College Freshman Builds Fusion Reactor 680
Aiua writes "The Deseret Morning News is reporting that a Utah State University freshman has built a nuclear fusion reactor and compares how the student is similar to Philo T. Farnsworth (the inventor of the television and designer of the plans for a fusion reactor)."
Um.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Informative)
The tale of the radioactive boyscout [fortunecity.com]
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Funny)
Sir, we've finally found those weapons of mass destruction. They were in a dorm in Utah.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Informative)
"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."
Yes.
Fusion doesn't have to be self-sustained! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Informative)
I find it annoying when people spell words as they hear them. Wich works in german, but not at all in english. Especially if you have a thick american accent.
As far as LTFS, you might want to ask yourself how on earth the neutron might come out of the fusion reaction
H + H + energy -> He + energy.
See, no excess neutrons. However,
H + energy -> p+ + n + e-
Not that this reaction is possible also
H + H +energy -> He +n +energy
In which
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially when the word in question is Russian. The term is a contraction of "TOroidal KAmera with MAgnetic field". "Kamera" is Russian for "chamber".
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Informative)
If this guy truly built a Farnsworth fusor, then you're wrong - the fusor really is capable of creating nuclear fusion. People building these things have measured the neutrons to prove it.
The heart of the machine is some kind of electrode which uses energy from the fusion reaction itself to reinforce the electric field which is used to trigger the reaction (I guess by picking up energy from the energetic alpha particles & electrons between blasted out in all directions at really high energy levels from inside the electrode). Unfortunately, the reaction is not sustainable - the same effect which can force the deuterium together strongly enough to create fusion also prevents any _new_ fuel from entering from the outside of the field, thus causing the collapse of the reaction once all the fuel is consumed.
Farnsworth really was a genius at manipulating electric fields. It's too bad he died early, or he might've been able to figure out how to make his fusor practical.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. It's basically two electrodes - an outer and inner spherical or conical system. By applying a high voltage, electrons or positive ions are attracted towards the inner elecrode, where they get trapped, collide, or overshoot.
In simplified terms, some of the ions flying through/near the centre can have enough energy to undergo nuclear fusion.
As far as ive read, one of the big problem is the occasional collisions with the wires that form the electrodes. This wastes energy and causes decay. Future research involves "virtual" electrodes or magnetic sheilding.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If by dying early you mean that 65 years old is "early," then sure... But for someone who conceived the principles of television at 13 years old and holds 300 U.S. and foreign patents, I'd say he did pretty good for himself in his lifetime. If only people spent more time thinking and inventing and less time reading
Farnsworth? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Farnsworth? (Score:5, Informative)
The Radioactive Boy Scout (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone remember this story [findarticles.com]?
cribRe:Farnsworth? (Score:3, Funny)
Still, a man can dream. A man can dream....
Re:Farnsworth? (Score:4, Funny)
If he pulled the fing-longer-er out, he'd probably begin to wish he hadn't invented the smelloscope...
Re:Farnsworth? (Score:4, Informative)
Then someone had the idea of, instead of charging people for the privilege of watching TV and using the money raised to pay for high-quality programmes that would at once inform, educate and entertain, letting people watch telly for free but showing advertisements during the breaks between programmes, and using the advertising money to pay for programmes that ultimately would do little more than fill in the breaks between adverts. IMHO that was the disinvention of television.
Re:Farnsworth? (Score:4, Funny)
Mr. Wallace please report... (Score:5, Funny)
In other news (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:4, Funny)
way too much time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:way too much time (Score:4, Funny)
pm
Utah Fusion (Score:4, Funny)
Oh yeah, I forgot... that line of investigation went cold.
Cool... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, wouldn't the FBI be looking hard at him now that has built something like this?
Re:Cool... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cool... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Required materials (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Required materials (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Required materials (Score:5, Informative)
It actually is pretty hard to make an implosion-type bomb work. They didn't work out the designs using slide rules, but actually cobbled together what was a hell of a lot of computing power for the day. I don't remember if they actually built any general-purpose electronic computers, but at least some of the work was done by large teams of workers using single purpose calculating machines. One machine would could add, another multiply, etc. and the system was "programmed" by coming up with a specific order in which IBM cards containing the information being processed were run through the system. Richard Feynman discussed a lot about this system in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Admittedly the average mobile phone these days probably had enough processing power to do those calculations, but the Nobel Prize winning minds in charge of the project had a lot more to do with its success than the raw processing power.
FWIW, you can learn far more than you ever wanted to know about nuclear weapons by reading the Nuclear Weapons Archive [membrane.com]. When you understand everything in there, you can start thinking about building bombs.
