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College Freshman Builds Fusion Reactor
Aiua writes "The Deseret Morning News is reporting that a Utah State University freshman has built a nuclear fusion reactor and compares how the student is similar to Philo T. Farnsworth (the inventor of the television and designer of the plans for a fusion reactor)."
Check out Fusor.net.
Yawn.
In a way. In one of the episode commentary tracks on the Futurama Season 1 DVD set, it's revealed that Philo was the good professor's namesake.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
No, it's not cold fusion. It's been around for a long time, and it's been mentioned here before. See the wikipedia entry at:
_ Fu sor
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch
Good way to win a Darward Award while still living if you ask me...
Blockwars: free, multiplayer, and with new features!
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?
p
And
Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
I can see the second.. but the first!?!?!?
http://www.sciserv.org/isef/results/grnd2003.as
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
the /. editors got suckered on this one - if you RTFA you'll see that it isn't actually a fusion reactor or reaction at all. What it is is a deuterium ion plasma generator. While not actually fusion, Deuterium ion plasma holds some promise for fusion research. However, it is - as the article states - useful as a neutron radiation generator. That's mostly what this kid has accomplished - NOT fusion.
Scientists have built PLENTY that work. But they do not produce more energy than it takes to maintain the reaction. This one does not, either.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Unfortunately, Wallace's IEC, like every other IEC ever built, doesn't get even close to break-even. Their primary utility is, as the article mentions, as a neutron source (and in fact that's what they're usually used for). There are some folks that are hopeful they can find a way to improve the efficiency of IEC fusion and exceed break-even (Robert Bussard, of Bussard ram-jet fame, for example), but no one's managed to actually demonstrate a working, energy-generating IEC yet.
Philo T. Farnsworth (the inventor of the television... )
The inventor of television is not necessarily Farnsworth -- there are several scientists with good claims on the title (including John Logie Baird, after whom the Logie television awards are named).
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
A good fusor reference with some close-up pictures of a working device is available here.
Actually, there were sevral other winners in the physics catagory alone. from: http://www.sciserv.org/isef/results/grnd2003.asp
Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of $5,000 for Top First Place Winner
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
First Award of $3,000
PH029 Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?
Jennifer Anne D'Ascoli, 17, Academy of the Holy Names, Albany, New York
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
Second Award of $1,500
PH005 The Effect of Salinity on the Production and Duration of Antibubbles
Michael J. Pizer, 14, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
PH040 Magnetoplasmadynamics: Ionization and Magnetic Field
Ray Chengchuan He, 19, Hempfield High School, Landisville, Pennsylvania
PH046 Nuclear Fusion Reactor Apparatus
Craig J. Wallace, 18, Spanish Fork High School, Spanish Fork, Utah
PH054 Electron-Phonon Interactions in Carbon Nanotubes
Edward Joesph Su, 18, William G. Enloe High School, Raleigh, North Carolina
It says that there are about 30 such reactors around. The special thing about this one is, that is was made from scrap parts. Please understand that there's really not all that much fusion happening here, definiteley not enough to get any energy output from it, you have to put energy in to heat the stuff up.
It's probably all really simple: every once in a while a deuterium core will tunnel into another deuterium core and cling to it (the actual process to get to He is probably a bit more complicated). That's fusion happening, only the odds are very bad. Create deuterium plasma, cage it with electromagnetic fields to apply some pressure and raise the energy high enough so the odds will get better. Aparently they get it to a few neutrons per minute (they measure 4 per minute).
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
the /. editors got suckered on this one - if you RTFA you'll see that it isn't actually a fusion reactor or reaction at all. What it is is a deuterium ion plasma generator. While not actually fusion, Deuterium ion plasma holds some promise for fusion research. However, it is - as the article states - useful as a neutron radiation generator. That's mostly what this kid has accomplished - NOT fusion..
As someone who participated in this science fair. I spent much of my time working in labs, contacting professionals, ensuring safety in the lab, as well as thorough and detailed demonstration of the development of such research. My endeavor lasted three years, with much frustration in recieving materials, gathering funding (mostly personal), as well as balancing an accelerated education with my projects.
