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Michigan Teen Creates Fusion Device
Josh Lindenmuth writes "The Detroit Free Press is reporting that Thiago Olson, a 17 year old Michigan teen, was able to create a small fusion device in his parents' basement. The machine uses a 40,000 volt charge and deuterium gas to create the small reaction, which he says looks like a 'small intense ball of energy.' The teen's fusion device is obviously not a self-sustaining reactor, but it still shows how fusion technology is becoming more accessible. Hopefully this points to a future where large scale fusion reactors are both economical and widely used."
Dueterium is present in all water, and can be refined fairly easily with electrolysis. All that's needed is some electricity and some fairly common instruments.
Just order it from any gas supplier. They deliver. It's not radioactive.
t ID=90&Keyword=deuterium
http://www.airgas.com/browse/product_list.aspx?ca
I think you're confusing deuterium with plain old hydrogen. You can extract hydrogen from water with electrolysis, but separating the deuterium (representing a vanishingly small percentage of the liberated hydrogen) from that would still be, to put it mildly, less than trivial.
IIRC, commercial heavy water plants do something that takes advantage of the slight difference in boiling point between D2O and H2O, and do a very delicate fractional distillation, over and over and over. The energy involved to do it is pretty immense, and it would be tough to do except under very carefully controlled conditions. Hydrogen sulfide may also be involved at some point in the process, as well, at least according to this WP article.
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You can buy D2O, for example from sigmal aldrich, for moderate prices, compared to the rest of the equipment. I dunno the actual price, but i bougt 100ml high purity ND4OD, obviously harder to make, for 150$ for 50ml, so i guess 95% grade D2O schould be 50% for 100ml.
Its a non hazard material, non radiative, and WAY to common for any kind of sale restriction to make any sense.
Isotopic purification is dead easy if the weight ratio is 2:1, vs for example 235:239...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
This is a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor . They are no big deal! Effectively it is like a vacuum tube, where an electrical charge is used to accelerate D+ ions until they smack into each other. No biggie! The energy levels needed for fusion are very small and can be achieved in a hand-held device. These fusors are used as laboratory neutron sources.
So if fusion is so easy, and if it's such a great power source, why aren't we using it right now to generate power? The Fusor device can easily make fusion happen but, for various reasons, it is not energy-positive fusion. The energy you get out of it cannot be capture in a useful way to get more energy than was put into it. So they're great for neutrons but not much else.
If someone could figure out a design that would be energy-positive then we would have something amazing but there's nothing there for that right now.
Not only is it not radioactive, it also isn't useful in non-thermonuclear fission weapons AFAIK. For a straight A-bomb, you really need enriched Uranium and/or Plutonium, but you have no need for Deuterium. Small quantities of Tritium can also be used in some designs, but I think that's a little beyond where Iran is today. It's only H-bombs that use Deuterium, and they're a lot more advanced than what we're talking about here.
I don't know what source the GP has for the US "having a fit" over Iranian Deuterium, but it sounds fishy to me. Either the US government is being irrational (what possible harm could Iran do with Deuterium?), or the GP doesn't actually have a clue what Deuterium is.
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Fusion is easy to verify: Deuterium-Deuterium fusion spits out a proton at a well know energy level (3ish MeV) and a tritium atom.
Deuterium-Tritium fusion spits out a neutron at a well know enegery level (14ish MeV), and a helium. With the appropriate gear either the proton or the neutron are easy to spot/measure.
You can get Deuterium Oxide from http://www.unitednuclear.com/chem.htm (and probably many other chemical suppliers) from which you can make deuterium gas.
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Amazed that no one's posted this yet in a story about amateur physics
Forgot... No, it's not an anti-catholic site. It's supposed to be "autopope" but that got messed up in Internet pre-history.
I don't believe the US is worried about Iran having deuterium exactly, but the US is worried about Iran building heavy water (D20) moderated reactors. D20 is used in reactor designs that need a low neutron capture cross section, including ones used to breed plutonium. Note that heavy water reactors may also be used simply for power generation with unenriched uranium.
