about), just talk about his disqualification from some science fairs.
The main reason I posted it was to get other people's opinion on it (since I don't have a degree in science).
What are your thoughts on the comedic potential? (ie a Farnsworth getting kicked out of a science fair despite building a reactor.)
Besides, I was hoping to hear more about the reactor :(
I want to know how he didn't qualify at his first science fair. Maybe he can build and follow directions but doesn't know the science part well enough. is there another story about how this kid entered a science fair with a nuclear reactor but didn't qualify for the international contest?
They are now likely to continue on this path, practising and following in others footsteps until one day they make something that no-one has made before. Enough of these teenagers and we might just survive the century as a human race.