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12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Home (2018)
- mordant 8y agoThe fact that he's still alive and kicking undercuts his thesis.
- petermcneeley 8y agoThis looks to be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor and is a very common hobby fusion project. A very powerful electric field drives the fusion. No positive energy output from this style of device has ever been reported.
- atemerev 8y agoIt is “common” (as in not unique), but assembling a fusor and getting actual neutrons from it is still a very big deal, especially for a 12 years old. I am a nuclear engineering enthusiast at 35, I know a lot about these devices, but I doubt I could build a fusor on my own at home. It is a big engineering project.
- agumonkey 8y agoYeah the age is probably the news here. I remember older teens (HS junior) doing the same.. but 12 .. that's young. Kudos to him. Hopefully mother nature decided he would be the chosen one to make fusion reactor net positive
- solarkraft 8y agoThen again: Why would he?; There are are thousands of very smart people working on this. While this is an excellent demonstration of his ability, I doubt he could actually outbid professional researchers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aaomidi 8y agoA lot of science has been dumb luck and doing some random thing at the right time. I mean I hope for all of us this is one of those cases.
- agumonkey 8y agoNothing serious man, part of me just want fusion energy to exist (although humanity will probably abuse it ..)
- coldtea 8y agoIt was just a kind comment to applaud his ingenuity at such a young age. It wasn't meant to be interpreted as a factual statement.
- mrob 8y agoNote that a lot of "fusors" are actually "demo fusors", i.e. they run at too low energy to produce detectable fusion even if you did fuel them with deuterium. A "demo fusor" just produces plasma that looks similar without doing real fusion. This article is about the real thing, which is substantially more difficult to build.
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoThe key is - does it make neutrons or not? If it does, it's fusing. If not, it isn't.
- mrfusion 8y agoThere’s really no reason positive energy output should be impossible though? I guess it’s just a really inefficient design?
- webkike 8y agoDoesn’t that answer your own question?
- hutzlibu 8y agoWell, you are free to provide a better design. Problems are many, mostly the very high temperature and pressure needed to achieve fusion ... no material can stand that so you need to have your fusion happening floating which needs energy etc.
- DennisP 8y agoIt'e been proven that this particular design can't achieve net power, but other designs probably can. Scientists are especially confident about the tokamak, for example. (And of course, thermonuclear bombs definitely achieve net power.)
- UnpossibleJim 8y agoThermonuclear bombs work on nuclear fission not fusion, just to clear up any confusion. Nuclear power plants also achieve power from fission, which is the breaking of nuclear bonds.
- Yetanfou 8y agoNo, thermonuclear bombs [1] are fusionbombs. Nuclear bombs can be of both types but the term thermonuclear specifically means (partly) fusion-powered bombs. These bombs always use a fission reaction as a starter for the fusion reaction, depending on the type of bomb the power output can be anywhere from mostly fusion to largely fission. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
- robotresearcher 8y ago
- mikeash 8y agoAnd to clarify, no net energy is expected from such a device.
- blackflame7000 8y agoApparently one of the problems with this device is that much of the energy is lost when the ions strike the inner electrodes and that got me thinking. What if there were a way to construct a sort of thin inert buffer on the electrodes with say a noble gas, to facilitate ion collisions over ion conduction?
- geoelectric 8y agoWorth mentioning there are a number of hobbyists/enthusiasts doing this, and there's no reason to be skeptical about the result itself. The link in this post is deep in the same site, but http://www.fusor.net/board/index.php http://www.fusor.net/board/index.php is pretty active. This particular achievement is notable because Jackson Oswalt might have been the youngest person to home-build a fusor, or at least the youngest to have spoken up about it. Also worth noting that this is a year old. Looks like he's been plugging at it since then: https://www.foxnews.com/science/teen-builds-working-nuclear-fusion-reactor-in-memphis-home https://www.foxnews.com/science/teen-builds-working-nuclear-...
- jcims 8y agoI worked with a young guy that built one of these in high school. About a year after we parted ways I was just randomly considering how long various things I built would last. Then it occurred to me that the hydrogen atoms that he snapped together and let loose are still likely floating around out there, and could conceivably be in the same configuration a hundred billion years from now.
- tylerhou 8y agoDon't feel bad -- it's very possible some of the CO2 that you breathe out every day will still be in the same configuration a hundred billion years from now as well.
- robotresearcher 8y agoIf those darn green plants don’t wreck all my hard metabolic work.
- Symmetry 8y agoNah, CO2 is absorbed by rock weathering and released by vulcanism. There are currently 740 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere and 1 of those is absorbed every year by rocks. you should expect that most of the molecules he exhales are going to be gone in just a millennium.
- asdfologist 8y ago(2018)
- eindiran 8y agoThis reminds me of Taylor Wilson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson In fact, if the claims are true, he will have beaten Wilson's record as youngest person to have produced nuclear fusion using a fusor.
- arkades 8y agoIn his write-up, he explicitly calls out Wilson as his inspiration.
- iceninenines 8y agoTaylor hauled uranium ore home in checked baggage while it was legal. IIRC, he might've been also partially inspired by the early David Hahn. I wonder if he still has a part-time gig at VICE after the layoffs and HBO cancelation.
- six_inch_spike 8y agoDon't you mean Mitch Taylor? Perhaps this kid will get a scholarship to Pacific Tech.
- LASR 8y agoThis is certainly a pretty big deal for a 12 year old. But also, it’s a hobby project that’s been around for decades. Fusion is something we hear about in the media as being something very hard to achieve. It’s not. Achieving fusion beyond breakeven - so we can generate power from it - now that’s a very hard problem. It takes the combined effort of seven countries and billions of dollars.
