14-year-old kid reportedly become youngest person to achieve nuclear fusion

[C C]

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-14-year-o...ayroom-lab

EXCERPT: . . . Tennessee teenager Jackson Oswalt is not your average 14-year-old. While other kids are playing video games or watching TV, he's been busy putting together a nuclear laboratory in an old playroom in his house. The budding nuclear engineer has been working on this project since he was 12, and on 19 January 2018, just hours before his 13th birthday, he reportedly achieved his mission. Using 50,000 volts of electricity, Oswalt was reportedly able to combine two atoms of deuterium gas, successfully fusing the nuclei in his reactor's plasma core.

[...] To be clear, these claims have not been peer reviewed as yet - until they're replicated and the results are published in a peer-review journal, we need to take all of this with a very, very big grain of salt. But Oswalt is not the only one who thinks he's been successful. The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium has also verified Oswalt's results. According to Jason Hull, an administrator on the website, Oswalt has now been added to the hobbyist group's list of successful fusioneers....

MORE: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-14-year-o...ayroom-lab

[Yazata]

I was amazed to first learn that this is possible about a year ago.

Apparently achieving hot nuclear fusion isn't even all that difficult. It can be done on a laboratory bench. Not only professional physicists do it, but it's become an exciting area for amateur scientists as well.

Of course this isn't the fusion power that they have always been promising (which is always 30 years away, no matter what decade it is, they were saying 30 years in the 1960's and they are saying it now). Bench-top Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors don't come close to energy break-even. But they are an abundant source of neutron radiation and secondary x-rays and can be very dangerous to anyone standing nearby. (Hobbyists have killed themselves doing it, often by electrocution since it requires high voltages and currents.)

Nor, it must be said, will it enable adolescents to blow up their neighborhoods with huge explosions with cool mushroom clouds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

http://www.fusor.net/

https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-bo...ear-fusor/

http://www.electricalfun.com/workbenchfu..._Jack.aspx

[Image: fusor_details_grid.png]

The basic principle is simple (though the details of the physics isn't and neither is executing it so it actually works). The 'Electicalfun.com' story in the link above explains it this way: "Basically, a fusor consists of two concentric, usually spherical grids inside a vacuum chamber, the inner one usually about 5 times smaller in diameter than the outer, (most fusors use the vacuum chamber itself as an outer grid). A vacuum of about 1 millitorr (the exact pressure varies from fusor to fusor) is pulled on the vacuum chamber, and then it is backfilled with deuterium to a pressure of about 5 millitorr or less. The inner grid is then charged with anywhere from -20,000 to -100,000 volts at a current of at least 2mA, the outer grid is left grounded. Due to a process called electrostatic field emission (from the inner grid), the deuterium is ionized. These ions are positively charged, which results in them being accelerated towards the negatively charged inner grid wires. Some ions strike the wires, and others carry on through the grid. Some of the ions that pass through the grid collide, and some of those collisions result in the fusion of the deuterium ions into helium." So it's basically a spherical ion accelerator/collider. (Move over, CERN.)

Fusors are used for nuclear research (I suppose that physicists can determine technical things about fusion processes by measuring the emission products from these things) and universities like MIT have built them. They are also used as neutron sources (you can never have too many neutrons) and to produce radio-isotopes for medical and other purposes. And they are an item of tremendous current interest in 'maker'/amateur scientist circles.

The fusor was invented by Philo Farnsworth, one of the most fascinating people that the public has never heard of. He was an old-school Thomas Edison style inventor/engineer (I don't know that he ever graduated from college) who built the first electronically-scanned television system in San Francisco in 1927, the ancestor of those cathode ray tube TVs that dominated TV for a generation. His first TV transmission was from one room to another in the building in photo below. Farnsworth's words upon seeing his first TV image were, "There you are. Electronic television!" One of Philo's big interests was doing cool things with vacuum tubes. (The fusor is an example of it.) Companies like RCA screwed him out of the TV patents and he never made much money from his epochal TV invention. He later started his own company in Fort Wayne IN where he produced improvements in radar during WWII (one of his early patents was for what he called a "fog penetrating beam" for ships and aircraft) and even infrared astronomy. Then for good measure, he invented the desktop nuclear reactor in the 1960's!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth

I was aware of Philo because I used to walk past his old laboratory building where he made the first experimental electronic TV in 1927. Today it's marked by a little historical plaque, visible just to the left of the former laboratory building (not sure what the building is used for now) in the photo below. (I was unaware of his fusor until recently.)

[Image: farnsworth_lab_thumb.jpg]