While his project is surprisingly complex and I am sure safe and well thought out, it is quite difficult to demonstrate such an accomplishment in a concise and easily acceptable form. There are limitations given to contestants involving time to present, space, and strict rules regarding what projects are allowed to be running during the interview and booth judging.
As far as who has actually won first place in the physics section of the fair, following is a list of the overall, first and second place winners, as taken from the intel science fair website:
Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of $5,000 for Top First Place Winner
PH053
Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
First Award of $3,000
PH029
Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?
Jennifer Anne D'Ascoli, 17, Academy of the Holy Names, Albany, New York
PH053
Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
Second Award of $1,500
PH005
The Effect of Salinity on the Production and Duration of Antibubbles
Michael J. Pizer, 14, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
PH040
Magnetoplasmadynamics: Ionization and Magnetic Field
Ray Chengchuan He, 19, Hempfield High School, Landisville, Pennsylvania
PH046
Nuclear Fusion Reactor Apparatus
Craig J. Wallace, 18, Spanish Fork High School, Spanish Fork, Utah
PH054
Electron-Phonon Interactions in Carbon Nanotubes
Edward Joesph Su, 18, William G. Enloe High School, Raleigh, North Carolina
OBLIVION!-
maybe because you refuse to look? yes, cold fusion got a bad rap and may very well be a crock of... non-fusing stuff. but there are smart people who disagree:
quotes cribbed (using Copy-n-Paste[TM]) from the wired magazine article on cold fusion
give it a read.
2 1337 4 u!
As impressive as this is, it isn't fusion. Don't you guys read these articles?
"The ball is, literally, a small sun, where an electric field forces deuteron ions (a form of hydrogen) to gather, bang together and occasionally fuse, spitting out a neutron each time fusion occurs."
Yes.
Scroll about 2/3rds down the page or search for "Spanish".
He came in second in his category (Physics). He was beat by about 40-some-odd other students altogether, and tied with a hundred or so.
What beat him?
Phase transition in chaotic fluids,
Identifying genes with neural networks,
Investigation into geothermal activity on Venus
Silencing cancer with RNA
Novel asteroid distance determination technique
Capstone: Brain-computer interface for the disabled.
He may have not gotten as high marks because he wasn't really discovering anything new or pursuing a topic from a strange angle... it was a humoungous task of engineering, however, and this could not be overlooked.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
No, it isn't. If you just put enough U-235 together in the same place, it'll go BOOM all on its own.
A fusion bomb is just a fission bomb surrounding a dense deuterium/tritium core. Typically spherical to provide an even "squeeze" on the D/T mix. Blast plates push the plutonium together (of which the ciritcal mass is already widely known). It goes boom, crushing the D/T core with force beyond that found even in the sun. The core has nowhere to go, so it immediately fuses a good portion of its mass. The resulting secondary blast is even bigger than the fission explosion and gives us a really big boom.
It actually is pretty hard to make an implosion-type bomb work. They didn't work out the designs using slide rules, but actually cobbled together what was a hell of a lot of computing power for the day. I don't remember if they actually built any general-purpose electronic computers, but at least some of the work was done by large teams of workers using single purpose calculating machines. One machine would could add, another multiply, etc. and the system was "programmed" by coming up with a specific order in which IBM cards containing the information being processed were run through the system. Richard Feynman discussed a lot about this system in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Admittedly the average mobile phone these days probably had enough processing power to do those calculations, but the Nobel Prize winning minds in charge of the project had a lot more to do with its success than the raw processing power.
FWIW, you can learn far more than you ever wanted to know about nuclear weapons by reading the Nuclear Weapons Archive. When you understand everything in there, you can start thinking about building bombs.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
No, it isn't. If you just put enough U-235 together in the same place, it'll go BOOM all on its own.
If you don't put together just right, it will just melt and vaporize. "Right" means with sub-millisecond timing.
RTFA. In addition to the TV display, he was also using a neutron detector he came upon. He didn't do anything new either, he copied the expeiment done by Farnsworth, and managed to dupliace his neutron generator. Fusion is being accomplished, but nowhere near the levels it needs to be, to be any kind of power source.
