Posted on 06/20/2015 4:44:59 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Taylor Wilson has a Geiger counter watch on his wrist, a sleek, sporty-looking thing that sounds an alert in response to radiation. As we enter his parents’ garage and approach his precious jumble of electrical equipment, it emits an ominous beep. Wilson is in full flow, explaining the old-fashioned control panel in the corner, and ignores it. “This is one of the original atom smashers,” he says with pride. “It would accelerate particles up to, um, 2.5m volts – so kind of up there, for early nuclear physics work.” He pats the knobs.
It was in this garage that, at the age of 14, Wilson built a working nuclear fusion reactor, bringing the temperature of its plasma core to 580mC – 40 times as hot as the core of the sun. This skinny kid from Arkansas, the son of a Coca-Cola bottler and a yoga instructor, experimented for years, painstakingly acquiring materials, instruments and expertise until he was able to join the elite club of scientists who have created a miniature sun on Earth.
Not long after, Wilson won $50,000 at a science fair, for a device that can detect nuclear materials in cargo containers – a counter-terrorism innovation he later showed to a wowed Barack Obama at a White House-sponsored science fair.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
bringing the temperature of its plasma core to 580mC – 40 times as hot as the core of the sun///
In the garage?! I know nothing about this stuff, but that sounds incredibly dangerous.
Fusion is fairly easy — it can be driven by a high voltage discharge in a near vacuum of hydrogen gas given basement laboratory facilities. And it will show clearly what it is doing on a Geiger counter. Getting the fusion to continuously (i.e. not once as in a bomb) yield back more energy than was expended to ignite it is a different trick, and that is what copious modern research in advanced laboratories has been about.
Remember what burnout did to Dr. Richard Daystrom.
It will definitely send out a lot of radiation.
I’m going to ask stupid questions. Was there any danger of some kind of reaction? Could the radiation have damaged neighbors? Did he get too much and not know it? Isn’t it illegal?
Didn’t he need uranium or plutonium?
I know it’s too many questions but this is confusing the heck out of me.
Lower case “m” is milli (x 0.001) and upper case “M” is mega (x 1,000,000).
That's nothing, I have a working nuclear reactor in my garage. It's how I power my Jacuzzi.
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What he has made is a version of the Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor.
First proposed by Philo T. Farnsworth the acknowledged inventor of television.
There is a lot of info about Fusors available on the internet. Just do a google search.
You'll even find all kinds of plans to construct you own fusors.
That’s a BIG difference!! Thanks :)
I still dont understand it, but I do know whatever it is, it’s an awful lot less, lol.
But he had something in his garage 4 times hotter than the sun’s core!! That’s sounds incredible and dangerous. I guess you have to understand physics to understand this article.
It must work great!!
580 milliCelcius? That's almost cold enough to freeze water... almost.
I just love science writers who don't know science. It grates on the ears like hearing a sports reporter talking about a baseball player getting a field goal.
that makes sense. thanks.
Enough exposure to the radiation while operating could be harmful to humans, so dense shielding is advised. No radioactive metal is needed nor would it produce much, if anything, by way of lingering nuclear by-products.
It is driven by a high voltage discharge in low pressure tritium (isotope of hydrogen gas, an isotope that isn’t radioactive on its own accord). In the resulting hyper-excited ionized gas (or plasma) extremely high temperatures are achieved and some nuclei will knock together with enough energy to fuse into higher density elements. The quantities are tiny, but because of the efficiency of e=mc2 the energy produced is enough to be harmful when emitted as nuclear radiation.
Amateur grade apparatus is all that is needed to reproduce this scientific curiosity.
I followed a little of that. What’s your IQ? 300? :)
It was enough to follow what a bright sixth grader would have been able to gather back during the cold war days, when they explained nuclear fusion and fission in science class. In pubskewl!
Education has been so dumbed down since. Children are not dull. Education is.
They really explained that in class? geez. And I went to a private school and I dont recall it being touched on at all. I’m 47.
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