14 Year old Thiel Fellow creates his own nuclear fusion plant [video] | Hacker News Reader

14 Year old Thiel Fellow creates his own nuclear fusion plant [video]

nbcnews.com

80 pointspetenixey28 comments

Calling what the 19 year old Taylor Wilson built at age 14 a "fusion plant" is somewhat misleading. For me, a "fusion plant" is a device that generates power. His machine, a Farnsworth fusor, should more appropriately be called a "reactor", because it can only sustain a fusion reaction, but it cannot generate power. Building Farnsworth fusors is not too hard, given access to the right tools. Building fusion reactors that can be used as power plants, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. The design is a lot more complex, because plasmas don't scale well and tend to get unstable as they get bigger. For comparison: A Farnsworth fusor can be built for around 1000 Euros, but it's Q-value (=output_power/input_power) is so low that I have trouble even estimating it. Based on a quote of "multiple hundreds of thousands of neutrons per seconds" for describing a "dangerous design", the fusion power is somewhere between a nanowatt and a microwatt, which makes the Q-value something like 10^-10. For more complex fusion reactor designs based on magnetic confinement, the best Q-value that has been achieved so far was a value of 0.7 at the JET facility in the UK, 1997. A new reactor is currently being built in southern France. It is called "ITER", and it is hoped that it can reach a Q-value of around 10. This is the type of Q-value that you need for a fusion power plant. ITER is projected to cost around 16 billion euros.

I think there is a lot of sensationalization, because teens aren't really expected to do much while they are teens and you do something like this - then catch words like wizkid and wonder boy or whatever get thrown around - "he certainly has shown the stupid scientists spending billions of dollars building a fusion reactor!"

fact of the matter is - today there is just so much information available on the net that you can pretty much build a 3d-printer or a cat scanner or whatever else you fancy at your home.

the bar for being a genius has significantly lowered since the 90s.

If you watched the video, it's pretty clear that the kid is actually a genius. He's done a heck of a lot since what he did at 14.

Minor nitpick, but I don't like this characterization of genius. He has not accomplished a lot through just being a genius; he accomplished a lot through discipline and extreme effort. Genius probably made it all easier, but I feel that ascribing one's accomplishments to one's intelligence ignores the hours upon hours of hard work that goes into them.

Even ITER won't actually generate usable electrical power - the heat generated by the reactor will simply be used to warm up water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Cooling_systems

Actual power generation will have to wait until the follow up DEMO project, which should actually have fusion powered electrical power generation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO

One of the reasons why the timeline is so long is that a reactor will have to be connected to a system that can exchange the tritium (and deuterium). Now, since both are hydrogen isotopes they can diffuse like crazy. Leaks of tritium are bad because it is radioactive (alpha radiation, which is not so bad unless incorporated, but it's a gas, so yeah). Also, some processing like isotope sorting will have to be in the circle. Right now, all these new technologies are being developed, which takes a lot of work, money, time and PhD students.

Imagine taking the title at face value (teen builds fusion reactor), then listening to the hilarious intro:

"Most of us are unable to build our very own fusion reactor, at least in our teenage years - who has the space? You're about to meet Taylor Wilson, who has already achieved that milestone, and is looking at a better-than-average future in the world of science."

Tough crowd!

Thank you. In the video they make it sound like he invented it.

I expect no less than misleading from the mainstream media.

Still... He was only 14. I'm impressed.

... he was 14.

A 14-year-old who didn't build a fusion plant.

No doubt, this guy is brilliant. That said, hobbyists have been building IEC fusion reactors like the one in the video for decades. It's not unheard of for people to build them for high school science fairs. A site with a lot of information on the subject is http://www.fusor.net/

And the current issue of Make has instructions for building one.

To be fair, he did a lot more than build the fusor. Watch the video.

It's common to see parents push their children into doing things that they aren't ready for to create the illusion their child is gifted. I don't see any evidence of that in this case - the kid truly seems both smart and hard working which is a rare combination.

Truly speaks to the power of diversity within a large population. You will get all kinds of anomalies with 7 billion people on the planet. Some large, some small, some dim, some bright. Every once in a while appearing to generate a profoundly gifted person that does have the ability to change the world. In this instance we're fortunate he was born into the resources that allowed him to use it rather than, for example, dying from malaria at the age of 5.

I agree. He comes across as a great communicator, cheerful and outgoing, and is genuinely driven by his interest in science, as opposed to being forced by his parents (who seem nice/normal) to be "a genius" which can often lead to bad things later in life as an adult - burnout, depression, substance abuse etc.

It's a shame many HN'rs on this discussion thread can't see the bright side of things with this kid. Yes I agree he didn't build a full blown power generating fusion reactor, but what he did get to work on (and understand how it works) is far beyond what most kids get up to at age 14. Good luck to him and I look forward to seeing him contribute good things to humanity through his science and research.

Finally a teen, who can talk in non-bias way and without fallacies :) I wish this world would be like he is..

Someone fix the title? It's a video, and he's 19.

But he was 14 when he created the nuclear fusion plant! I enjoyed the video.

"Theil Fellow created his own nuclear fusion plant aged 14"?

19 year old Thiel Fellow created his own nuclear fusion plant at age 14?

It's a video.

I came here to see the predictable comments of "f@?k him, I could do the same thing in an afternoon with wordpress and php." Sure enough, that was the gist of almost every comment.

Well he isn't 'disrupting' any web technology, and hasn't written a bouncing 'hello world' with only CSS ... pity.

Wait until he has a 'real' promising startup idea, like a site to post messages to his friends, then we'll be mildly impressed.

Just a "you need flash" page for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson seems to be it.

His conclusion? We are stuck in the fifties (unsafe power plant designs were created then)...

The school he goes to, Davidson Academy for the profoundly gifted reminds me a ton of the 1980s movie Real Genius http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/

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