Re:Required materials (Score:3, Informative)
A fusion bomb is just a fission bomb surrounding a dense deuterium/tritium core. Typically spherical to provide an even "squeeze" on the D/T mix. Blast plates push the plutonium together (of which the ciritcal mass is already widely known). It goes boom, crushing the D/T core with force beyond that found even in the sun. The core has nowhere to go, so it immediately fuses a good portion of its mass. The resu
Re:Required materials (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't put together just right, it will just melt and vaporize. "Right" means with sub-millisecond timing.
Re:Cool... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cool... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool you say? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Title is misleading (Score:5, Funny)
Errr, yeah; what kind of stupid bastard mistakes a deu... deuterium
*darts eyes back and forth*
Re:Title is misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Neutron generator tubes, that rely on deuterium-tritium fusion to generate neutrons, have been available for decades.
Re:Title is misleading (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Title is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Atrox
Re:Just a question.. (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe he thought... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe he thought... (Score:5, Funny)
Fusion is hotter than an older college chick.
Re:Maybe he thought... (Score:5, Funny)
Words he will never hear... (Score:3, Funny)
Words this kid will never hear: "Baby, you make me hotter than a Poisser plasma reaction."
So... not much, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So... not much, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
some 18 year old kid was able to do it.
thats pretty f'in impressive...
Re:So... not much, right? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm in rare form tonight, must have forgotten my meds.
Not cold fusion. Not terribly useful, either. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch
The vacuum of space (Score:3, Interesting)
Either way, that would be one part you could omit if this were launched into space. Could anyone familiar with how this thing works tell me if it would run in space?
Second Place? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Second Place? (Score:5, Informative)
Scroll about 2/3rds down the page or search for "Spanish".
He came in second in his category (Physics). He was beat by about 40-some-odd other students altogether, and tied with a hundred or so.
What beat him?
Phase transition in chaotic fluids,
Identifying genes with neural networks,
Investigation into geothermal activity on Venus
Silencing cancer with RNA
Novel asteroid distance determination technique
Capstone: Brain-computer interface for the disabled.
He may have not gotten as high marks because he wasn't really discovering anything new or pursuing a topic from a strange angle... it was a humoungous task of engineering, however, and this could not be overlooked.
CDs (Score:5, Funny)
I guess we have a new winner for what to do with AOL CDs.
Re:CDs (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally! A use for those AOL and MSDN CD's!! (Score:5, Funny)
Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs.
Just some of my insight (Score:5, Insightful)
I point all this to intellectual property. He was fortunately able to obtain most of his material cheaply and easily, but what about most hobbyists that want to fidle with new technology? Where do they get the money for new tools, machines, etc? If we applied an open source model to intellectual property and treated ideas not as property, but as what they really are, then we could accelerate scientific and technological progress greatly. What this college student did is quite amazing. The thing he built is only found in top notch institutions. I just think we need more plagiarism prevention, not patents. Btw, I'm sorry for being somewhat off-topic, but I feel that there is an important lesson to be learned here.
Re:Just some of my insight (Score:4, Insightful)
As for applying an open source model to ideas...well, we already do that, stupid, it's called peer review. It manifests itself in the form of these cool, incredibly terse publications about the size of silver age comic books, with the words JOURNAL OF at the front of the title and a bunch of syllables at the end. This system is how we "know" cold fusion isn't real, or at the very least it isn't going to be easy. The methodology of experimentation is not prevented by intellectual property law. Patenting something doesn't mean nobody else understands how it works, or prevent you from improving upon it. Pantent law PROTECTS improvements. There is no DMCA for this sort of thing, no FBI agent will come to your lab. In the biotech field you can make as many AIDS cocktails as you like for research. Steal the recipe right out of the JAMA if you like. Shit, Glaxo wants you to. The more publications there are that back up their findings, the easier it is to get the FDA to lay off on them.
All patent law does is assure that the first guy to come up with a brilliant new concept will be allowed to make money from technologies based off of it. That's how researchers live...selling ideas that can be made into profits. Taking that away from them doesn't help science, mate.
Cool, But No Breeder Reactor (Score:5, Informative)
Good way to win a Darward Award while still living if you ask me...
Blockwars [blockwars.com]: free, multiplayer, and with new features!
Re:Cool, But No Breeder Reactor (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cool, But No Breeder Reactor (Score:5, Informative)
There's a good documentary about him that was made earlier this year.
You can get some info on it here [eagletv.co.uk].
The RIAA is currently investigating ... (Score:5, Funny)
RIAA: "They wouldn't be CD's with pirated music on them would they ??"