Bizarrely enough, not only are they funding it (along with the rest of the developed world), they will sign the consortium agreement today.
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Actually, radiation should be linked with blue light due to Cherenkov Radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
Ah the classic misconception. Voltage doesn't affect kill-power, current does. If we were talking amps or say watts, then it would be unnerving.
Please do some basic fact checking before commenting. This thing is a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. The design is common knowledge, decades old and is proven to work. No pseudo science involved, period. Your comment would have potentially made sense if we were talking cold fusion, or if the kid had claimed to have made a toroidal reactor.
Moreover, differentiating between a nuclear reaction and a chemical one is easy; the former is going to give off some highly recognizable forms of radiation (X-rays are specifically mentioned in TFA, and IIRC Fusors give off neutrons as well).
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
This is what I want to know. If fusion had occurred (and I doubt it, but still...) then there would have been a burst of neutrons. If he was near enough to the experiment to see a ball of plasma then he's very lucky to be alive.
According to the wikipedia article, "neutron emissions can present a hazard if voltages above 40 kilovolts are used". Sounds like the kid was cutting it fairly close, but should have been reasonably safe. It sounds as though the associated X-ray emissions are actually more problematic.
I know this is off-topic, but when I hear people refer to the NRA as overheated and overpoliticized gun owners, I sigh, and think, "They didn't used to be...."
I remember when I was in Boy Scouts during the 1970's and I took the dreaded "Rifle and Shotgun" merit badge.
Back then, the NRA was a gun safety and training organization. They struck everyone as being straight-forward and calm, more interested in making sure that people knew how to prevent gun accidents and how to responsibly own firearms.
Then things changed, and they transformed themselves into a political organization - and now they're either seen as "the safeguard of the American way" or "crazy gun-toting fascists," depending on whose overheated rhetoric was heard last.
Perhaps this should be seen as a warning to other groups - once you enter the political fray, you become a political animal. Or in the words of the Punisher, "The means always screws up the ends."
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
TVs have very dangerous capacitors. The function of capacitors that you unhappily discovered is something like a temporary battery.
See, a real battery can only push so much energy out per second (I think batteries are usually defined in milliamp hours (mAh)). So what you do is you start pushing charge (electrons) onto a capacitor, and then when you need a real big quick burst of energy (like, say, to shoot an electron at a TV screen) the cap can give you that high amount of current or voltage very quickly.
Another use is to smooth power signals. You're getting sent AC voltage in the wall, which oscillates above and below zero volts. This gets rectified at the home so that it's either above or at 0 volts. Then, this gets filtered through a series of capacitors (and lots of other stuff, too; Zener diodes FTW) to provide (more) consistent voltage, instead of a rising and falling voltage. In essence, it's acting as a battery for us while the voltage is lower than what the circuit needs.
Capacitors are also very important in analog filters and a lot of other Electrical Engineering voodoo.
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This is a Farnsworth Fusor. See Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor/ for info on this type of device, which is VERY OLD, reasonably well-characterized, and most definitely NOT an energy-generation device.
Fusors use far more power than they generate. The idea is a pair of spherical grids charged to 50K volts differential. Deuterium gas is a welding supply item. Gas hits the outer grid, ionizes, and is propelled at ultra-high speed to the exact center of the grid.
The drawback is the inefficiencies: There is no known design (and some theoretical work saying it is impossible to a achieve such a design) which does not have significant heat losses to impacts of the gas on the inner grid. This generates random gas, which impedes the movement of the ions, etc.
It is also known as Electrostatic fusion.
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The main industrial use of the Farnsworth Fusor is as a neutron source. Anyone trying this at home needs to understand that the neutron flux near the reactor can be deadly. (Wikipedia says amateur Fusors generate about 3x10^5 neutrons / sec.) Fortunately, they escape in all directions, so the density falls with the square of the distance. Just don't get too close while it's running. It's a good idea to have a detector for ionizing radiation and be familiar with exposure levels humans can tolerate. (Any good links?) Remember the neutron bomb? Killed people - not things.
Actually, it was Philo Farnsworth of "inventing television" fame... although maybe the Professor did that too.
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