Wow...college freshman builds nuclear fusion reactor...
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I'll do everyone a favor:
Fun with fusion: Freshman's nuclear fusion reactor has USU physics faculty in awe
By Alan Edwards
Deseret Morning News
LOGAN ? A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.
[Photo]
Spanish Fork High graduate Craig Wallace shows off his nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of TV.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret Morning News
Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.
Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops.
The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.
The reactor sat on a table with an attached vacuum pump wheezing away. A television monitor showed what was inside: a glowing ball of gas surrounded by a metal helix.
The ball is, literally, a small sun, where an electric field forces deuteron ions (a form of hydrogen) to gather, bang together and occasionally fuse, spitting out a neutron each time fusion occurs.
"Here I am with this thing here," Wallace mused, looking at his surroundings. "Who'da thought?"
Wallace and Farnsworth are much alike. Both are (or were ? Farnsworth died in 1971) tinkerers. While Wallace was in grade school, his mother got a flat tire while he was riding with her. He fixed it. For his part, Farnsworth began improvising electric motors at a young age. Both went on to bigger and better things.
"He was never motivated to take science," said Wallace's father, Allen Wallace. "It was really the tinkering that motivated him."
When Craig was a sophomore in high school, browsing the Internet he discovered that Farnsworth had come up with a way to create deuteron ion plasma, a prerequisite to fusion.
While it was not good for production of energy (the source of much embarrassment to the University of Utah in the cold fusion debacle in the late 1980s), Farnsworth's design did emit neutrons, a useful tool for commercial applications and scientific experimentation.
[Photo]
USU freshman physics major Craig Wallace, center, demonstrates his experiment to USU professors John Raitt, left, and Farrell Edwards.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret Morning News
"He (Farnsworth) was after the Holy Grail of excess energy, but everyone agrees that it's mostly useful as a neutron generator," Allen Wallace said.
About 30 such devices exist around the country, owned by such entities as Los Alamos National Laboratories, NASA and universities. ("I bet I'm the only high school student that has one," Craig Wallace said.)
Looking at Farnsworth's plans for the first time, Craig and his father both had the same thought: Now there's a science project.
They set to work. They found a neutron detector in an Idaho Falls scrap metal yard. Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs. They found a broken turbo molecular pump lying forgotten at Deseret Industries.
Too poor to buy pricey deuterium gas, Craig bought a container of deuterium oxide, or heavy water, for 20 bucks and came up with a way to make it a gas and get rid of the accompanying oxygen by passing it over heated magnesium filings.
Not bad for a backyard amateur who considered himself more mechanic than scientist.
"I teased him that he was now officially a science geek," Allen Wallace said.
One professor Friday stood nervously away from Wallace's reactor ? which is notably free from any shielding ? but he needn't have worried: Wallace's detector measures 36 neutrons per minute just in background radiation from space, and the device's usual output adds only four neutrons per minute. People in airplanes absorb much more than that.
It took two years of gathering materials and six months of assembly, but the final product actually, incongruously, works.
"(This was) the day I achieved a Poisser plasma reaction," Wallace wrote next to a picture of the glowing ball. "Probably the coolest thing I have ever seen."
Others thought it was cool, too. Wallace began winning contests ? local, state, national ? culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland. He's now beginning work on a USU physics degree.
"The whole thing combines chemistry, engineering, physics," he said. "Put them all together and you come out with something pretty sweet."
Farnsworth would have been proud.
Fun with fusion: Freshman's nuclear fusion reactor has USU physics faculty in awe
By Alan Edwards
Deseret Morning News
LOGAN ? A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.
[Photo]
Spanish Fork High graduate Craig Wallace shows off his nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of TV.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret Morning News
Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.
Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops.
The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.
The reactor sat on a table with an attached vacuum pump wheezing away. A television monitor showed what was inside: a glowing ball of gas surrounded by a metal helix.
The ball is, literally, a small sun, where an electric field forces deuteron ions (a form of hydrogen) to gather, bang together and occasionally fuse, spitting out a neutron each time fusion occurs.
"Here I am with this thing here," Wallace mused, looking at his surroundings. "Who'da thought?"
Wallace and Farnsworth are much alike. Both are (or were ? Farnsworth died in 1971) tinkerers. While Wallace was in grade school, his mother got a flat tire while he was riding with her. He fixed it. For his part, Farnsworth began improvising electric motors at a young age. Both went on to bigger and better things.
"He was never motivated to take science," said Wallace's father, Allen Wallace. "It was really the tinkering that motivated him."
When Craig was a sophomore in high school, browsing the Internet he discovered that Farnsworth had come up with a way to create deuteron ion plasma, a prerequisite to fusion.
