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Teen Builds Nuclear Bomb Detector
DaneM writes "An enterprising teenage boy named Taylor Wilson, 17, has created a homemade, hand-held nuclear bomb detector. It utilizes a small fusion reactor that he made when he was 14, and detects nuclear materials by shooting neutrons at closed containers and exciting any nuclear materials inside — which, in turn, causes more radiation to be produced, and is detected by the device. This may provide a simpler, more effective alternative to searching containers visually, one-at-a-time. No information is given about how safe such a practice is. Taylor also has some choice things to say about how science is, in fact, very cool."
Must be nice to have your own portable fusion reactor.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Did it work, or did it explode the bomb?
Nice to know that he used a "fusion reactor he built when he was 14". Just goes to show projects like ITER are a waste of time. We should let 14 year olds deign our nuclear plants. Sarcasm aside, i'm slightly skeptical about this claim. I rank it's crdibility somewhere between Fleishmann and Pons, that is.
this is plainly unsafe. uranium atom + neutron = barium + krypton + 200mev energy + 3 neutrons
So this dude 'reinvented' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation_analysis and solved the problem of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion.Ra-ha-ight.... Yet if we just assume that he uses a regular neutron source like Californium 252 - so no breakthroughs in fusion physics are involved- it would still be interesting to see how he processes the data from the detectors. Maybe that's where the innovation lies.
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
lol?!
He used his *time machine* to make the nuclear fission reactor. Geez, some people are so cynical !
Built his own fusion reactor...excellent...and also figured out a way to make sure that the resulting neutron flux doesn't turn his carcass into a smouldering ash heap. Bonus.
Of course, "Made on a Mac". I mean, where else can one find a reality distortion field strong enough to make a portable fusion reactor?
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The Radioactive Boy Scout
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
Why don't you have a seat...
"It utilizes a small fusion reactor that he made when he was 14" (sic)
OK, great job kid. I just have one problem...
So after a quick rifle through my movie collection I recall a certain Doctor with DeLorean was powered by questionable amounts of radioactive plutonium in a home-made reactor. He had to trifle with a rowdy band of Libyans to get his material.
So who did you trick and to I need to be worried?
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
This boy is clearly a genius with unlimited potential. How extraordinarily sad that he is applying all that potential to something as fucking idiotic as counter-terrorism.
Sigh.
I'm worried that timothy might not be able to tell the difference between reality and comic books.
Why isn't there some sort of editorial filter between submission and front page?
"But the thing is, science is cool, and me and my friends who do science are cooler than the people who don't. I have to end this interview now as Mum needs to cut my hair."
As someone pointed out: building a fusion reactor, while not trivial, is routinely done by tinkerers worldwide: see e.g. this Instructables guide .
No, the truly amazing thing here is what I found when I clicked through to the original story (as usual, not linked in the summary):
Allow me to be the first to say, WHAT THE YELLOW RUBBERY FUCK? In every university department I've ever had experience of, researchers and grad students fight tooth and nail to get funding for anything more expensive than an alligator clip. Meanwhile, these guys have sufficient resources to start handing out equipment and lab space to enterprising teenagers for science fair projects! Hmm, time to start looking for a postdoc position there, I think...
Where it says "fusion reactor" it means "Farnsworth Fusor". Yes, it fuses hydrogen. No, it doesn't have net power output.
For the love of Science, fusion reactors are actually pretty easy to make. The problem is making them pass unity (ie, produce more power than they consume).
Go look up a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor . Kids have been making them for scout merit badges for years.
Neutron radiation leads to neutron activation. I don't know off the top of my head what intensity of neutron radiation would be needed, but exposure which forms long-lived isotopes is cumulative. Common isotopes of iron, nickel and copper are all susceptible to some amount of activation.
Cross-section to spall neutrons off of U238 or Th232 are ~1barn with halflife of days, but the most common isotope of iron has a n-2n cross section of around half a barn and the result has a halflife of several years. Any nuke techs care to chime in?
I could've used one just the other day...
To all the idiots being smartasses and trying to claim he couldn't possibly have built a fusion reactor:
Making a fusion reactor is easy. What is difficult is to create a fusion reactor that produces useful amounts of power at a reasonable cost. If all you want is the neutrons then power output is not important, making it relatively easy to do. You only need a few kV or electric potential, and every cathode ray tube or even just some flourescent light armatures contain the electronics needed. The reason this won't get you a power plant is that to make the thing produce more power than you put in you need a good energy confinement ( making sure most of the energy you put is not just radiated away and wasted ). Now THAT is very tricky, and generally involves the use of computer controlled magnets or extremely powerful lasers.
