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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)."
What I love is how the article is completely free of those "fact" things. All I see is a tv screen with some molecules on it. I wrote a program that put molecules on a tv screen when I was a freshman too.
I don't know. If its real, that's excellent. But my BS-o-meter is screaming.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This thing has a vaccum pump attatched to it, I wonder why?
Either way, that would be one part you could omit if this were launched into space. Could anyone familiar with how this thing works tell me if it would run in space?
I was once an ISEF finalist/winner. "Second place" is a designation given to a substantial number of projects at the International fair. There are like 5-10 blue (first), 10-30 red (second), etc. The biggest winners are in a seperate catagory -- things like the, "BLAH T. BLAH SCIENCE AWARD" that includes a trip to Japan, or a trip to see the Nobel ceremonies, etc etc. Interestingly, building a project like this is really only a certain level of merit at a real science fair (like ISEF). I used to build devices like that -- and get awards like second place. The real thing the judges are looking for is scientific/research content. For instance, the kid may have built this and got it to work, but did he improve on the design? did he measure the efficiency of the system? did he use the device to study some effect X, Y, or Z? This may sound crazy, but at that level the high school students are expected to perform at the level of grad student researchers. The winning doesn't really matter, though -- the kid got a postiive experience that will stay with him for the rest of his life...!
If you think this guy is brilliant, take a look at this guy's page. He built a CYCLOTRON(!!!) when he was in his senior year of HS! (he's now doing grad school work at Fermilab, what a shocker)
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
...this is a lot better effort by a kid (and a great read, too). I mean - this guy's doctoral thesis got classified Top Secret, etc... *and* he got to hang out with The Big Guys of Nuclear Physics and Weapons Making... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D068803351 2/thebrowsersbookwA/102-5759479-8637704
Like I said, I am not denigrating the kids work or his obvious smarts and the way he applied them - what I am getting at is the story title "here" was misleading. If the device was a Tesla coil, the headline would've claimed "Young Inventor Tames Lightning!"...
Are We Agreed?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
i gotta be honest with ya - this kid is going to get a visit from uncle sam, but most likely it will be one of those: "Hello Kind Sir, We will pay you, and provide you anything you want, please come help us blow people up." Kindof a conversation... Come join the family, Poppy takes good care of his family.
... hi bingo
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.
Personally, I think these devices are far more likely to generate succes than the current breed of "tokamak" style reactors. They've had 20 years and upteen billion dollars, and still think it will take anotehr 20 years longer.
I for one think it's lucicrous (to the point of conspiracy), and if fusion can be generated so easily through these devices, then it is certainly worth more funding/research.
But then again, what do I know?
"Since Marconi's invention of wireless telegraphy in 1897," ...which shows that they don't know that the telegraph was invented by Morse (in 1835) and that precedence for the "wireless" goes to Tesla--not Marconi.
Not sure if this is a very odd troll or not. Anyway, for the benefit of the public... Morse invented the wired telegraph, so he's got no claim on wireless telegraphy and is irrelevant to the issue. Marconi was transmitting Morse code in 1895, whereas Tesla started transmitting voltage in 1893. So yes, Tesla was transmitting wirelessly first, but it was in 100,000 volt discharges of electricity -- hardly the sort of transmission you'd like to receive in your headphones! And plainly not intended to be a telegraph.
Tesla was a cool guy and invented lots of interesting stuff, but people have a tendency to get all cultish about him and ascribe all sorts of miracles to him. Rather than claiming Marconi's work as his, you'd do his memory a better service by honouring him for his own achievements (like AC power).
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I actually read quite a bit on these devices a few weeks ago when the cold fusion article came up on /.
One of the things I came across was Fusor, which is essentially a site for people who do this as a hobby.
The most interesting thing I found was a link to the work of a gentleman named Eric Lerner. He actually has a workable, scalable, power-generating reactor. His is based on "dense plasma focus". Thing is, he's already got the thing to 1 billion degrees - and he's going for the big time - the aneutronic p-B11 reaction. That only generates alpha particles - which can be directly converted into electricity. No nasty turbines or steam! Pretty amazing.
Does anyone remember this story?
cribPlease don't read my journal
John Logie Baird did invent the TV, and what's more he was one of the last lone scientists in a loft lab doing his own thing. However, his TV is nothing like the modern television (for which the Americans can reasonably claim credit for) it used a spinning disc with slits in it to selectively project an image on to various parts of the screen (the TV camera used the same system in reverse). In effect it was a mechanical TV, cool or what! In the UK dual signals were broadcast up until sometime in the 1940's I believe (don't quote me on that date I don't remember the exact one). Eventually, the signal for Logie Baird's TV system was switched off. One of the major prolems with his system was that the screen size of the TV was limited by the radius of the spinning disc - can you imagine a 36" widescreen version?!
