Dr. Zoomie –I read about a kid making hydrogen fusion in his home? If a 12-year-old can produce fusion, what in the world have all those scientists and engineers in the US, Russia, France, China, and all the other fusion researchers been working on for the last half-century? Is this kid going to win the Nobel Prize? And what about his neighbors – are they safe?
So…at the risk of boring you with yet another anecdote from my past, when I was working for the Health Department, I got a call about a guy who was apparently doing fusion research in an old warehouse where he’d rented some space. Seems some of the neighbors were worried about radiation exposure…and maybe an explosion. I went over, accompanied by a fire chief – my concern was that the guy doing the work might be collecting radioactive materials like the radioactive boy scout; I think the Chief was just curious and maybe a little bored.
What I found was a bunch of metal components that had been welded and bolted together, attached to a high-voltage power source, and filled with vacuum. The premise was that releasing some ionized hydrogen into the device and then turning on the voltage would cause the hydrogen atoms to be attracted to the grid at the center. If two of them met, the voltage was high enough that there was a chance they’d stick together – fusing to form a helium atom. To make that more likely, the guy doing this was using deuterium, a form of hydrogen with a proton and a neutron – and when he flipped the switch (causing the fire chief to take a few steps back), sure enough, I saw a faint purple glow emanating from the charged wire grid in the center that the owner told me indicated that fusion was taking place.
Wandering around the area, looking around and checking my instruments, I was glad to see no evidence that the guy was hoarding radioactive sources – licit or illicit – so I could check that concern off my list. And, talking with him, he seemed to have a fairly good idea as to the principles behind what he was trying to do. Interestingly, making a DIY fusion reactor isn’t very difficult…as long as you don’t expect to, say, power your home…and not tremendously expensive either. And even the part I’d thought would be most challenging – getting his hands on deuterium – turned out to not to have been that big a deal; $250 for 50 liters – who knew?
After showing us his device, walking us around his shop, and talking through how he built and operated it, some of the snags he’d had to overcome, and so forth – then he asked if we wanted to see it in operation. I gave an immediate yes, the owner reached for the circuit breaker, and the Fire Chief who was there with us took a step back away from the device. Looking inside the vacuum chamber, I saw a nice purple glow build up, and my instruments started registering radiation – gammas and neutrons both.
The neutrons were crucial – there are a lot of things that can produce gamma radiation, but the neutrons could only come from actual fusions taking place. The levels of both were quite low; certainly not enough to pose a risk to anyone. But they proved that I was standing just a few feet away from genuine hydrogen fusion reactions, which was pretty cool.
Having said that, there’s a huge difference between the massive devices that are racing to be the first to produce power from nuclear fusion. Those devices fill entire buildings and cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars; they’re among the most complex devices ever built. This device – and the one I saw – are as far from those behemoths as a campfire is from a forest fire.
So here’s the thing – what’s impressive here isn’t that someone made a hydrogen fusion reactor in their home – that’s been done by a lot of people at this point and there’s a ton of information online as well, including shopping lists. So, without detracting from the kid who built this reactor, this work didn’t break new ground scientifically or technologically – what was new is that it was done by a 12-year-old kid. When I was 12, I could maybe repair my bicycle…if it was something simple. For a kid this young to build something like this is pretty impressive. So – good job kid – my hat’s off to you!