Wallace: "No sir, Mr. RIAA-man. But you can have a look yourself. I keep them over there in that nuclear reactor. Fill your boots."
Strange (Score:3, Informative)
In my day we called it a moderator. Why didn't he just use charcoal, coal or graphite?
And another thing, I thought it was John Logie Baird [mztv.com] that invented (mechanical) television and Marconi who invented magnetically-scanned television? Maybe in America, everything was invented by Americans independently of the rest of the world?
[sigh] Slight false alarm (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, Wallace's IEC, like every other IEC ever built, doesn't get even close to break-even. Their primary utility is, as the article mentions, as a neutron source (and in fact that's what they're usually used for). There are some folks that are hopeful they can find a way to improve the efficiency of IEC fusion and exceed break-even (Robert Bussard, of Bussard ram-jet fame, for example), but no one's managed to actually demonstrate a working, energy-generating IEC yet.
Re:[sigh] Slight false alarm (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think these devices are far more likely to generate succes than the current breed of "tokamak" style reactors. They've had 20 years and upteen billion dollars, and still think it will take anotehr 20 years longer.
I for one think it's lu
Re:[sigh] Slight false alarm (Score:5, Informative)
That was Bussard's big breakthrough - he developed a way to use magnetic fields to protect the inner electrode from electron impacts, and thus increase the efficiency. Unfortunately, as far as I know, he never got the money to take it much beyond the concept demonstration stage (not as far as break-even). See "The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor: And How to Make It Work" [tripod.com] for more details.
Wait a minute (Score:3, Funny)
Farnsworth and TV (Score:5, Informative)
The inventor of television is not necessarily Farnsworth -- there are several scientists with good claims on the title [physlink.com] (including John Logie Baird, after whom the Logie television awards are named).
Re:Farnsworth and TV (Score:3, Informative)
See this site [park.org] and this site [philo75.com] for more details...
Re:Farnsworth and TV (Score:5, Informative)
Farnsworth invented the Farnsworth Image Dissector, the first TV camera tube. Which sucked. The device required huge amounts of light to work, bright sunlight, and big optics. It required so much light because it didn't integrate over the entire frame time; only the light that came in during the scan of the specific pixel contributed to the output. But it had some light amplification; it works a lot like a photomultiplier. In fact, it's basically a photomultiplier whose viewpoint can be steered.
Shortly thereafter, Zworklin invented the iconoscope. Which also sucked. That device required huge amounts of light, but for a different reason. The iconoscope has no light amplification, but it integrates the accumulated light over a frame time on a per-pixel basis as an electric charge. The accumulated charge is then read out by a scanning beam.
After much litigation, RCA ended up owning both technologies, and RCA Labs spent many years developing the image orthicon, which combines the good features of the two technologies. The image orthicon is just what you'd expect from a big corporate lab. It took years to develop, it's incredibly complicated and expensive, requires a huge amount of support electronics, is difficult to adjust, and produces a good picture at reasonable light levels. It has the photomultiplier-type amplification of the image dissector and the charge accumulation of the iconosope. Only after the image orthicon was developed did TV broadcasting become commercially viable.
Re:Farnsworth and TV (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure if this is a very odd troll or not. Anyway, for the benefit of the public... Morse invented the wired telegraph, so he's got no claim on wireless telegraphy and is irrelevant to the issue. Marconi was transmitting Morse code in 1895, whereas Tesla started transmitting voltage in 1893. So yes, Tesla was transmitting wirelessly first, but it was in 100,000 volt discharges of electricity -- hardly the sort of transmission you'd like to receive in your headphones! And plainly not intended to be a telegraph.
Tesla was a cool guy and invented lots of interesting stuff, but people have a tendency to get all cultish about him and ascribe all sorts of miracles to him. Rather than claiming Marconi's work as his, you'd do his memory a better service by honouring him for his own achievements (like AC power).
Sheesh .... (Score:5, Funny)
I'VE BEEN LOOKING ALL OVER FOR THAT!
I think this means something else (Score:3, Funny)
Bloom County (Score:3, Funny)
"Attention students! Fire drill!"
Generating neutrons is easy (Score:5, Informative)
Beryllium 9 is great because it's essentially two helium nuclei held together by a loose neutron with a very low binding energy (1.66 MeV). It's almost the nuclear equivalent of an alkali metal. You can even pop the thing apart with a gamma ray if you don't want to bother with alpha emitters. For those who worry about berylliosis, boron 11 also works. The (alpha,n) reaction yields nitrogen 14.
