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High Schoolers Use Homemade Nuclear Fusion Reactor To Dominate Science Fairs (us.com)
An anonymous reader writes: 20 high school students gather every Friday night in a basement of a modest home in Federal Way, Washington to work on science experiments using a home-made nuclear fusion reactor. [They've also reportedly won top honors in science fairs as well as college scholarships.] This extreme science club is the brainchild of Carl Greninger, a Program Manager at Microsoft by day, scientist by night. He was concerned about the current state of high school science education, [and] lamented that the public school system does not truly expose students to the excitement of experimental discovery.
So using his own money (and one-ton of radiation shielding), Greninger "gathered some students and built a working nuclear fusion reactor in his garage."
So using his own money (and one-ton of radiation shielding), Greninger "gathered some students and built a working nuclear fusion reactor in his garage."
This is exactly what the radioactive boyscout did, but he got arrested and his work confiscated. Yet this guy gets to keep his? Maybe I should build a reactor.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
Serious question.
Are we talking about a neutron source, like the Farnsworth Fusor? A good neutron source could supply subcritical fission reactions, those which operate only while the neutron source is running.
... will be arrested just about tomorrow for endangering the kids or something like that then?
They mean fission, right?
An internship at Fukushima would give them the education they need.
A man can dream, right?
I'm not sure what is worse, the current state of high school science education or Microsoft-quality nuclear experimentation.
Maybe we should ask Tay ?
When you use students for your pet project and they go on to win every science fair, isn't that more discouraging for the competitors who don't get free money behind the scenes? Or is it naive to think that any participant in a high school science fair is autonomous enough to produce interesting projects on their own?
Doesn't sit well by me to see them snag a bunch of scholarships and apparently crowdfund their project (according to their website) with all that money and expertise doing (presumably) most of the work for them.
Make the children do it, that's the American way!
Assholes.
To be honest this seems like true apprenticeship. Why spend money forcing everyone to learn advanced material, when there are people who will soak up as much as they can if given the opportunity. With an experience as described in the article I bet that every one of the students would make a great scientist or engineer.
... and it didn't end well
I don't respond to AC's.
This is near Seattle
This is likely some variation on the Farnsworth Fusor. The main dangers to the students come not so much from radiation as from working with near vacuum in glass vessels, high voltages, and explosive gases (deuterium is, after all, hydrogen).
In my day the popular science fair experiments were also being done with near vacuum in glass vessels and high voltages, with the other danger being the emitted laser beam that could blind you (HeNe, argon) or burn holes through things (CO2).
-- Alastair
Ah, so that's why Azure ground to halt. Those kids were optimizing their plasma containment unit with the whole capacity of the cloud.
So the right place?
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
I hope they're working on the Mr. Fusion. It's long past time.
Fusion reactors can make things radioactive over time, but they cannot meltdown. Fusion plants or devices only use a very tiny amount of fuel at once.
Fission plants can meltdown because they are stocked with a decade's worth of fuel in the plant all at once, which means that criticality always needs to be controlled.
With a fusion plant, the reaction stops the second the tiny amount of fuel is used up or the reaction is disturbed in some way.
You do know their security and safety history, yes? I consider this a dangerous thing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The labor-market currently has far more scientists in it than jobs for them. There aren't nearly enough professorship spots open either. An education in science is a sure-fire way to wind up with crushing student debt and a bottom-of-the-market salary in fast food service.
We do not need to encourage kids to like science, there is already an abundance of interest. We need to encourage politicians to like science, so they will allocate more money to research and put all that talent to productive use!
While we are at it, we need to encourage voters to believe that research is a good use of taxpayer dollars. Teaching kids how to build century-old machines will accomplish nothing of the sort.
is what the god damn headline should read. Fusion? If they've cracked that before anyone else, then it's a more important advance then just about anything to come out of a home garage/basement lab in many years because it means we can finally get our "Mr Fusion" powered flying cars.
Now if you meant they have a Fission plant, then call out the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, DEA, Delta Force, Marines, Army and evacuate 100 miles around the damn place. It'll take 20 years to clean up the radioactive crap while we wait for these terrorists to die from their radiation induced sickness or for them to mutate into even more fearsome mutants.
Slashdot retards
These kinds of fusion reactors have been around for a long time. They are fun and not overly hard to build. They are effectively little more than a big vacuum tube. Here is a Makezine article on how to build one. Here is a Youtube video. They are used as neutron sources, but none of these designs has a prayer of generating more energy than it requires to run. It's certainly a nice science fair project, but it's not a groundbreaking novel discovery.
"One ton" does not take a hyphen here. Learn to spell.
Carl Greninger started his classes back in 2010
Articles on the same subject first appeared online in 2011
https://news.microsoft.com/201...