Detecting nuclear bombs by shooting neutrons at it is like detecting dynamite by throwing fire at it right?
Okay, you might call it a fusion reactor, but it's just a fusor no matter how you look at it. It could most likely be replaced with any other neutron source, since what drives this is the neutron bombardment and the detection of induced radiation, the source of neutrons doesn't matter.
Also, this is in no way revolutionary. What is revolutionary, however, is that the ICE and border guard hasn't managed to implement an automated neutron scanner yet, but a 17-years-old kid managed to. That is why I congratulate him, and hope the government takes notice of him.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
If there is one thing not to mess with as a teen, it's nuclelar tech.
Why do so many alleged nerds not know the difference between cold fusion and fusion?
People are so quick to take the piss out of something on here that half of them skip reading, comprehension, or both.
"It utilizes a small fusion reactor that he made [...]" That right there is a clear indication this is bullshit.
"Fusion reactor" is dumbed-down terminology for the masses. What he's built is probably a Farnsworthâ"Hirsch Fusor which can be made quite small. It's not useful for generating energy as it's very inefficient, but it's a good neutron source. Also, you're missing the point of how his contraption is supposed to work. The radiation detector isn't the part that uses the fusor. The fusor is used to send a neutron beam through the package under test. If it contains enriched uranium or plutonium, the interaction with neutrons will cause it to emit far higher levels of neutron flux and gamma radiation than most other materials. If you see this effect, you might want to inspect the package. I don't know how effective it is in practice, but the premise of operation makes sense.
Fusion is actually trivial to achieve. Thousands of people have built units in their garage.. it's a common science fair project.
Perhaps you're confused because you've heard that an effective fusion power plant is an area of active research and not currently available and have incorrectly assumed that this somehow implies that fusion must be hard.
You're wrong, and I hope you feel like an idiot now for being so smug.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I assure you, Farnsworthâ"Hirsch fusors exist, fit the dictionary definition of "reactor", are well within the capabilities of teenagers to build, and do emit neutrons.
And I also assure you that when you bombard fissile material with neutrons, its rate of activity goes up, and that increase in activity makes it easier to detect the fissile material with radiation detectors.
What the hell is with his web page? Does he hate gays and incite them with all his crooked pictures?
The operating principle is given in the second sentence of the goddamn summary: Fire neutrons in, watch radiation from activation products. As others have pointed out, otherwise known as Neutron Activation Spectroscopy.
Well, the article did clearly specify this was a different type of detector, which worked by emitting neutrons, exciting nearby fissionable material, and measuring the radiation given off by it after excitation. Still, it's unlikely the boy has has a portable nuclear reactor. Perhaps some of the article is true, and the journalist confused that part.
If he had created a Fusion reactor both him and his familiy would be set for life...
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
The fusion reactor is an neutron emitter is all, not a sustainable power supply that generates more energy than is needed to contain it. It's the second of these that's difficult, even the Sun's containment isn't too great, and at that mass, it has gravity doing a large amount of the work. We need to hold our fusion of levels needed to produce energy in strong magnetic fields to hold it together and not let it melt the reactor. The electromagnets needed to produce such magnetic fields use a lot of energy (until the more recent designs, more than the fusion reaction generates).
There is nothing new here other than a kid decides he wants to become sterile.
I love the Gizmodo link. Nothing like having a blank screen when I follow the link because I have to allow scripts on the page for simple text to show up. Nice. Good work on the post.
Make love, not reality television.
The Onion, of course, pointed out this disturbing trend some time ago:
Report Finds Troubling Rise In Teen Uranium Enrichment
Jealous much?
Wow. Please don't vote parent up and please vote grandparent down.
I expected better of people from Slashdot to not be your average moronic Americans who go batshit insane at the mention of anything nuclear.
Seems I was wrong.
Slashdot really needs a "Moron" rating. Seriously, add it, please.
This kind of stupidity is just embarrassing.
Same goes for all those other morons below here.
It is a nuclear reactor that performs fusion. Get over it.
It isn't efficient. It isn't for getting a profit in power. It is for generating neutrons.
Fusion isn't hard to do if you don't care about what comes out of it, especially if all you want is a neutron source.
Tabletop fusion has been done more times than most people here have probably had hot dinners.
Since there are so many morons on here, I will link this.
Because it seems fusion is seriously hard to do...
SO hard.
Sorry for my mockery, but due to the number of morons that appear to have collected on Slashdot recently, I'm sure you will understand why.
Sketchy fusion reactor is sketchy.
He can probably milk them for millions - further 'research' needed and all that.
Why "utilize" - was the word "use" not long enough? Consultancy past shining through?