This was the setup that Chadwick used for detecting the neutron in 1932. Back then neutrons were referred to as "beryllium radiation" (sort of like how electrons were first called "cathode rays") and were wrongly thought to be some sort of strongly penetrating photons. Chadwick surrounded his beryllium source with wax and measured the energies of the protons that got knocked out by elastic collisions. Wax is a great moderator because it's full of protons, and the neutron slams into a proton in the wax and loses all its energy like a billiard ball. The neutron that emerges from the wax is a slow neutron. Slow neutrons are generally much more useful than fast neutrons because they spend more time in your fissionable material, and there is no Coulomb barrier that they need to overcome so they react with nuclei very easily.
I shouldn't say too much more or else I'll get myself placed on the Bush Administration's new list of 100,000 maniacs. [nytimes.com] But if you're building a fission bomb, these reactions are really handy because your implosion doesn't last very long and you need to get hold of lots of slow neutrons in a hurry. If you're building a nuclear reactor for power generation, you're under less of a tight schedule and can probably wait a millisecond or two for neutrons from cosmic rays or spontaneous fissions to get your pile going.
Fusion that GENERATES electricity (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things I came across was Fusor [fusor.net], which is essentially a site for people who do this as a hobby.
The most interesting thing I found was a link to the work of a gentleman named Eric Lerner. He actually has a workable, scalable, power-generating reactor [crosswinds.net]. His is based on "dense plasma focus". Thing is, he's already got the thing to 1 billion degrees - and he's going for the big time - the aneutronic p-B11 reaction. That only generates alpha particles - which can be directly converted into electricity. No nasty turbines or steam! Pretty amazing.
Re:Fusion that GENERATES electricity (Score:4, Informative)
No, he doesn't. From the linked article, in the Objectives section.
It's a pretty set of sketches and projections (right down to very detailed guesstimates at the income and return on investment for a hypothetical company who might want to fund this project) but it is by no means a working generator. He hasn't even achieved break-even yet. Don't hold your breath.
More evidence... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just more evidence that the Internet is improving our lives. A science project such as this would have been barely imaginablie before the Internet.
It is also probable that the boy's access to information would have been too limited to compelete such a task without the Internet.
If corporations can be prevented from imprisoning this information for their short term profit, progress will be accelerated exponentially. It is essential that communication be kept free. Great discoveries are never made by old scientists (or should I say married scientists [slashdot.org]?). Therefore, young people need more access to information.
It seems that the monopoly profit model no longer "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Access to all information needs to be guaranteed for the future for progress. Profits are secondary to access.
Finally, if scientists are not tinkerers, what what is their purpose?
Two cultures (Score:5, Insightful)
And why this apparently off-topic minor rant? Because we're seeing it here. The ones who probably can't even change a bicycle tire say "Oh that's easy, probably just followed the instruction book", not having the slightest clue about how difficult it is to make something from disparate parts. The ones who have got a clue or have been involved in projects like this have an idea of how difficult it really is, but actually they have no idea of how huge and insuperable the barrier is to 99% of the population - because they themselves are hardwired to know where to start.
It's about disparate rewards. The same level of skill and application this guy showed, applied to basketball or acting, might get him a multimillion dollar income. Why don't we perceive someone who spends hours bouncing a little ball around as being sad and geeky and having too much time on his hands? Why does someone who pretends to be other people, often not very well, get paid so much more than an astronaut or a fighter pilot who does something really, really difficult and dangerous?
Naive ramblings, I guess, but in the conversion of the human race from savannah apes to civilisation, it wasn't the actors and the basketball players that worked out how to bang the rocks together and how to get one stone to stick on top of another.
Inventor of TV???? (Score:5, Informative)
I would not necessarily call Philo Taylor Farnsworth the inventor of TV. Electronic TV, yes, along with transmission of TV signals (demonstrated in 1927), but Baird was the first to demonstrate a working "television" - a mechanical device, demonstrated in 1925. Farnsworth's used a scanning technique, much different in design to Baird's.
I think Baird was the first to get colour working (in WW2). There were many others too, such as Zworykin (invented similar things, parallel to Farnsworth), Du Mont (invented the CRT), and Nipkow (invented the scanning disk in 1884, the basis for mechanical TVs).
More info here [aol.com] and here [physlink.com].
-- Steve
Wesley? Is that you? (Score:3, Funny)
Looks like Mr.Crusher has some competition!
Only Second Place?! (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, building a nuclear fusion reactor only gets you second place in Intel's science contest? What did the kid who got first place do, find a cure for cancer?
