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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."
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.
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
The "one ton of radiation shielding" appears to be a significant difference, so no, not *exactly*.
It probably is fusion, just not net-positive. In other words, a collider.
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.
They mean fission, right?
Yea, is fusion reactor, the article title is wrong
Now I'm confissed...
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Considering that he is not endangering children, not he won't be.
This is exactly what the radioactive boyscout did...
fusion != fission.
... and it didn't end well
I don't respond to AC's.
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
I suspect it's the kind of twattish thing the French do.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not to mention he was creating a fission reaction that got away from him real quick. Fusion reactors you can unplug and they tend to be safer.
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.
More likely it is because they are posting from a phone or tablet and are using the word complete thing instead of typing the entire word out and it inserts a space after the word it inserts. Most of the time it backspaces for punctuation but I noticed my android phones seem to skip it sometimes with anything other than a period.
You mean a typo got nuclear boyscout into trouble?
Fukushima is all fission products. This is fusion, which a field trip there won't do squat for, other that more quickly exposing them to a lifetime's supply of radiation if they get too close.
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.
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.)
Since when has that been important?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
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.
If you get free neutrons you can get all sorts of nasty stuff. Luckily, the amounts involved are too small to matter.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Amazingly no one else has bothered to correct you on this, instead focusing on the fact that he was trying to build a fission reactor, not a fusor, but:
(a) He fucked up badly enough that his mother's property ended up being declared an EPA superfund site, needing to be cleaned up at considerable expense
(b) He was not arrested at the time he was trying to build the reactor (1994) -- he was arrested in relation to possibly trying to build another reactor in 2007, but that was because he was stealing smoke detectors from his apartment building for their americium. None of the charges had anything to do with actually building a reactor
(c) His work was "confiscated" because it was outputting very unsafe levels of radiation -- and by "confiscated" I mean the radioactive material was buried in the desert where it hopefully will not harm anyone or the environment
These cases are not at all similar, and trying to portray David Hahn as a victim is laughable. He did serious damage to himself and the local environment and created a massive mess that the government had to clean up, and they still did not punish him in the slightest. He's a victim of nothing other than his own mental illness.
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.
Thank god they did not try to make a clock... they might have been arrested
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.
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.
Written English sentence structure is a human invention, subject to improvement. The improvement of putting other punctuation inside or outside of quotes depending upon where it makes logical sense is a recent development, used mostly by technical people with a strong sense of hierarchy. It reduces ambiguity. It should be embraced.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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...
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
"Fusion reactors you can unplug and they tend to be safer."
For now. But 25 years from now, when we have practical fusion power, the fusion reactor can power itself.
On the plus side, 25 years from now, we will still be 25 years away from practical fusion power so, no worries.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
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.
In order to get too close to anything at Fukushima you'd have to be inside the _pressure vessel_, not just the reactor building.
Yes there are radionucleides in the environment, the hot ones are detectable from a safe distance and collectable (unlike the mercury products further down the coastline at Minamata Bay) but in general you'll face greater radiation exposure as a pack-a-day smoker.
It's worth looking for "the 10 most radioactive places on earth" on Youtube. It does a good job of pointing out the relative differences.
"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.
He didn't produce self-sustaining fission (criticality). You can't do that in such a small volume without HEU. He *may* have managed to get some neutron multiplication by putting a neutron source surrounded by a bunch of crude U ore.
What he did wrong was collect too many otherwise legal, unlicensed sources together making the sum total in one place violate NRC regs. That is why they took his stuff away.
You can play with a lot of radioactive stuff without trouble, if you just stay under the quantity limits.
That saved my day!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Not an English major here, but I always thought that only the quoted content belonged within the quotes. The comma isn't part of that. No?
Just another day in Paradise
From the few photos, it's almost certainly a fusor. Which is also what you'd expect for a student-project type design, they're probably not running a tokamak in someone's basment.
Where was your submission on the subject in 2011 that wasn't published?
Slashdot doesn't write its own articles except in special cases, they publish people's writeups, no writeup, no publish.
If you want to see this in action, take a look at the firehose. These are the articles that haven't made it to publish stage yet.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?