TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061119/NEWS03/611190639

On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager.

He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college.

But to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist."

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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not a fission. It's a world of difference.

And his fusion experiment is interesting but not ground-breaking.

The trick about fusion has always been two-fold, sustain a reaction (or come up with a reactor that can do a rapid reset and cycle - "pulse fusion") and, the most important thing, capture enough energy from the fusion reaction to generate more power than the reactor consumes in creating the reaction.

I don't know the totals, but a safe bet is that 10s of billions of dollars have been spent already on this, and while there has been slow incremental progress, each new device to take a theory to the next level costs billions and takes years to build. And to date there isn't even a drawing board idea on a fusion power plant that can be operated efficiently enough to pay for the cost of building.

SO why bang our heads against this wall? Simple, if we can build it, it really is the panacea that the world needs. Cheap or not cheap, there would be sufficient electricity to power everything, no need to burn fossil fuels, even gasoline (airplanes and ships are another issue), no need to worry about large quantities of nuclear waste, no greenhouse gasses. And the fuel supply is almost quite literally inexhaustible.

my hat's off to the kid for doing it, and to his parents for funding it.

Isn't this what the scam in Utah was about? I thought this guys got millions because they claimed to create fusion in a test tube---then disappeared.

"capture enough energy from the fusion reaction to generate more power than the reactor consumes in creating the reaction."

That was the claim of the scamsters.

It was also claimed that they were creating fusion at near room temperature.

The kid's experiment is a high temperature fusion... albeit very very small.

...reactors which LaRouche has been talking about for some time now as the answer to our power needs over the next 50 years.

There is an Energy from Thorium site which outlines the advantages of using thorium as the nuclear fuel source:

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We must build thousands of thorium reactors to displace coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium as energy sources. This would be impractical if liquid-fluoride reactors were as difficult to build as pressurized water reactors. But they will be much simpler and smaller for several reasons.

- They will operate at a higher power density (leading to a smaller core);
- They will not need refueling shutdowns (eliminating the complicated refueling equipment);
- They will operate at ambient pressure and have no pressurized water in the core (shrinking the containment vessel dramatically);
- They will not require the complicated emergency core cooling systems and their backups that solid-core reactors require (because of their passive approach to decay heat removal)and;
- Their power conversion system will be much smaller and power-dense (since in a closed-cycle gas turbine you can vary both initial cycle pressure and overall pressure ratio).

In short, these plants will be much smaller, much simpler, much, much safer, and more secure.
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http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2006/05/introduction-and-basic-principles.html

Anyone remember that one?

They don't make movies like that any more.

with Val Kilmer as the ultimate nerd.

Course, the USAF actually now HAS the device they were working on in the movie.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/1283906.html

If only a few percent more US students were busy working on such science and research projects, instead of wasting their lives in front of the TV.