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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."
No, that's not exactly the same. The 'boyscout' was a freaking moron who had no idea what he is doing. All he managed was to irradiate himself and create threat to neighborhood (since his safety precautions and shielding were minimal). That's why his stuff was dismantled and taken away.
They mean fission, right?
It's an ion collider. It's not a "fusion reactor" as most non-pedants would think of the term.
#DeleteChrome
I dug around on the website and found this document which seems to indicate that yes, we're talking about a Farnsworth Fusor.
It probably is fusion, just not net-positive. In other words, a collider.
This is exactly what the radioactive boyscout did...
fusion != fission.
No, that guy built fission reactors using various radioactive sources, while this guy is using a 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.
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.
This is exactly what's wrong with science education in America.
The radioactive boy scout did fission, while these high school students are doing fusion.
Buy a dictionary, there's a difference.
I couldn't find any definite information, but this is probably a Farnsworth Fusor, which is every bit a valid and interesting science project for high schoolers. (It's about the right size and gives off about the right glow.)
No it is not the same, the radioactive boy-scout produced a significant amount of radio nucleotides in a self sustaining fission reaction, all these fusion fan boys do is blast some heavy hydrogen and knock off it's neutron. As far as I know they have never managed to activate any other element to create an isotope that was unstable and considered dangerous, as the radioactive boy-scout did. If they did they would be shut down and with good reason as it is one pathway to a dirty bomb.
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.