The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

Geiger counters in hand, the two of them race toward the entrance.

  “Mom,” Taylor yells over his shoulder, “bring your wallet!”

  Taylor and Willis quickly disappear among tall shelves heaped with gas masks, electron microscopes, photomultiplier tubes, detonator cables, and endless piles of esoteric instruments.

  Though Ed Grothus died of colon cancer nearly a half decade before the year he’d predicted humanity would blow itself apart (2013), the store is still tottering on when we visit (it would last another six months). Grothus’s son, Mike, lives in Los Angeles but has returned on the day of our visit to take care of some business. He tells me that even though the store is becoming less and less viable as a business, he wants to keep it open as long as he can, since “it’s a mecca for science geeks from all over the world.

  “But we don’t get many who take it that far,” he says, nodding toward Taylor and Willis, who are prowling an aisle with their beeping Geiger counters. I fall in behind as they home in on something radioactive. When Taylor’s clicking slows slightly, Willis, behind him, lowers his probe toward the concrete floor and zeroes in on a brown stain. “Hmm,” he says. “I wonder what spilled here.”

  As Taylor and Willis continue their hunt, Grothus takes Tiffany and me outside and opens a shipping container to show us his father’s final big project, a pair of forty-ton white granite obelisks with Grothus’s gospel of the atomic threat inscribed in fifteen languages. “These were his Doomsday Stones,” Grothus says. “My dad was a character, and by far the most famous person in town. But most people accepted him. It’s not as though no one else working in those laboratories had doubts about what they were doing.”

  One of the wrenching ironies of the American nuclear weapons program is that many of the most creative minds of the twentieth century ended up producing the most destructive force in history. Many pondered the ethical implications of their work; 155 Manhattan Project scientists even signed a petition to President Truman opposing the bomb’s use. Oppenheimer delayed the document’s delivery until it could no longer make a difference, but after the bombs were dropped, the brilliant physicist’s life imploded with guilt. He became a passionate opponent of the escalating madness that gripped the world as the weapons he’d pioneered took on ever-larger dimensions of destructive potential. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb with a vehemence so vocal that his security clearance was eventually revoked and he was shut out of Los Alamos, the atomic complex he’d built.

  An hour later I locate Tiffany near the front of the store, absent-mindedly poking at her smartphone. “They’re lost somewhere in the vacuum section,” she says. I find Taylor with a shopping cart half full of equipment. “Look!” he says, lifting up a fistful of gear. “I got this noise-generating tube that’s really radioactive and some ConFlat 1.33 connectors.”

  Nearly another hour later I run into Grothus again and ask if he’s seen Taylor. “The kid with the real thick Southern accent?” he says. “He’s up front, arguing with his mom.”

  I approach slowly and spot Taylor and Tiffany near the cash register flanking a cart full of ConFlat fittings, radioactive resistors, and two high-voltage feedthroughs.

  “Tay, these high-voltage whatchamacallits are pretty expensive,” Tiffany says. “What do you need ’em for?”

  “For the fusor I’m thinking about building in the house.”

  “Tay, no way,” Tiffany says.

  “I’m thinking just a small one, a little side project.”

  Tiffany, who had been pulling her wallet from her purse, stops and spins toward her son.

  “Taylor,” she says, “you are not going to build a nuclear reactor in the house.”

  Later, we’ll explore Bayo Canyon, the eerie site of the Manhattan Project’s Technical Area 10. Here, engineers tested the implosion design for what became the Fat Man bomb, staging explosions that intentionally spewed radioactive lanthanum (RaLa) into the air—in other words, setting off dirty bombs—and measuring the gamma rays. The RaLa tests were the single most important experiments affecting the final design of the bomb that leveled Nagasaki, which may partly explain the eerie atmosphere in the canyon. We don’t talk much as we work our way across the scrubland with Geiger counters and metal detectors, finding bits of still-radioactive debris and skirting fenced-off areas that are still too radioactive, decades after the tests ended, to enter. At one point I stub my toe on something hard and look down at a slab of concrete poured over a stretch of ground. It’s embedded with a bronze marker warning Do not disturb until 2142.

  We linger a little too long and find ourselves locked in at the gate. After a while a guard comes along and releases us, and we head back toward Albuquerque. On the way, Taylor and Willis reminisce about Taylor’s second attempt at building a reactor. Taylor, getting more savvy, began monitoring several websites each day, watching for new postings of used laboratory equipment. Surfing the web with his list in hand, he learned to pounce quickly if he saw something he needed at a reasonably good price. He also began contacting anyone who might have a part or a lead for him. One day, he called Theodore Gray, the science author, app developer, and obsessive collector of elements. (Among his most famous projects is a four-legged physical table assembled from thousands of samples of elements from the periodic table.) Gray, an advocate for exposing children to the wonders of science, was glad to talk with Taylor about their respective collections. When Taylor asked Gray if he happened to have any extra tungsten lying around, Gray said he did indeed have a bit of thin tungsten wire, which he’d be glad to send to Taylor for his fusor’s grid.