Then again on 2012
http://www.federalwaymirror.co...
Then again on 2013
http://www.kplu.org/post/why-a...
As for Slashdot, it has to wait till 2016 before this gets published
fission reactors .... fusion reactor - the two are entirely different concepts. In this case the fuels are (relatively) inert when not involved in an experiment, the only radioactivity being produced is during collisions.
Actually that is not really correct. Before use uranium fuel is only very mildly radioactive (the half life is in the billion year range) but is toxic whilst hydrogen is explosive if it mixes with air so both have their own hazards neither of which is really radioactivity before use. Both fission and fusion reactions produce radioactive products such as tritium from fusion depending on what you are reacting. The key difference is that fusion reactions produce light nuclei which, if they are radioactive, decay with short half-lives unlike the products of fission which have half-lives in the thousands or years or more.
Both types of reactor also produce lots of neutrons which activate the material around the reaction when they are absorbed. So really the two types of reactor are very similar the difference being the far short half-lives from fusion which make it far easier to deal with (just store the waste for a few years and it becomes safe) and the fact that the fuel in a fusion reactor is enough to last of order a second while a fission reactor's fuel can last for of order a year. This makes a fusion reactor far safer because all you have to do if anything breaks is wait a second (or less) for the reaction to stop plus you don't have a reactor which contains many months of radioactive decay products that need active cooling.
Good thing these kids are not of Arabic decent.
BTW... do nuclear weapons fall under the 'right to bear arms' in the second amendment of the US Constitution?
You mean "melt down".
The article suggests that schools learn from this: it won't happen.
This is a highly qualified person running a science club. But he does not have a Masters in Education, and therefore he is not qualified to be a teacher in most of the United States, because the teachers unions closely control entry into the field through an artificial barrier of credentials that have nothing to do with whether or not this guy is a good teacher, or the student are learning.
This is also primarily why this situation is being handled as a "club", rather than as an education program.
Schools can't learn from this because they do not accept volunteer help from extremely qualified individuals.
Do you know who was not allowed to fill in for a high school computer science teacher?
Vinton Fucking Cerf.
IBM used to run a program where they would give a year sabbatical to any employee to volunteer to teach in a K-12 school for a year. IBM shut this program down. They didn't want to shut this program down, but it turns out that the research scientists at IBM's TJ Watson and Almaden Centers, and the regular scientists and engineers elsewhere -- no longer met the credentialing requirements which would be required to allow them to teach in public schools.
The program lingered on for a bout two years, but it was mostly the same people who had been in it before, and who were teaching in Private and Parochial schools, rather than in public schools.
Public education in the United States is a fucking joke these days.
In a lot of cases that's how much of real science works. Even if you have a great idea, unless it's great and CHEAP, you'll need to dig up funding or get a backer so you can make it happen.
If you've got a good concept for a working long-range teleporter, or a way to convert sand to gold but they require access to something like the LHC, then it won't do you much good without backing to get there...
Isn't reactor against end user agreement at Microsoft?
Wonder what would have happened if Carl Greninger was a muslim. I bet we'd have a terrorist scare on our hands.
We regulate the cr@p out of our nuclear industry.
We pay BILLIOINS of dollars in clean up costs.
We only allow universities/national laboratories [under federal control] to play with this stuff.
And yet, this guy can play and produce nuclear waste in his basement?
I would think Homeland Security would be wanting to pay him a visit?
Just about everybody who has been in college can remember professors who while knowing their subject were absolutely horrible teachers. College is supposed to be where the student teaches themselves and uses the expert for guidance. This is why college requires ZERO education experience and provides ZERO education training for professors. Children and teenagers in public schools are a TOTALLY different situation from that of even a public college.
Anybody with experience in education should be able to inform you if you ask what the biggest issues are for education of the immature... FYI, knowledge of the subject is not on the list! I bet you that many USA readers here will remember a time in school when they had a guest speaker who wasn't treated respectfully or a substitute teacher who was unable to get the lesson completed (it is to the point that I rarely had a teacher tell the substitute teacher continue their plans unabridged. Yes, I realize from experience one can't always just hand it off so easily.)
A motivated child acting mature enough for a little bit of time will learn ON THEIR OWN, as I suspect many /. readers know from their own childhood interests.
Plenty of science and research on education has been done and continues to be done. Some are applying this wisdom but the USA is not. It IS political and it's not actually the unions or lazy old teachers. I also know some of what actually goes on in that area as well. I personally know somebody in political system who is among a group who's goal is to ruin public education for the long term goal of completely recreating it along their ideals. Why ruin it? It is simple, people love public education so it has to be more than just attacked, it has to be made less lovable.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Help yourself to a map, as this is the wrong Washington. Unless the government secretly moved to Seattle and no one spilled the beans, until now. And there is little risk of disaster with the exact technology in question here. A used banana truck spilling banana peels all over Wall Street would be more dangerous.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I commend anyone who undertakes the project to make a fusor. It is a great technical feat.