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.
Especially when the word in question is Russian. The term is a contraction of "TOroidal KAmera with MAgnetic field". "Kamera" is Russian for "chamber".
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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.
/....
If by dying early you mean that 65 years old is "early," then sure... But for someone who conceived the principles of television at 13 years old and holds 300 U.S. and foreign patents, I'd say he did pretty good for himself in his lifetime. If only people spent more time thinking and inventing and less time reading
Is it just me, or was this a lucky find? I mean, even before 9/11, finding nuclear devices was pretty hard.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
You're right, that is a simple way to generate neutrons--for those who happen to have radium lying around the house.
Actually, I suppose some people do, and it's giving them lung cancer--radon is a decay product of radium.
Finally, a word of warning about beryllium. The bulk material isn't terribly nasty--it's not particularly readily absorbed through the skin, and ingested beryllium mostly passes through the digestive tract. Powders can be quite harmful, however, causing--appropriately enough--berylliosis.
~Idarubicin
Farnsworth was also the first to build a working electronic television, although Zyorkin had a larger corporate backing. (The legal fight between the two is quite interesting reading).
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
More seriously, they were in a field in Maryland.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
If you take a look over at fusor.net, there are actually a bunch of us working towards just that. The main problem with the Farnsworth's team later designs is that they require very complex ion guns - the type that uses a gas pressure significantly higher in the guns than in the main chamber they fire into, requiring two sets of vacuum gear and more plumbing. We're still working on homemade ion guns.
Actually, some list members have recently figured out how (in theory) to use something called a wakefield accelerator to get many orders of magnitude more powerful ion guns than anything Farnsworth could ever build, and these toys are buildable by the amateur machinist.
Many list members (including myself, although I still a month or so away from "first plasma" in my first fusor) are building this hardware right now.
I have a little experience in this matter, and what really impresses me are the kid's scrounging abilities. A neutron detector in a scrap yard? A turbo-molecular pump from the DI? (FYI, Deseret Industries is the Utah equivalent of the Salvation Army or Goodwill). How in the heck? Jeez, do you know how much money that would have saved when I built ~my~ deuteron collider? I thought I was doing good by scrounging HV supplies out of a junked ion implanter. BTW, the Deseret News got it wrong - the CD's are a neutron MODERATOR not MODULATOR. In my experience, Paraffin Wax is probably better than CD's, and is cheap, but maybe he had too many AOL cd's lying around.
Yes, I built a fusion reactor in college too. Seriously. It's on my resume. Of course, I was a junior by the time I got it built. I didn't want to go with the Farnsworth design though - everyone knows how it underperforms (although it ~could~ be improved). Mine was a beam collider, more similar to the works of Rostoker or Maglich. It produced a LOT more fusion - I had to limit my time near it while it was on, in order to keep my dose down to reasonable levels. Darwin Awards, I know. Seriously, I was careful, and received about a Rad or two in the years I worked on it (more from x-rays than neutrons). Lead is your friend, water and borax too. I wish my college professors had been as supportive as the ones at USU appear to be. They discouraged undergraduate research, thinking we didn't know enough to do anything real (of course, skipping class to go work on FUZZY didn't get on their good side).
Yes, Farnsworth fusors are old news. I still think they are cool - the primary reason big science moves so slow is that it is so big. I don't know why more colleges don't build ones and let their kids play around with them. They're cheap! Get enough people messing with them and maybe something will come of it.
Strangely enough, I grew up in Utah too. Must be something in the water...
Heh - it's the only site I read as religiously as slashdot. :)
There are several physicists that have attempted to grab it all through patents (Miley, Bussard), and there are plenty of people who read the board and never contribute, only leach ideas to add to their own patent filings, but there are a number of people that still openly contribute VERY good ideas.
On the self-sustaining account, a number people doubt it, but I don't... There are some really neat aspects to the fusor, and there are MANY unexplored operating characteristics.
I bet that once we get a few amateur devices with pairs of synchronized wakefield accelerators firing into a reasonably designed virtual inner grid, with some rudimentary magnetic shielding of the grid and geometry optimized for recirculation, I bet we'll start seeing more accounts of self-sustaining reactions. Of course, theres the added problem that at those reaction rates the device had better be buried in a concrete bunker in the backyard...
Raise the grid voltage, change your ion source from deuterium gas to laser vaporized boron, and we can start playing with the mythical p+B11-> 2 beta reaction, and start playing with direct conversion! That's just too cool... I'd be happy to get a few picowatts of DC out of the reactor, that's my personal goal.
-Fred