Teen Goes Nuclear
A 17-year-old amateur scientist has built his own Fusor.
In the basement of his parents’ Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren’t privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build — a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.
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In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion. So, how does he do it?
Pointing to the steel chamber where all the magic happens, Thiago said on Friday that this piece of the puzzle serves as a vacuum. The air is sucked out and into a filter.
Then, deuterium gas — a form of hydrogen — is injected into the vacuum. About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine. As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon — ta da — nuclear fusion.
- Link (via Slashdot)
- The Radioactive Boy Scout is a gripping account of another teen who almost succeeded in building a much more dangerous breeder reactor without anyone’s knowledge.
