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Students Build Reactor For Scavenger Hunt
MattJ writes "At the end of this NYT story about a scavenger hunt at UofChicago, you discover two physics students got points for building a working nuclear reactor, in a day, from scratch. It's a bit scary how easy it was for them to actually produce plutonium. " Reminds me of some of things we did in Biochem. But the lawyer says I'm not supposed to talk about that.
At the Chicago Maroon (UofC student newspaper), there's a longer story about the scav hunt with more info on the reactor: http://www.chicagomaroon.com /articles/a926450700.shtml.
Those fabric-like mesh-bag mantles used for kerosene and gas lanterns contain thorium.
Experiment: stack a mantle and a key on a plate of film, stick it in a drawer for a week, then develop the film. Voila, a shadow of the key on the film, just like an xray
So I guess you can get radioactive material at the hardware AND camping goods store...
Here are the explanatory posts by the two guys
who made the reactor on the University of
Chicago local newsgroups: Enjoy!
Alright, I just want to set a couple things straight, so here are some
responses to oft heard comments the last few days:
1. "I assume they used U-238 to get to Pu-239..." we did not start
with any uranium or plutonium, that would have ruined the fun, and the
point was to make fissionable materials. Our starting material was
thorium, which can be found at any hardware store. we happened to have
some in our dorm room... The final products were Uranium 233 and
Plutonium 238. I'm not going to spoon feed the decay chains to anyone,
you can figure it out yourself if you really need to.
2. "You endangered the life of my son!" We created a neutron source
using some shit we pulled out of a trash can. This source was safer and
less radioactive than the radioisotope Americium 241 found in the smoke
detector in each of your rooms.
3. "Someone said your roommate lost his job because he built a nuclear
reactor" Neither I nor my rommmate have lost our jobs since doing this.
4. "I hear you paid another group to steal Plutonium for you" We did
not steal Uranium or Plutonium from anywhere. Nor did we have anyone
else steal some for us.
5. "but to qualify as a true breeder, doesn't the reaction have to be
self-sustaining?" No. A breeder reactor just means taking advantage of
all those tasty neutrons flying off from whatever source you have, be it
a sustained fission reaction or a naturally radioactive source. The
best neutron source on campus would be the Physics Dept's neutron
howitzer. But since the howitzer produces neutrons from the decay of
Plutonium, you have to agree it would be silly to use it to try and make
plutonium.
6. "(I'll be really impressed if the two come up with a micro-fusion
reactor.)" We'd fly back next year just for that one...
- Juniper Tasks
Just some clarification for the readers who've forgotten their nuclear
physics:
U-235 is the fissionable used in the Hiroshima bomb and Pu-239
in the Nagasaki bomb. U-238 is used in fast breeder reactors
to make weapons grade Pu-239. (U-238 is also used in fission-fusion-fission
bombs, so technically it is fissionable with a net gain of energy
but you need really fast neutrons).
Thorium was to have been used in slow breeder reactor technology which
turns out U-233 as its fissionable. (Is Pu-238 fissionable at low neutron
energies with a net gain? The even Z makes me think not...)
I thought you had started with depleted uranium to make a fast breeder;
didn't know the thorium isotope available from hardware stores was the
one used in slow breeders.
Well, with a small sample of thorium and a neutron source, you can make
the U-233. But with a fully functioning breeder don't you need some of the
U-233 created to fission and transform the rest of the thorium without
running away and slagging the reactor or damping out so you never
end up with more thorium than whatever's directly exposed to your
neutron source? I suppose the nuclear engineering definition of a
breeder has to be more pragmatic.
Fred and Justin didn't begin with any uranium.
(Uranium, after all, ain't a commonly available thing.) They began with some
thorium and an alpha source, which they just happened to have lying
around. They used the alpha source to make a neutron source, and bombarded
the thorium. This induced a chain of reactions, the final products of
which were fissionable uranium and plutonium.
That's actually an exaggeration started by Helen Caldicott and perpetuated by anti-nuke activists like Karl Grossman. I suggest an interesting article by Ilya Taytslin to be found at Dr. Caldicott and the Truth About Plutonium. The article largely discusses the space probe Cassini and the uproar over it's use of an RTG power supply, but the points made are generally applicable.
I went to the same high school as Dave, and I was in his scout troop (troop 371). :-) was obsessed with radioactive material, and didn't care about taking any safety precautions (he used to carry chunks of Americanicum around in his front pocket without any shielding)
Dave (or Glow Boy as we called him, not Radioactive Boy like the Harper's article says
I've heard several stories from him on how he got caught. One was that he got caught when he was pulled over by the local cops who thought he was stealing tires from cars. The looked in his trunk and freaked out when he warned them it was radioactive. Another was that a chemical spill sensor at a railoroad crossing kept going off at the same time every day (when he was heading to school).
Very strange guy... I got a letter from him a while ago - he's writing a book, and apparently a movie is in the works.
As pointed out elsewhere here, the nuclear reactor is entirely believable. I might point out that the chief danger from plutonium in small amounts is not its radioactivity, but its poisonousness. Even 1 gram could kill a heck of a lot of people.
Like the article hints, you don't win these days without setting up a LAN and using some database technology. There are too many items to track otherwise. The big items everyone remembers, but there are lots of little 5- and 10-pointers, like ostrich eggs or whatever, that tend to get forgotten. Read the list, and you'll be amazed, but some teams get almost everything within 72 hours.
Back in my day, we got an airplane, a one-ton animal, a telephone pole, and a marching band. We found a collector of turn of the century train cars from the Chicago Elevated to loan us an El car, but we couldn't get permission from the city to take such a heavy load on the streets.
