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12-Year-Old Boy Reportedly Builds A Nuclear Fusion Reactor (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
An American 14-year-old has reportedly become the youngest known person in the world to create a successful nuclear reaction. The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, a hobbyist group, has recognised the achievement by Jackson Oswalt, from Memphis, Tennessee, when he was aged 12 in January 2018....
The enterprising teenager said he transformed an old playroom in his parents' house into a nuclear laboratory with $10,000 (£7,700) worth of equipment that uses 50,000 volts of electricity to heat deuterium gas and fuse the nuclei to release energy. "The start of the process was just learning about what other people had done with their fusion reactors," Jackson told Fox. "After that, I assembled a list of parts I needed. I got those parts off eBay primarily and then oftentimes the parts that I managed to scrounge off of eBay weren't exactly what I needed. So I'd have to modify them to be able to do what I needed to do for my project...."
[S]cientists are likely to remain sceptical until Oswalt's workings are subject to verification from an official organisation and are published in an academic journal. Still, the teenager may now have usurped the previous record holder, Taylor Wilson, who works in nuclear energy research after achieving fusion aged 14.
The enterprising teenager said he transformed an old playroom in his parents' house into a nuclear laboratory with $10,000 (£7,700) worth of equipment that uses 50,000 volts of electricity to heat deuterium gas and fuse the nuclei to release energy. "The start of the process was just learning about what other people had done with their fusion reactors," Jackson told Fox. "After that, I assembled a list of parts I needed. I got those parts off eBay primarily and then oftentimes the parts that I managed to scrounge off of eBay weren't exactly what I needed. So I'd have to modify them to be able to do what I needed to do for my project...."
[S]cientists are likely to remain sceptical until Oswalt's workings are subject to verification from an official organisation and are published in an academic journal. Still, the teenager may now have usurped the previous record holder, Taylor Wilson, who works in nuclear energy research after achieving fusion aged 14.
Fair point, but consider this: He was 12 years, 11 months and a few days old at the end of January 2018. He turned 13 in February of last year. The Guardian story was published this week, so the kid had exactly a year (and a few days) to grow by one year. Which he did.
Because all 12 year old boys have $10,000 to do whatever they want with.
I think the term "reactor" came from chemical engineering, meaning a vessel in which a *reaction* takes place. So in that sense, what was built was a "reactor".
In a nuclear fission context, it implies a device capable of supporting a sustained and controllable reaction, in which sense this is *not* a "reactor".
But by that criteria, there are no nuclear fusion reactors in the world. It's not unusual for fusion researchers to call fusion devices such as tokamaks or magnetic mirrors "reactors", even though they cannot sustain a reaction. So in that sense it *is* a "reactor".
It's less important what you call a thing as being clear what you mean, which of course in an age where most news sources have shed their science desks in favor of opinion journalism is a rare thing.
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It's a bit less impressive when think about his parents buying $10,000 worth of equipment for him. The chance that they didn't help in other ways is vanishingly small.
When I was twelve, I had trouble scraping together 10 bucks. Rich kids, hmph.
Still, a 12 year old doing it is pretty impressive.
How impressive it is really depends a lot on how much help he got from his parents. They clearly provided very significant financial support...