So far what I've seen in these projects is technical. Learning how to build and maintain vacuum systems, building and safely using high voltage supplies, managing instrumentation, running the device and collecting data on its operation to tweak and modify the operational parameters.
I also see that success depends on access to funding or "salvage" equipment. Even trying to build a single demonstration/experimental plasma apparatus for my classroom is running me several thousand dollars. Once I spend some time with students studying plasmas with that device, I'd love to try a fusor just for the fun of it and to develop some scientific questions that student's might investigate with the fusor. It isn't the technical ability of my students that limits our ability, it is the resources of time and money.
Still, the thing that has limited my interest in the fusor project is the lack of existing classroom or student project scientific applications. Not just building the device, but what experimental questions can we tackle with the running hardware? It is not enough, in the long run, to just build the apparatus. That achievement puts you at the starting point of scientific investigation, not the finish line.
Teaching as a profession has barriers to entry. These are established by professional organizations through the government because it requires people to demonstrate a minimum basic knowledge of the practices and regulations of the profession.
There are abundant opportunities to achieve certification through legitimate pathways, usually through a small number of courses covering the relevant topics. In many states, you can start teaching in a field for which you hold a bachelor's while taking the required coursework for full certification online or at night and over summers for one to the years.
People who complain that a person can't teach in a field where they professionally operate are really saying that a person is not willing to go through one of those straightforward methods to become a professional teacher.
"Fission plants can meltdown because they are stocked with a decade's worth of fuel in the plant all at once"
No, it's because theyr'e designed in such a way that they _can_ melt down. Better designs exist - and have been tested in operation too, but civil systems chose to remain with dangerous water- or molten-metal- based systems.
"which means that criticality always needs to be controlled"
See above. The criticality issue comes down to needing to limit the temperature to prevent water boiling instantly (prompt criticality - that's what killed 3 guys in the 1950s) or the entire system boiling dry over time and then rising to the natural limiting temperature of fission reactions (about 1500C due to doppler effects) which results in the metal cladding of the fuel rods melting.
It's worth nothing that the interior of a fission fuel rod is over 1000C, despite the water it's immersed in only being 300-400C (and obviously under high pressure or else it'd boil - which adds the risk of steam explosions to deal with), thanks to the incredibly shitty thermal conductivity of the uranium oxide in the rod. Meltdowns usually occur long after the fission reactions have stopped - because you have to keep wicking that heat energy away for a long time as it finally reaches the outside of the rod.
The safety issues of water-cooled reactor systems are such that they should have been banned a long time ago - and whatever bozo thought that molten sodium made a good coolant should get to cleanup the Monju fast breeder reactor site without a hazmat suit.
There _are_ better designs - which don't need water cooling (and because water-cooled systems have to run at low thermal efficiency, such systems don't need the big heatsinks PWR systems need - aka rivers or oceans), they also can't melt down, or catch fire, or vent radioactive steam. The problem is that building a reactor takes a lot of money and as the old kludge design worked in 6-8MW nuclear submarines, it's "good enough" to scale up to 1500MW without seeking better solutions. Alvin Weinberger was abysmally treated and I hope his name is better remembered in 100 years than it is now.
But he does not have a Masters in Education, and therefore he is not qualified to be a teacher in most of the United States
I do martial arts since 30 years.
I'm somewhat 'known' as well.
I teach marital arts.
The qualification I have is: I'm in the business or hobby longer than you are.
Who cares about the USA? I'm invited to give classes all over the world: without any formal "Master in Education". Why?
Because I know how to 'do' stuff. If I did not know how to 'teach' stuff, no one would invite me.
If you learn something from a teacher most people automatically learn how the teacher is teaching.
No "formal Master of Education" needed!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Prompt criticality is not water boiling instantly. It has to do with Uranium fission reactions that produce fast neutrons and slow neutrons. Criticality basically means that on average, one fission will yield one neutron resulting in another fission. The desired criticality involves slow neutrons, which results in a much slower and controllable reaction. If criticality is achieved with the fast neutrons it is referred to as prompt criticality which is a very unstable situation.
I don't know what 6-8 MW submarine you are talking about. Nautilus was 10 MW and very soon after that the reactors became much bigger. Aircraft carriers use quite a bit larger cores, maybe a third of the size of the largest PWR commercial reactors. There are a lot of differences between commercial PWRs and early sub designs. The new AP-1000 PWRs are using designs for the RCPs closer to that used the US Navy than the Westinghouse and CE plants ever have before.