Teams that really contend for the top prizes are made up of 100 or more people, of whom at least 25 must be willing to dedicate the ENTIRE 72 hour period to collecting and building. Usually, you specialize, putting your smooth talkers onto tasks like wheedling Olympic medalists into loaning their medals, your skilled researchers onto finding the answers to obscure questions like the location and population of Waldo, your exhibitionists in the latex paint-on pants, etc.
I have never done anything more fun in my entire life.
Actually, most of the weapons grade plutonium was produced in thermal reactors, not fast breader reactors.
"...didn't know the thorium isotope available from hardware stores was the one used in slow breeders."
Thorium is thorium no matter where you get it.
You are allowed to recreate patented processes (without a license) for the purpose of understanding them.
There are probably fifty things in an average house that are as equally capable of killing someone if ingested. Just don't inhale it, or eat it. They were converting some portion of another material into uranium and plutonium. I'm no nuclear engineer, but I know the reaction has to do with slow moving neutrons, and they've got to pass through a certain amount of material before they lose enough energy to get trapped in the nucleus and change the material. Any faster and they'll fission the nucleas.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong you nuclear engineer types...)
Thus the production was probably theoretical, and not actually tested for (although if theory says its there, you're pretty safe in assuming it is there). With the plutonium confined to the interior of the sample, you're not going to ingest it.
I also don't think its quite as dangerous as tree-huggers typically make it out to be. The warning on the Lysol toilet mint I put in my john the other day was a lot scarier!
If you read the article carefully, they only produced a trace amount. Producing a trace amount is relatively easy; they could probably do it with just a piece of uranium (which wouldn't have to be high-grade) and a particle source. Of course they'd only produce a few atoms of plutonium. This isn't the same as building a reactor that can provide power or can produce any visible quantities of anything.
It's like asking someone to build a rocket, they build a one foot model rocket, and you see headlines of "College Students Beat NASA--Make Rocket In Dorm Room Based on Same Principles as Million Dollar Launch Vehicle".
That's exactly it. They created a few atoms of plutonium and had the necessary equipment from the physics department to detect it.
b ?getdoc+site+ site+26193+3+wAAA+nuclear%7Ereactor%7Estudents
:)
Here's an updated URL for the article:
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastwe
I love going to the UofC.
The guy says at the end that there were only trace amounts of plutonium. I get the feeling that 'Working" has erroneously replaced "Scale Model" here. They probably had a model that if scaled up would work. You need a certain MASS of plutonium to get a reaction. So the idea of a small nuclear reactor is somewhat silly. Since you would need at least enough space to hold the 15(?) pounds of plutonium.
/*---------------------------*/
Man? What is man?
But a collection of chemicals with delusions of granduer.
Lessee... kids got instructions on how to make bombs on the Internet... kids make bombs... kids kill a bunch of people... Government bans said instructions from the 'net. College students learn how to make plutonium in school... college students make a working nuclear reactor, in a day, from scratch... will government ban that from schools?
Look it wasn't a working breeder reactor. It took Thorium to Uranium and then to plutonium. It took Justin and Fred(the guys who built it) about 2 days to build it. However they started with 4 grams of thorium(alpha source) and got about 8000 atoms of uranium(neutron source) after a day and about 100 atoms of plutonium. Plus it took more energy to sustain the reaction then it producded. All in all, it wasn't a viable way of producing large quantities of uranium or plutonium since you have to separate a very messy mixture.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
hus the production was probably theoretical, and not actually tested for (although if theory says its there, you're pretty safe in assuming it is there). With the plutonium confined to the interior of the sample, you're not going to ingest it.
Actually the were able to conform decay from the uranium atoms that they predicted were produced. So given the physics involved, there was no reason to assume the plutonium atoms were not being produced. Of course they only had about 8000 atoms of uranium so they couldn't have more about a few thousand plutonium atoms. You would get more radiation from a particle shower coming off of a cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere so it is relatively safe.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
This one appears to work.
Well yes, how else do you make a 'healthy' society?
no more bomb making instructions, no more chemistry in high school (hell chem is worse that inet instructions), no more physics.. lets see, oh yah.. no more learning history (to much violence in the past).. hell at this rate we should be bonified government zombies in just a few years!
Lessee... kids got instructions on how to make bombs on the Internet... kids make bombs... kids kill a bunch of people... Government bans said instructions from the 'net. College students learn how to make plutonium in school... college students make a working nuclear reactor, in a day, from scratch... will government ban that from schools?
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
May be found at: http://student-www.uchicago.edu/orgs/scavhunt/
I'd love to read more details about this. I'll have to admit I'm skeptical (Where do you get enough high-grade fissionable material to make plutonium without the NRC knowing about it? How do you verify the presence of plutonium in your dorm room without irradiating yourself? Did this thing produce useful power, or just plutonium? etc.) But the NYT article does not go into much detail about the technical aspects. Does anyone know where we can read more?
http://student-www.uchicago.edu/orgs/scavhunt/list 99.txt
It's really fscking long, so I won't post it directly.
http://www.ryans.dhs.org
Perhaps one of the items on the list was "Get a national newspaper to print that you have made a nuclear reactor".....
(Or maybe "Convince a local newscast to run a story about hackers stealing AOL credit card information from a web page and threatening users if they didn't forward the message to 10 people.")
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
A group of community technical college students succeeded in building a Mercedes Benz 420 E-Class. Unfortunately no extra-credit was granted due to patent infringement...
Ha ha ha New York Times...
Blar.
When I read some of this stuff on Slashdot, I ask myself, why are people so bitchy?
The project was for a scavenger hunt, only $500 for first place, and this is just one item on the list. Their goal was not to power all of Chicago or the world, or to produce bombs with this device. And with this fact, people bitch and moan because it isn't a "real" reactor, or they didn't make enough plutonium...
Sheesh.