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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)."
Is his name Dexter by any chance?
Philo T. Farnsworth? Is he any relation to Hubert Farnsworth, inventor of the smelloscope?
That kid obviously has waaaay too much time on his hands. I can't imagine doing that my freshman year.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Boy, it seems as though Utah has invented yet another way to do fusion... didn't a pair of scientists from Utah already invent fusion once before? What were their names? Pons and Fleischman?
Oh yeah, I forgot... that line of investigation went cold.
On the other hand, wouldn't the FBI be looking hard at him now that has built something like this?
Check out Fusor.net.
Yawn.
...Building it would get him older college chicks?
I mean, it's cool he could do this and all, but there's already 30 of these around the country, they don't produce any excess energy, other than that from what will soon be hundreds of little slash.fingers merrily typing away... Misleading intro to this story - I was all set for some kind of great breakthrough, and instead I get the equivalent of a SCO press staement - a story, some hot air, but nothing of real substance. Or am I missing some greater consequence of this?
He got second place in a science competition? It makes me wonder what project won first place. An advanced prototype of a nuclear fission weapon using kitchen grease as fissionable material? How manay days is it until April 1st?
"Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs. "
I guess we have a new winner for what to do with AOL CDs.
Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs.
He isn't a die hard nerd that sits around reading books all day, getting straight A's, and spending time doing various things the stereotypical nerd would do. It goes to show that we need to understand that people don't all see things the same, learn the same, and fit in the same model we believe works so well. This college student is more a mechanic than any typical scientist.
I point all this to intellectual property. He was fortunately able to obtain most of his material cheaply and easily, but what about most hobbyists that want to fidle with new technology? Where do they get the money for new tools, machines, etc? If we applied an open source model to intellectual property and treated ideas not as property, but as what they really are, then we could accelerate scientific and technological progress greatly. What this college student did is quite amazing. The thing he built is only found in top notch institutions. I just think we need more plagiarism prevention, not patents. Btw, I'm sorry for being somewhat off-topic, but I feel that there is an important lesson to be learned here.
Question everything.
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'
Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs.
RIAA: "They wouldn't be CD's with pirated music on them would they ??"
Wallace: "No sir, Mr. RIAA-man. But you can have a look yourself. I keep them over there in that nuclear reactor. Fill your boots."
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
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...!
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
The Bush Administration announced a military attack on Utah in order to destroy an incipient WMD program....
Are We Agreed?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
I'VE BEEN LOOKING ALL OVER FOR THAT!
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
" 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."
... ion plas*cough*aarghph*cough* for a fusion reactor? Hey Rob, what kind of Mickey Mouse show are you runnin' here?
Errr, yeah; what kind of stupid bastard mistakes a deu... deuterium
*darts eyes back and forth*
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Neutron generator tubes, that rely on deuterium-tritium fusion to generate neutrons, have been available for decades.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That is exactly why this kid DOES deserve a prize. He managed to make the device without a $10,000 research/developement grant. No he didn't create anything revolutanary, but he did accomplish an extraordinary acheivement. I'll drink to him tonight. (not that I really need an excuse)
Little Brother, watching the watchers
But if -you- RTFA, you would note, he -did- actually acheive fusion in the thing. Albeit, only a few molecules a minute, way to low to ever be used as a power source, but the device -did- fuse Deuterium ions. Which does have the side effect of generating the neutron radiation, which is negligable, as the article mentiones, no more than airline passengers are exposed to (being up there with a little less atmospheric cover).
Atrox
-Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
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!
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.
I don't doubt it is real. The fact that his machine only can generate 4 neutrons/minute above background makes it kind of wimpy fusor.
I had a boss once who built a Farnesworth-style fusor from scrounged parts sometime back in the late 60's or early 70's. He told me he kept it behind his desk for years.
At the time he ran the Nuclear Effects - Solar Thermal Test Facility at White Sands Missile Range (basically a BIG concentrating mirror for simulating the intense heat of a nuclear blast and its effect on materials). Frequently they would get VIP visitors dropping in from the Pentagon, major universities, etc. He would always take the visitors on a walking tour of the facility. He would flip the machine on ahead of time and turn on a geiger counter he kept next to his desk. At the end of the tour he would take the visitors to his office. Usually the visitors would notice the clicking sound after a few minutes of chit-chat and ask "what's making that sound?" He would then dead-pan "oh that's nothing, that's just the radiation from my fusion reactor" and wave the geiger counter back and forth across the machine, generating lots of above background clicking.
The fusor was completely safe and the neutron radiation from it was well within safe limits, but frequently the visitors would require a bit of calming down after his little joke.
I think at least one general thought he had created a fusion power source and wanted to classify the whole deal and immediately fund development. Don't imagine he was too happy when he found out it used alot of energy and produced only a few neutrons.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
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.
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.
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.
And why this apparently off-topic minor rant? Because we're seeing it here. The ones who probably can't even change a bicycle tire say "Oh that's easy, probably just followed the instruction book", not having the slightest clue about how difficult it is to make something from disparate parts. The ones who have got a clue or have been involved in projects like this have an idea of how difficult it really is, but actually they have no idea of how huge and insuperable the barrier is to 99% of the population - because they themselves are hardwired to know where to start.
It's about disparate rewards. The same level of skill and application this guy showed, applied to basketball or acting, might get him a multimillion dollar income. Why don't we perceive someone who spends hours bouncing a little ball around as being sad and geeky and having too much time on his hands? Why does someone who pretends to be other people, often not very well, get paid so much more than an astronaut or a fighter pilot who does something really, really difficult and dangerous?
Naive ramblings, I guess, but in the conversion of the human race from savannah apes to civilisation, it wasn't the actors and the basketball players that worked out how to bang the rocks together and how to get one stone to stick on top of another.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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
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.
Nevertheless, SCO cannot demand any money from the customers that use neutrons -- after all, they are free of charge.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Others thought it was cool, too. Wallace began winning contests -- local, state, national -- culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland. He's now beginning work on a USU physics degree.
Wow, building a nuclear fusion reactor only gets you second place in Intel's science contest? What did the kid who got first place do, find a cure for cancer?
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!
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