The fusor is used to send a neutron beam through the package under test. If it contains enriched uranium or plutonium, the interaction with neutrons will cause it to emit far higher levels of neutron flux and gamma radiation than most other materials
And if he does that trick on a barely subcritical mass of uranium 235 or plutonium, it goes bang.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
At first I thought the article was about this guy, another teenager building a fusion reactor.
Not likely - the amount of fissile material in a typical nuclear bomb has to be compressed to a fraction of its size by the detonation mechanism in order to achieve criticality. Exposing it to neutron flux won't set it off.
Yeah thats why I said a barely subcritical mass, not a normal fission bomb. And yes, I know that this is pretty unlikely. Such a mass would be sensitive to other factors such as humidity.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
ICE and border guard hasn't managed to implement an automated neutron scanner yet, but a 17-years-old kid managed to.
That's because they are too busy taking down websites for the RIAA.
Read the paper. He bought or built a "Farnsworth Fusor" to send 2.5 MeV neutrons into a package, and then look for high energy products of neutron induced fission from the package. These would be high enough in energy that the natural background would be quite low, making false positives low. There is no reason why this shouldn't work (although whether its practical is another question.)
He tested it on "20 grams of Natural Uranium Trioxide (UO3) containing - 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235." (In other words, about 0.1 grams of U235.) The integration time he found he needed was 10 minutes, rather than the 15 seconds desired by DHS, but it's an interesting concept. He doesn't do any calculations as to the expected return from an interesting about of U235 (say, 100 grams), but it would be higher, and so integration times should be less.
He also says that the incident beam is low enough not to be harmful : "the system has low enough does as to not affect the health or functionality of the cargo and operator, However, he doesn't state any dosage information, which I would fault him on if I were grading this paper.
[points to the sky]
Yep, it's a nuclear bomb.
At least it's not a Bitcoin article.
Foolishness.
Only if it was designed to be a bomb that triggered when you tried to detect it. Otherwise, the uncontrolled chain reaction would go something more like "zort" as it irradiated all the people nearby.
People have accidentally made supercritical masses before. You can't just lump a sufficient amount of plutonium into one spot and magically it's a bomb.
And we're in this world to fulfill our destiny to survive (of course) and learn -- but let's use learning to survive further, not die younger.
While science is cool, the examples of people studying radium and dying or experimenting with explosives with amazing losses come to mind.
Except now the stakes are way higher: be careful to not blow up only your family, but your entire circle of friends... on Facebook!
People have accidentally made supercritical masses before. You can't just lump a sufficient amount of plutonium into one spot and magically it's a bomb.
Nope. It'll seriously mess up your day, but a bomb it ain't.
Stefan Axelsson
I can see a group of engineers being told " Okay this kid showed us a plan on how to make this thing you need to figure out how to make it work in the field UNLESS I SHOULD FIRE THE LOT OF YOU AND HIRE THIS KID AND HIS FRIENDS"
maybe the dosage info is not present because he did not have/take the time to get enough data for a legally/medically sound figure??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Yes i agree, but its not approved knowledge by our federal government. Please come with us.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Only if you're stupid, pig-ignorant and are unable to Google.
Do you know the kid? i was doing things like then when i was in high school 30 years ago and i did NOT have it handed to me to 'call it mine'.
Creating what this kid does not require TONS of money, and besides is it a crime if his parents are funding his learning? Learning doesn't come free ya know.
You have no clue what really took place here, so you just look stupid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sure, this sounds like it would be good at telling you when you find U or Pu or whatever, but what happens to the benign stuff? Is it dangerous to people? Does it pose a risk to electronics and/or data?
My webcomic
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Worst.
Haircut.
Ever.
Aren't there things that might be shipped in cargo containers that might be damaged by exposure to neutron radiation? Devices with firmware in flash memory, etc?
in space! The US launched surveillance satellites containing a neutron source. They would "ping" foreign satellite and monitor the response signature. A correlated neutron spike response indicates the presence of fissile material.
I would guess that it is a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor which is a commercially produced device to produce free neutrons. In terms of application I'd be a little concerned what this device is used to probe. Neutrons are readily absorbed by many nuclei and can produce radioactive isotopes. So scanning an object will result in making it radioactive. While I would hope the number of neutrons required would be small, and so the activation minimal, this is still probably a concern for foodstuffs since radioactive material is a lot more dangerous inside the body than outside. Same applies for clothing too probably.
The other issue is that since a nuclear device is a sub-critical mass of fissile material bombarding it with enough neutrons may actually make it supercritical while it is in the beam if the beam balances the neutrons lost. This would let you "detect" the bomb put perhaps not in a very constructive way...although again I would guess that the number of neutrons used for scanning would probably be too small to do this.
