Jeremy Gutsche
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 Don’t worry, you’ll be safe from terrorists because it is difficult to build anything with the word ‘nuclear’ in it… Oh wait! A high school student, Thiago Olson, built a Nuclear Fusion Reactor in his home… This isn’t a nuclear bomb but it certainly is amazing. Luckily, everybody knows that terrorists don’t have access to eBay, so they’ll never find the parts to build anything REALLY dangerous. Pretty cool achievement. Well done Thiago!  For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store. Flanges and piping? Check. High-voltage X-ray transformer? Check. Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check, check, check. “I have cross-country and track, so during those seasons I don’t have much time to work on it,” says Olson, a high school senior in Michigan. “It’s more of a weekend project.” Last November the machine finally delivered the hallmark of success: bubbles in the dosimeter. The bubbles indicate the presence of neutrons, a by-product of fusion—an energy-releasing process in which two hydrogen nuclei crash together and form a helium nucleus. Fusion is commonplace in stars, where hydrogen nuclei fuse in superhot plasma, but temperatures that high are hard to achieve on Earth. Still, the prospect of creating all this energy while forming only nonradioactive helium and easily controlled neutrons has made harnessing fusion one of the most sought-after and heavily funded goals in sustainable energy.
(discovermagazine)References: discovermagazine, techeblog 2 Comments: on High School Student Builds Nuclear Fusion Reactor |
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