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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.
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.
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.
This is exactly what the radioactive boyscout did...
fusion != fission.
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.
You come to slashdot and ask "Why behind a bookcase"? What is wrong with slashdot?
You, dear sir, hand in your geekcard at once.
Why? Because it is a freaking cool to have a fusion reactor in your garage in a secret lab behind a bookshelf! I cannot imagine someone on this website even has to ask that.
You mean a typo got nuclear boyscout into trouble?
If you look at the images on the site, you can see it is a Fusor. It has the wire cages and all of that.
Fusors are pretty cool. Was thinking of building one myself. You can definitely build one as an amateur. It's like 1950's TV era technology.
Of course a Fusor is not a power plant, but it's a decent neutron source.
They are trying to use the same concept for an actual power plant with the polywell, which uses magnetic fields instead of the wires to provide the confinement and the charged particle acceleration.
Since the Fusor's inability to be a power generating source is due to radiation and conductive energy loss from some of the particles impacting the physical surface of the wires, the magnetic confinement should dispense with that issue.
The major problem is that getting the right geometry for the magnetic fields is difficult and it hasn't been demonstrated whether it is possible to get the fields to allow for this approach yet.
I don't think you need an NRC license for a Fusor. This isn't ever going to be a power plant and the radiation threat is minimal. You probably want to protect against those free neutrons though if you're going to run it for extended periods, but otherwise, no big deal.
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.)
Are we talking about a neutron source, like the Farnsworth Fusor? A good neu--
--ews everyone!
(Since I have no idea what a Farnsworth Fusor is, I'll just make a pithy cultural reference.)
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.
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.
"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.
"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.