Surely detecting a nuclear bomb isn't that hard. Or does he mean before it goes off?
This process is called neutron activation analysis. It's well known. The practical problems are 1) not putting in so many neutrons that the tested object becomes radioactive, and 2) detecting enough emitted particles in a reasonable length of time. There's an obvious tradeoff there. The second problem is solvable with a large number of detectors, which probably means a portal or tunnel setup, rather than a hand-held device.
Here's a commercial luggage screening machine from Russia which includes nuclear material detection by neutron activation, along with regular explosive detection.
At least not with non-homemade devices.
Although it generates a neutrons, which pretty much ignore shielding, if it's portable it's not going to generate that much. Also, it's not a neutron detector.
Now here's the fun part, properly manufactured nuclear devices are shielded to such a level you could use it to shield yourself from other radiation sources. They do NOT show up as radiation sources until you detonate them. Any neutron source that would cause the core to become so radioactive it can be detected is going to be impractical and probably be the source of other issues if used.
As to uniqueness, the process being used is known, and various government agencies have multiple detection systems for nuclear weapons, but it's not like they openly talk about them.
All in all, it's a neat thing he did. Hollywood is full of B.S., but it might still work on poorly made homejobs. Of course, one of those shadowy government groups may already have something like it.
Perhaps, just perhaps, firing neutrons at a near-critical mass of fissile material isn't the best of ideas. And I guess a nuke put together by some terrorist group etc is going to be a lot closer to critical than one put together by a respectable nation.
Dr Sheldon Cooper when reading the summary?
Isn't that like checking for dynamite with matches.
get one
I'm almost sick of these "child discovers/creates amazing scientific breakthrough!" type articles in the popular press.
They make it sound like Dougie Houser did it all by himself in his parents basement, things which are supposed to be difficult or totally missed by adult researchers in the field.
Meanwhile, the kid that "cracked" CSS only contributed the smallest fragment of code to a team project, but got all the credit in the press.
A 17 year old "discovers" a medical breakthrough that could help prevent some cancers. What's not mentioned in the newspapers and buried 3 pages in on more detailed articles is that "her" research was based on her parents work, and she was little more than a hyped up lab assistant.
Come on folks, these are NOT genius kids. These are the people everybody hated because they got A's in school because their parents did their homework projects for them, spending hundreds of dollars on fancy materials and slick presentation. This is Captain Kirk in the 2009 movie.
Moronic post is moronic. Stick to software, it's more your speed.
Fusion is hard. It can be done, but if it was easy it'd be a net power source. ;-)
Damn it. Now we're going to have to read about a neutron emitter getting a pot growing warrant or someone using bitcoins to pay for a neutron emitter or something.
Oh yeah. Anyone nearby will be seriously upset. For a short while. Pretty different from a bomb, though.
Sorry to piss in your boot, but when your have fissile material being irradiated with neutrons, it fissions and radiates gamma. Gamma rays are easy to detect and discriminating between gamma and neutrons is trivial.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Right, because we know that "small fusion reactors" can actually be built and run.
Such a mass would be sensitive to other factors such as humidity.
And baggage handlers.
Our office takes the dental insurance that DHS uses, so we get quite a few Customs and Boarder Protection agents as patients. One told me that when they had the radiation scanners operational, the trash trucks from Canada couldn't get threw for 3 days, they finally had to steam-clean all of the trailers to get the radiation levels low enough to enter the United States. Thallium stress tests causes problems at the boarder too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Snark on slashdot is business as usual. Being skeptical of the phrase "fusion reactor" tossed around lightly in the press is nothing to feel bad about. Why the writer wasn't more careful in phrasing the article to begin with is a more revealing question. Calling a fusor a fusion reactor misses the whole point of what a fusion reactor would be should one ever exist.
Why no skepticism here, though, about the description of this purported "Little Man Tate" school:
http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/
We're to believe 1) that a significant population of PROFOUNDLY Gifted (emphasis in the original) kids exists in Reno, a city of just 200,000, and 2) that for some reason such populations don't exist in your own city or state for your local University to turn into mutant leaders of tomorrow? This is just charter school hyperbole and "Mismeasure of Man" crap about standardized testing. The school has been around for five years. What are the Reno odds that it will still be around after another five?
Regarding the science fair skepticism ("Daddy must have done it"), I might suggest that you seek out your local science fair with your own local population of regular old students. Annual judging day never fails to make me feel good about the future even given a general dearth of sources of neutrons irradiating the hall.