You could drink it
You could drink it, but you wouldn't want to drink a lot of it. Heavy water in concentrations of over 50% apparently inhibits mitosis (cell division) and would lead to eventual death if not reduced. The symptons are similar to radiation poisoning/chemo with bone marrow, the stomach lining, and hair growth suffering the most damage since these tissues/process are dependent on high cell division rates.
You would have to ingest fairly significant amounts of D2O over serveral days to do this though. A concentration of 25% heavy water or less is most likely safe.
I remembered this, so I went looking for it. Amazing what you can pull up on google. The shed did not glow. He did however, make a makeshift breeder reactor and enough radioactive material to be detected from five houses down.
The tale of the radioactive boyscout
-------------------------------------------------
Farnsworth fusors have been built by the dozens by many amateurs. In fact, anyone with little knowledge of high voltages and some crafty skills can make one. It's nothing more than a chamber which turns deuterium into plasma and a pump to keep it going. Some additionally have a neutron counter. Many believe that pushing the Farnsworth fusor is the precursor to cold fusion, but many more disagree. Nevertheless, this is nothing to be excited about. It would probably be more challanging to put together an erector set.
A blog like any other.
You don't even need electricity for that. Just mix beryllium with a good source of alpha particles like radium. Beryllium 9 undergoes an (alpha,n) fusion reaction with an incident alpha particle, generating carbon 12 and a loose neutron.
Beryllium 9 is great because it's essentially two helium nuclei held together by a loose neutron with a very low binding energy (1.66 MeV). It's almost the nuclear equivalent of an alkali metal. You can even pop the thing apart with a gamma ray if you don't want to bother with alpha emitters. For those who worry about berylliosis, boron 11 also works. The (alpha,n) reaction yields nitrogen 14.
This was the setup that Chadwick used for detecting the neutron in 1932. Back then neutrons were referred to as "beryllium radiation" (sort of like how electrons were first called "cathode rays") and were wrongly thought to be some sort of strongly penetrating photons. Chadwick surrounded his beryllium source with wax and measured the energies of the protons that got knocked out by elastic collisions. Wax is a great moderator because it's full of protons, and the neutron slams into a proton in the wax and loses all its energy like a billiard ball. The neutron that emerges from the wax is a slow neutron. Slow neutrons are generally much more useful than fast neutrons because they spend more time in your fissionable material, and there is no Coulomb barrier that they need to overcome so they react with nuclei very easily.
I shouldn't say too much more or else I'll get myself placed on the Bush Administration's new list of 100,000 maniacs. But if you're building a fission bomb, these reactions are really handy because your implosion doesn't last very long and you need to get hold of lots of slow neutrons in a hurry. If you're building a nuclear reactor for power generation, you're under less of a tight schedule and can probably wait a millisecond or two for neutrons from cosmic rays or spontaneous fissions to get your pile going.
No, if you just push a critical mass of decaying stuff together you don't get much of a boom. To get a real boom out of the bomb you have to have VERY precise timining and compression characteristics. Otherwise you basically have a compact HE dirty bomb. If all you want is a realitivly large explosion and some nuclear fallout it's easier to get a load of decaying but not capable of critical mass stuff and place it around a large conventional explosive like say a truck full of kerosene and fertilizer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The four neutrons/minute quoted would be the detected rate. Given that the detector efficiency is probably around .01%, factoring in the solid angle, he's probably generating ~40000 neutrons/minute.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cyclotron &r=67
If this guy truly built a Farnsworth fusor, then you're wrong - the fusor really is capable of creating nuclear fusion. People building these things have measured the neutrons to prove it.
The heart of the machine is some kind of electrode which uses energy from the fusion reaction itself to reinforce the electric field which is used to trigger the reaction (I guess by picking up energy from the energetic alpha particles & electrons between blasted out in all directions at really high energy levels from inside the electrode). Unfortunately, the reaction is not sustainable - the same effect which can force the deuterium together strongly enough to create fusion also prevents any _new_ fuel from entering from the outside of the field, thus causing the collapse of the reaction once all the fuel is consumed.