- magicnmonkey 8y agoNo fusion Beyond breakeven is not difficult, controlled fusion is.
- mikeash 8y agoAchieving fusion beyond breakeven isn’t super hard either. It’s far from trivial, but it was figured out almost seventy years ago and produced on an industrial scale. The hard part is doing it both breakeven and in a way that lets you send the power to a city without destroying that city.
- msre1965 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER
- iceninenines 8y ago???
- GuiA 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- discobean 8y agoI'll be ok with it just powering my house
- mLuby 8y agoHow much of this is the kid and how much is the parent? Still impressive no matter what, but I do wonder…
- nhumrich 8y agoConsidering the kid is on a forum asking questions, its likely not much the parent.
- faissaloo 8y agoYou will continue to be amazed, kids nowadays have grown up with instant access to an incomprehensible wealth of knowledge via the internet.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- herpes 8y agoAnd also regular wealth. Have you seen the photos of it? It looks like a pre-assembled Radio Shack kit. Probably cost thousands of dollars in professionally machined parts.
- colmvp 8y agoYup. I was at a ML meetup and one of the kids who was only 12 or so knew advanced level coding and Tensorflow. Another one was a 16 year old who had been coding C++ for more than half a decade. They both credit a lot of it to the internet and the ease of learning which books to acquire.
- yesenadam 8y agoIn chess, there have now been four 12 year old grandmasters. ('Grandmaster' isn't an easy title to achieve, needing besides incredibly strong play, a high rating and doing very well in 3 tournaments with strong international opposition.) It's because of computers and the internet making every facet of chess learning/study incomparably faster than a few decades ago. And you can get a game in seconds anytime online.. There's no-one from before the chess + computer age on the list of the 36 players who've become Grandmasters before their 15th birthday : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_prodigy#List_of_youngest_grandmasters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_prodigy#List_of_youngest...
- vilifiedtwin 8y agoAt 35 the biggest obstacle to build such project would have been a nagging wife...
- deytempo 8y agoTruer words cannot be said
- moneytide1 8y agoThis is why Nikola Tesla was celibate.
- w0mbat 8y agoYou know he banged that pigeon though.
- bretthellman 8y agoor husband
- eli 8y agoThis sort of sexist joke about traditional gender roles is mildly offensive in 2019 and, in any event, not very funny or interesting
- gammateam 8y agoAnd also a non-negligible probability that people have a shared experience of and may want to objectively consider avoiding it?
- kryogen1c 8y agoTheres nothing sexist about that joke, mild or otherwise.
- deytempo 8y agoThis really isn’t a joke to anyone who has went through an emotionally abusive relationship that resulted in their creativity and will to experiment be destroyed at the hands of someone else. Anyone downvoting this clearly hasn’t had to experience it.
- GuiA 8y agoForum post detailing how he got there: http://www.fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=12120 http://www.fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=12120
- jacques_chester 8y agoThis is a prime example of a "too good to check" story.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maehwasu 8y agoNarrator: He hadn’t. And back at the model home, Michael was dealing with a physics problem of his own.
- agumonkey 8y agoMeanwhile I just made a NiCr wire glow white with an ATX PSU. The race . is . on.
- djsumdog 8y agoFusors are totally different from the concept of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) right?
- rajacombinator 8y agoMaybe now he can get into his target high school.
- Ancalagon 8y agoThis is pretty inspirational. Im curious how much a setup like this must cost though? Cursory investigations into vaccuum costs seem pretty prohibitively high for a 12 year old, even most middle class parents. Very cool though.
- roywiggins 8y agoI saw a figure in another article that said $10k had gone into his fusor.
- feedbeef 8y agoLooks to be around $1.5-3k USD in his setup photos, likely less if he's using some used/surplus equipment, which is quite possible. Stainless fittings and tubing are surprisingly affordable. About $250 for the Deuterium. Edit: sibling points out it may be $10k. I wonder if that price includes other equipment not shown. If not, apologies for the gross underestimation ($1.5-3k seemed reasonable - most of the equipment pricing can be looked up).
- cubano 8y ago"A demo fusor can and has been made in a bell jar with crude vacuum gear and kluded-up power supply. Most such systems are assembled by younger school age children (mostly boys save for one pair of girls). The demo fusor often serves as a science fair project in the 10th to 12th grades of high school. The better examples have won regional science fairs and a couple of national events! "[0] [0] http://www.fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=2674 http://www.fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=2674
- reubenmorais 8y agoI don't know why you're quoting that. His device is not a demo fusor, it's actually producing real nuclear fusion.
- ggm 8y agoWhere's the neutrons. As in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964833.Yes_We_Have_No_Neutrons https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964833.Yes_We_Have_No_Ne...
- Jun8 8y agoBy coincidence I'm currently reading The Boy Who Played with Fusion https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Played-Fusion/dp/0544705025 https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Played-Fusion/dp/0544705025, which tells the amazing story of Taylor Wilson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson) who performed this feat when he was 14. It's mind boggling what dedicated kids can achieve with parental backing and scientist mentors. In Wilson's case places like The Black Hole surplus store (https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/18130 https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/18130) also greatly helped. Sadly such places are getting rarer.
- peter_d_sherman 8y agoYou go, kid! (Applauding)
- vietvu 8y agoFor how long, on what scale, and how much energy it can create? A lot of problems
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- stevespang 8y agoAnother example of a kid going to irradiate himself with neutrons . . . as wahern states: You don't really need to do the math or understand the physics to appreciate that Fusors are a dead-end.