"It utilizes a small fusion reactor that he made when he was 14"
Umm... wouldn't a fusion reactor be one heck of a story!?
I need to clarify some things. First, yes a nuclear bomb can be blown up by neutrons pointed at them. In fact all nuclear weapons do this, even Fat man and Little Boy dropped on Japan. At first via a Beryllium-polonium pellet that would be mixed by the explosion giving off neutrons to make the explosion more efficient. Today this is done by electronic fusion/neutron generators similar to the fusion device mentioned but smaller.
In fact, a way to destroy an incoming nuclear bomb which by ICBM touches the edge of space, is to blow up a nuclear bomb near it-this has been strongly considered and probably implemented into strategy. You don't have to hit it-the neutron flux-preferably from a low explosive, high neutron yield device such as a neutron bomb, will cause the weapon to self detonate by increasing the fission rate in the bomb and make it explode-not a full yield-just enough to make the enemy's weapon destroy itself by what is termed a 'fissile'. We are talking trillions and quadrillions times more neutrons, many times over, to do this than the fusor will produce-capable of 'just 10 million' neutrons peer second - one billion n/s if using deuterium and tritium instead of deuterium solely.
So no, it will not make a weapon explode unless it is already just barely sub-critical in which case a natural ly occuring flux, or a neutron reflecting material too close such as steel, carbon, aluminum, etc close by would make it go critical too. But not explode, and no person would ever have a super-close-to-critical piece of radioactive material made. Any slight mistake would make it go supercritical and they'd be dead quite soon. Just google the 'demon core' to know what I'm speaking of.
2. Although commercial electronic neutron generators/fusion devices are available, I know of no commercially available fusors-
nobody buys them, this kid built his. I have conversed with him. I have built one as well. They are not dangerous, they are difficult to build-less than 50 private individuals in the world have done so-that number was under 25 a few years ago, and only 2 or 3 in the 1990s. The closest to a commercial version, which is still not technically a fusor is built by NSD-Fusion but plan on setting yourself back $100,000-$150,000. A homemade device could cost as little as a few thousand dollars.
3. Yes radioactive material is easily shielded. Alpha rays, the primary type of radiation in a weapon, can't penetrate more than a couple inches of air, let alone a piece of paper. Beta rays can't penetrate a thin sheet of plastic or aluminum foil, and gamma or x-rays can be blocked by a few millimeters of lead. However neutrons can go through all of this stuff, lead, gold, everything, but low density materials especially rich in hydrogen slow them down and can block them with some difficulty. Also yes, radioactive material
can be used to shield one from radiation. Strong gamma sources or x-ray sources in labs will often be shielded from workers by uranium plating as less is needed than lead as it is more dense.
4. This is the point though, radioactive materials CAN be shielded so how do we find it? Well, since the neutrons given off are
penetrative this is the obvious way. But not that many neutrons are given off as the half-life of bomb-grade material is measured in millions and millions of years and only a fraction of decays will be by spontaneous fission which releases neutrons naturally.
However if you have a neutron producing device which can hit the nuclear material and induce fission, releasing extra neutrons on
demand with a specific energy signature you can 100% guarantee what element or isotope the neutrons are coming from. Plus these neutrons will go right through a cargo hold and be detected by the massive neutron detectors already installed at ports and borders by homeland security to detect the very small amounts of neutrons given off by weapons-grade material naturally.
Using this fusor-system, smaller neutron detectors can be built or
I'll gladly admit I had no clue one could do fusion as a science fair project - I thought the journalist had either been taken in, or was reporting in the usual science-journalism-style where everything is exaggerated to its Star Trek equivalent.
That building the fusor was part of the 'news' (which it appears it is not - newsworthy, that is), did give the impression that what had been achieved was something worth writing about; sustainable fusion.
There is a second shite factor here, though. Using this to 'fight terrorism'. A geiger counter could do as well, and I do not see this guy running around containers either way. A student building a known source of neutrons, and using it as an active scanner where a passive already exists, is not a great step up for Homeland Security. I am, in other words, not convinced that he just saved us all from a Horrible Death...
All respect for the kid though - I can't imagine an active scanner setup is simple, and he does have a great attitude towards science.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Dude, what's the point of posting "anonymous coward" when you claim outright that your wife is the chemistry teacher. It ought not be difficult to look up the professor of chimie at the university or academy...
Um its only physics if he was testing a hypothesis.
He took established physical law and known to work configurations and built one, solving the myriad of technical challenges.
Thats engineering,
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
He built his own fusion reactor when he was 14? Are we sure his name is Taylor Wilson and not Sheldon Cooper?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.