Modulator? Now that would be cool. Try moderator. Much more pedestrian, but probably more accurate.
Too poor to buy pricey deuterium gas, Craig bought a container of deuterium oxide, or heavy water, for 20 bucks...
20 bucks for a "container" of D2O? I wonder how big that container was? Sounds like a pretty good price to me.
Wallace's detector measures 36 neutrons per minute just in background radiation from space, and the device's usual output adds only four neutrons per minute.
Not to denigrate the kid's work, because it's obvious he worked hard and was creative and learned something, but is anyone else out there wondering about the counting statistics here? It appears that the increase in count rate is within the expected uncertainty just based on Poisson statistics, unless he ran a lot of tests to reduce the sizable of the uncertainty bands. That isn't clear from what is discussed, but I assume he had to have done that otherwise the judges would have questioned the results on that basis (I know I would have). Maybe he ran a very long counting interval and normalized it to cpm. But in that case drift becomes an issue (not necessarily a fatal one) with pulse counting.