Farnsworth really was a genius at manipulating electric fields. It's too bad he died early, or he might've been able to figure out how to make his fusor practical.
In my day we called it a moderator. Why didn't he just use charcoal, coal or graphite?
And another thing, I thought it was John Logie Baird that invented (mechanical) television and Marconi who invented magnetically-scanned television? Maybe in America, everything was invented by Americans independently of the rest of the world?
Stick Men
I would not necessarily call Philo Taylor Farnsworth the inventor of TV. Electronic TV, yes, along with transmission of TV signals (demonstrated in 1927), but Baird was the first to demonstrate a working "television" - a mechanical device, demonstrated in 1925. Farnsworth's used a scanning technique, much different in design to Baird's.
I think Baird was the first to get colour working (in WW2). There were many others too, such as Zworykin (invented similar things, parallel to Farnsworth), Du Mont (invented the CRT), and Nipkow (invented the scanning disk in 1884, the basis for mechanical TVs).
More info here and here.
-- Steve
The heart of the machine is some kind of electrode which uses energy from the fusion reaction itself to reinforce the electric field which is used to trigger the reaction
Nope. It's basically two electrodes - an outer and inner spherical or conical system. By applying a high voltage, electrons or positive ions are attracted towards the inner elecrode, where they get trapped, collide, or overshoot.
In simplified terms, some of the ions flying through/near the centre can have enough energy to undergo nuclear fusion.
As far as ive read, one of the big problem is the occasional collisions with the wires that form the electrodes. This wastes energy and causes decay. Future research involves "virtual" electrodes or magnetic sheilding.
For your sake, it is tokamak.
:
:
I find it annoying when people spell words as they hear them. Wich works in german, but not at all in english. Especially if you have a thick american accent.
As far as LTFS, you might want to ask yourself how on earth the neutron might come out of the fusion reaction
H + H + energy -> He + energy.
See, no excess neutrons. However,
H + energy -> p+ + n + e-
Not that this reaction is possible also
H + H +energy -> He +n +energy
In which case one excess neutron is liberated, but I do not know which reaction is more likely.
BOllox - John Logie Baird invented television, though it relied on a mechanical contraption for projecting a picture. Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube, which managed to put a picture on a screen without the moving parts; but not until there was actually anything to display using one.
Then someone had the idea of, instead of charging people for the privilege of watching TV and using the money raised to pay for high-quality programmes that would at once inform, educate and entertain, letting people watch telly for free but showing advertisements during the breaks between programmes, and using the advertising money to pay for programmes that ultimately would do little more than fill in the breaks between adverts. IMHO that was the disinvention of television.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You didn't read the article either. It is fusion. It's just not self-sustained (only generating four neutrons a minute). It's still fusion.
More specifically, you mean to write:
.)
(1) H-2 + H-2 -> He-4 + gammas
Or,
(2) H-2 + gamma -> H-1 + n (We'll ignore the electrons)
And the alternate one you discuss is either:
(3) H-2 + H-2 -> He-3 + n + gamma
or
(4) H-2 + H-3 -> He-4 + n + gamma
(I believe this is the one the tokamak project is using. I'm inevitably wrong on this.)
His reaction, from the article description, is probably:
(5) H-1 + H-2 -> H-1 + H-1 + n
I have no evidence to back this up, other than the fact that they never spoke of Helium really being produced, and the lack of tritium in the discussions. By the way, we can also do a some calculations, to determine the Q-value of these reactions: (using This chart of the Nuclides Table
Q=(m_init-m_final)c^2 =>
(5) Q= -2.2 MeV In other words, These ionized atoms would have to be travelling quite fast. (It is endothermic after all.)
What about the ones that release energy? How fast do they have to be moving?
Well, from this page we're talking the temperature would have to be between 4 x 10^7 and 4 x 10^8 K, which is kinda hot. You may be able to make a lot of assumptions about the occasional fast moving particle using temperature distribution graphs.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
You can find the results at http://www.sciserv.org/isef/results/grnd2003.asp Wallace was one of several Second award winners. First award went to two projects: "Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?" and "Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow"
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Interesting question, IANAP but i think:
Fission = H + energy -> p+ + n + e-
Fusion = H + H +energy -> He +n +energy
I would guess that the fusion is less likely, and would require more energy because it requires smashing two H atoms together at sufficient force to overcome repulsion, whereas fission just requires sufficent energy to be absorbed by a single H atom.