Re:Only Second Place?! (Score:5, Informative)
second place? (Score:4, Informative)
What won first place, you might ask? According to Intel's [intel.com] page on it, there were in fact 3 winners [intel.com]. One developed a new method for determining the distance of asteroids from Earth, another developed a program that may one day enable a person with muscular disabilities to use brainwaves to control a computer keyboard, and the third set out to solve how to treat cancer patients effectively without destroying their healthy cells.
Re:terrorist (Score:3, Funny)
Re:terrorist (Score:5, Funny)
First place - NOT KIDDING!!! (Score:3, Informative)
And
Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
I can see the second.. but the first!?!?!?
http://www.sciserv.org/isef/results/grnd2003.as
Science and the science fair... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This makes me sick (Score:4, Informative)
Fusion does not free energy make (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fusion does not free energy make (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clever hoax? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are We Agreed?
Read the article (Score:3, Informative)
It's probably all really simple: every once in a while a deuterium core will tunnel into another deuterium core and cling to it (the actual process to get to He is probably a bit more complicated). That
Re:ugg think about it (Score:5, Insightful)
That is exactly why this kid DOES deserve a prize. He managed to make the device without a $10,000 research/developement grant. No he didn't create anything revolutanary, but he did accomplish an extraordinary acheivement. I'll drink to him tonight. (not that I really need an excuse)
Re:This guy will be rich (Score:5, Informative)
maybe because you refuse to look? yes, cold fusion got a bad rap and may very well be a crock of... non-fusing stuff. but there are smart people who disagree:
quotes cribbed (using Copy-n-Paste[TM]) from the wired magazine article on cold fusion [wired.com]
give it a read.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a boss once who built a Farnesworth-style fusor from scrounged parts sometime back in the late 60's or early 70's. He told me he kept it behind his desk for years.
At the time he ran the Nuclear Effects - Solar Thermal Test Facility at White Sands Missile Range (basically a BIG concentrating mirror for simulating the intense heat of a nuclear blast and its effect on materials). Frequently they would get VIP visitors dropping in from the Pentagon, major universities, etc. He would always take the visitors on a walking tour of the facility. He would flip the machine on ahead of time and turn on a geiger counter he kept next to his desk. At the end of the tour he would take the visitors to his office. Usually the visitors would notice the clicking sound after a few minutes of chit-chat and ask "what's making that sound?" He would then dead-pan "oh that's nothing, that's just the radiation from my fusion reactor" and wave the geiger counter back and forth across the machine, generating lots of above background clicking.
The fusor was completely safe and the neutron radiation from it was well within safe limits, but frequently the visitors would require a bit of calming down after his little joke.
I think at least one general thought he had created a fusion power source and wanted to classify the whole deal and immediately fund development. Don't imagine he was too happy when he found out it used alot of energy and produced only a few neutrons.
Re:Mr. Fusion (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Informative)
You could drink it, but you wouldn't want to drink a lot of it. Heavy water in concentrations of over 50% apparently inhibits mitosis (cell division) and would lead to eventual death if not reduced. The symptons are similar to radiation poisoning/chemo with bone marrow, the stomach lining, and hair growth suffering the most damage since these tissues/process are dependent on high cell division rates.
You would have to ingest fairly significant amounts of D2O over serveral days to do this
Re:D2O? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Inventor of Television"? (Score:5, Informative)
Q: How many of those are in use today?
A: About 1x10^e-120 (okay, so it's a guess)
Philo Farnsworth invented the electronic scanning system that you watch today.
Vladimir Zworykin, who is often cited as the "inventor" of television said after his 1930 visit to Farnsworth lab that "I wish I might have invented it."
Of course, Zworkin was in the employ of David Sarnoff of RCA. (as an aside: if you think that Microsoft is an anti-competitive monopoly, you should check out "Radio" of the 1920s. They had a portfolio of literally hundreds of patents that effectively denied entry in the radio marketplace unless you went first to them and paid licensing fees. And if Radio did not like you or wanted to own you, no license and no business for you.)
Anyways, Sarnoff wanted RCA to dominate television the same way that they dominated radio. RCA tried for many years to discredit Farnworth and his invention, instead saying that Zworkin had invented the iconoscope in 1923. This, history shows us, was clearly a lie. It is a lie as grand as Apple or Microsoft claiming the invention of the graphical user interface for computing. Or that Marconi invented radio. Neither is true.
History does show that on September 27, 1927 Philo T. Farnsowrth demonstrated the first all-electronic television system.
Farnsworth was a brilliant man, and should be given full credit for all that he did.
For more info: http://www.farnovision.com/chronicles/tfc-who_inv