Blogging My Life...
What were you doing between the ages of 15 and 17? Well, a kid in Rochester Hills, MI named Thiago Olson spent those years creating a Nuclear Fusion Reactor.
The Detroit Free Press reports;
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.Nuclear fusion -- when atoms are combined to create energy -- is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," he said.
Wikipedia has a ton of details on Nuclear Fusion and explains;
The only fusion reactions thus far produced by humans to achieve ignition are those which have been created in hydrogen bombs.
OK!
Tweet This!
Comments
Hmmm... when I was 17, although I had an interest in physics, I never felt the urge to build osmething that if it broke could liquidate me, my family, my house, my neighbourhood, my dog, my car....
Posted by: Caydel | November 21, 2006 3:06 PM
First, it was a FISSION reactor. No-one has made a fusion reactor yet, they are far too difficult (with the exception of bombs.) He apparently used radium he extracted from paint to provide the neutrons...
And when a reactor explodes, it is NOT a nuclear explosion, Chernobyl was a mechanical explosion, i.e. the steam presure exploding.
And I thought he did it in his shed.
Posted by: Hamish | June 17, 2008 12:58 PM
Hamish, it was a nuclear fusion reactor. Fission reactors are far too dangerous.
Posted by: David Mackay | November 25, 2008 5:10 PM
@ hamish
it was a fusion reactor. you are thinking of another guy who did build a fission reactor in his shed.
Posted by: someone | May 6, 2009 8:14 PM
What Hamish says is both wrong and right, no one has build a fusion reactor yet. Iter is trying to build the first one, if it was this easy, there would have been many of these reacors. But it wasn't a fission reactor either, they are far too dangerous and complicated also. I don't know what is was or what all these ''fusion'' reactors people are build are, but it's not what it claimes to be!
Posted by: Bob | November 8, 2011 10:58 AM
What Hamish says is both wrong and right, no one has build a fusion reactor yet. Iter is trying to build the first one, if it was this easy, there would have been many of these reacors. But it wasn't a fission reactor either, they are far too dangerous and complicated also. I don't know what is was or what all these ''fusion'' reactors people are build are, but it's not what it claimes to be!
Posted by: Bob | November 8, 2011 11:01 AM