While it was not good for production of energy (the source of much embarrassment to the University of Utah in the cold fusion debacle in the late 1980s), Farnsworth's design did emit neutrons, a useful tool for commercial applications and scientific experimentation.
[Photo]
USU freshman physics major Craig Wallace, center, demonstrates his experiment to USU professors John Raitt, left, and Farrell Edwards.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret Morning News
"He (Farnsworth) was after the Holy Grail of excess energy, but everyone agrees that it's mostly useful as a neutron generator," Allen Wallace said.
About 30 such devices exist around the country, owned by such entities as Los Alamos National Laboratories, NASA and universities. ("I bet I'm the only high school student that has one," Craig Wallace said.)
Looking at Farnsworth's plans for the first time, Craig and his father both had the same thought: Now there's a science project.
They set to work. They found a neutron detector in an Idaho Falls scrap metal yard. Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs. They found a broken turbo molecular pump lying forgotten at Deseret Industries.
Too poor to buy pricey deuterium gas, Craig bought a container of deuterium oxide, or heavy water, for 20 bucks and came up with a way to make it a gas and get rid of the accompanying oxygen by passing it over heated magnesium filings.
Not bad for a backyard amateur who considered himself more mechanic than scientist.
"I teased him that he was now officially a science geek," Allen Wallace said.
One professor Friday stood nervously away from Wallace's reactor ? which is notably free from any shielding ? but he needn't have worried: Wallace's detector measures 36 neutrons per minute just in background radiation from space, and the device's usual output adds only four neutrons per minute. People in airplanes absorb much more than that.
It took two years of gathering materials and six months of assembly, but the final product actually, incongruously, works.
"(This was) the day I achieved a Poisser plasma reaction," Wallace wrote next to a picture of the glowing ball. "Probably the coolest thing I have ever seen."
Others thought it was cool, too. Wallace began winning contests ? local, state, national ? culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland. He's now beginning work on a USU physics degree.
"The whole thing combines chemistry, engineering, physics," he said. "Put them all together and you come out with something pretty sweet."
Farnsworth would have been proud.
Yeah all we did was drink the cheapest vodka we could our hands on......
Never did we scour scrapmetal yards for useful reactor parts. Not once.
Never did we scour scrapmetal yards for useful reactor parts. Not once.
Cool. I like this -
I wonder how common those are in scrap yards? Heh. Maybe they've got a particle accelerator in the same yard as "scrap"
I wonder how common those are in scrap yards? Heh. Maybe they've got a particle accelerator in the same yard as "scrap"
Wow, i wish i could find cool things in a pile of junk like that.
Well they say it isn't putting off that much radiation, although i dont know what you mean by RA so if you were making a joke ignore me
Um, if you only get SECOND place for building a nuclear fusion reactor, what the heck do you need to build to get first?????
bolomite
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- Oct 12, 2000
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Quote
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: bbrontosaurus
Um, if you only get SECOND place for building a nuclear fusion reactor, what the heck do you need to build to get first?????
First place :beer:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: bbrontosaurus
Um, if you only get SECOND place for building a nuclear fusion reactor, what the heck do you need to build to get first?????
First place :beer:
Nuclear reactors use fission if i remember correctly. Its where you bombard a radioactive isotope with neutrons to get it to split off and make 2 new atoms.
Fusion is what the sun does where 2 H atoms combine to make helium (its alot more complex than that though)
Fission is common but limited by the availability of radioactive materials that react properly when hit with neutrons.
Im not sure if fusion is possible to create outside of nature. I.E. in a lab.
But then again, im a CompE major, not a physics major, and i hated chem2.
Physics - Presented by Intel Foundation Intel will present Best of Category Winners with a $5,000 scholarship and a high-performance computer. Additionally, a $1,000 grant will be given to their school and the Intel ISEF Affiliated fair they represent. Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of $5,000 for
Top First Place Winner PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
First Award of $3,000 PH029 Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?
Jennifer Anne D'Ascoli, 17, Academy of the Holy Names, Albany, New York
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
Second Award of $1,500 PH005 The Effect of Salinity on the Production and Duration of Antibubbles
Michael J. Pizer, 14, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
PH040 Magnetoplasmadynamics: Ionization and Magnetic Field
Ray Chengchuan He, 19, Hempfield High School, Landisville, Pennsylvania
PH046 Nuclear Fusion Reactor Apparatus
Craig J. Wallace, 18, Spanish Fork High School, Spanish Fork, Utah
PH054 Electron-Phonon Interactions in Carbon Nanotubes
Edward Joesph Su, 18, William G. Enloe High School, Raleigh, North Carolina<FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT>
BLUEBERRY PIE!?!?
Schadenfroh
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- Mar 8, 2003
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