5 ms·
Teenage entrepreneur finished his nuclear reactor at 14
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI would be really interested in reading about a 14 year old that created a fusion reactor, and how that reactor worked, since they can't get them going at Princeton. Even if he was just recreating Fermi's fission pile experiments that would be interesting. But since there is no information, on the kids website, or elsewhere, about any of these things I'm a wee bit skeptical.
- frugalfirbolg 14y agoGoogle search plus good memory returned an older article with a bit more information about Taylor: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-fusion http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played... He has built a Farnsworth fusor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor It is an example of inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. It's CoP is not above 1.0, but it does produce neutrons that can be used to create the short lived isotopes that normally need to be express delivered to hospitals because they cannot be built on site. When the media originally broke the story I was slightly annoyed with how they focused on Taylor's ingenuity and obsession, but only briefly mentioned contributions made by his family and the associates that they helped him network with. Yes, give the young man his due credit, but for the sake of others with his potential spend some time on how important it was for him to have the opportunity to play with a crane, store radioactive isotopes in the garage, and basically think about and investigate whatever he wanted. The Popular Science article I linked was least offensive in this way.