But I'm probably totally wrong - anyone with some more physics out there?
So this kid builds this amazing thing and he wins second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland.
What won first place, you might ask? According to Intel's page on it, there were in fact 3 winners. One developed a new method for determining the distance of asteroids from Earth, another developed a program that may one day enable a person with muscular disabilities to use brainwaves to control a computer keyboard, and the third set out to solve how to treat cancer patients effectively without destroying their healthy cells.
MORTAR COMBAT!
The article misrepresented the situation; that is not a small sun. Suns emit more energy than they absorb, until they run out of exothermically fusable elements.
-- Out of cheese error! Redo from start.
No, he doesn't. From the linked article, in the Objectives section.
It's a pretty set of sketches and projections (right down to very detailed guesstimates at the income and return on investment for a hypothetical company who might want to fund this project) but it is by no means a working generator. He hasn't even achieved break-even yet. Don't hold your breath.
~Idarubicin
Baird was the inventor of mechanical scanning television.
e nted_what.html
Q: How many of those are in use today?
A: About 1x10^e-120 (okay, so it's a guess)
Philo Farnsworth invented the electronic scanning system that you watch today.
Vladimir Zworykin, who is often cited as the "inventor" of television said after his 1930 visit to Farnsworth lab that "I wish I might have invented it."
Of course, Zworkin was in the employ of David Sarnoff of RCA. (as an aside: if you think that Microsoft is an anti-competitive monopoly, you should check out "Radio" of the 1920s. They had a portfolio of literally hundreds of patents that effectively denied entry in the radio marketplace unless you went first to them and paid licensing fees. And if Radio did not like you or wanted to own you, no license and no business for you.)
Anyways, Sarnoff wanted RCA to dominate television the same way that they dominated radio. RCA tried for many years to discredit Farnworth and his invention, instead saying that Zworkin had invented the iconoscope in 1923. This, history shows us, was clearly a lie. It is a lie as grand as Apple or Microsoft claiming the invention of the graphical user interface for computing. Or that Marconi invented radio. Neither is true.
History does show that on September 27, 1927 Philo T. Farnsowrth demonstrated the first all-electronic television system.
Farnsworth was a brilliant man, and should be given full credit for all that he did.
For more info: http://www.farnovision.com/chronicles/tfc-who_inv
Go to your local university and get the funding figures. Average the budgets, endowments, etc. etc. for Humanities and Social Sciences departments in one column and then the same for Sciences and Engineering departments in the other column. Chances are that one is definitely better funded, and it is not the Humanities/Social Sciences column that I'm speaking of.
Another way to check is to compare the stipends/scholarships/etc. given to graduate students in these respective divisions. Again you will typically find that the "hard sciences" are much better funded, much better respected, and even much better understood. Administration tends to favor the fusion project over the Durkhiem coloquium because they know what fusion is.
Note that this has little or no bearing on the public economy, which really favors business (including the business of entertainment) since business makes a point of connecting and communicating with the populace at large in the most user-friendly, attractive ways possible. You will never find a physicist who is as popular as a movie star simply because the physicist does not have a publicist, a career strategist, a hair guy, a make-up guy and a plastic surgeon. News agencies and talk shows do not go around looking under rocks for people to put on their shows, they rely on press releases and phone calls from publicists for the bulk of their stories and/or guests.
Any spare change the physicist encounters will usually go right back into his baby (a.k.a. current project), whatever that happens to be, rather than to making him famous and attractive.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The shed didn't "glow" to the naked eye. That was a misreading of the article, and now an urban legend. It "glowed" on radiation detectors. The government noticed when their methods normally used to search for rouge nuclear programs came up with a major source of radiation that was not registered. (Normally anything that might show up on such a scan has to be registered, so that the spy equipment doesn't issue panic alarms every time someone gets an X-ray done or a university runs a small physics experiment.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.