  Then, in the final days of the summer before he began eighth grade, Taylor came across something even more promising: a former astronaut living in Houston wanted to sell a mass spectrometer, a large machine that measures the masses and relative concentrations of atoms and molecules. It wasn’t fully functional, but the parts Taylor wanted were in good shape. Taylor doesn’t remember the price or the astronaut’s name, but after they talked for a while, Taylor asked if he’d consider donating it for Taylor’s fusor project.

  “Imagine,” says Willis, “you’re an established scientist and you get a call from a preteen kid who wants you to part with an expensive precision instrument so he can use it for the nuclear reactor he’s building. There’s both absurdity and charm to it, but that’s the way it works with Taylor—doors just open.”

  Kenneth had always been there to enable and support Taylor when he needed materials, mentors, or experiences to feed his evolving interests. Now, Taylor was taking the lead, reaching out to build his own relationships and shape his own trajectory. In the case of the mass spectrometer, though, Taylor would need Kenneth’s help.

  The astronaut said he’d donate the machine to Taylor if he could figure out how to get it from Houston to Texarkana. As it turned out, Kenneth’s company had just begun sourcing cans from the Houston area. The truck driver made a detour to the astronaut’s house on his next trip and loaded up six pallets of equipment using a rented forklift.

  “I had to hand it to Taylor,” Kenneth says. “He did pretty well on that one.”

  Taylor took apart the mass spectrometer and cannibalized its ConFlat fittings and other components. Though he didn’t have a precision workshop or tools or a budget for high-end equipment, he had a strategy that, he was convinced, could work this time: he’d create a more realistic and coherent design, put his money and energy into getting better parts, and resist the temptation to start building the reactor until he’d collected the key pieces of equipment he needed.

  Taylor used his time during science lab—“which was about as useless as you’d think”—to diagram and rediagram the fusor’s design. At night he’d get online and work the auctions and message boards; he snapped up a thick-walled reaction chamber, a high-voltage power source, and a vacuum pump that was twice as powerful as his last one.

  As Christmas approached, he’d acquired most of the fusor’s parts and was looking forward to assembl
ing and testing the machine. He figured he’d again need to use his homemade electrolysis gas generator to convert the deuterium fuel from heavy water. But to his surprise, he found a cylinder of deuterium under the tree on Christmas morning, a red ribbon tied around its valve fitting.

  “Remember that, Mom?” Taylor says as Tiffany drives. “You guys finally decided I could handle it, and I was so happy!”

  “My parents would have never done that,” Willis says enviously, shaking his head. He grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. With all its secret histories and its ongoing research, Oak Ridge was, even in the 1980s, an exciting place, Willis says, “for a young science nerd.”

  “I remember when some plutonium dropped onto the railroad tracks, and another time when my neighborhood was locked down due to a leak of iodine-131.”

  Willis tells us that his dad was a physicist, his mom a geology teacher.

  “I would have loved to have had scientist parents,” Taylor says.

  “Hey!” Tiffany says. “You got those genes from somebody.”

  “Keep in mind, Taylor,” Willis says, “that my folks were scientists, but they weren’t very supportive of the kinds of things I wanted to do. In fact, they were totally unpermissive about radioactive materials of any sort.”

  Ironically, Tiffany and Kenneth’s lack of expertise may have been helpful to Taylor’s development as a scientist. Lacking such realistic guidance, Taylor never learned that he couldn’t do things; instead, he learned how to do things.

  Willis’s parents supported his early interests in minerals and fossils, but when he got interested in nukes, he says, “I had to be clandestine.”

  Once free of his parents’ watchful eyes, Willis was like a college freshman who’d been denied candy at home gorging on Snickers bars in his dorm room. When we arrive at his house, on Albuquerque’s south side, Taylor’s belt-mounted radiation detector starts beeping furiously the moment Willis swings open the door.

  “Maybe,” Willis says, “you could turn that off so you don’t drive us all crazy.”

  Willis, who lives with another nuclear engineer, says break-ins are common on his block. “But I’d pity the poor guy who got in here and slipped the wrong thing into his pocket.”

  As he takes us through his quack-cures collection in his dining room, he enters an ironic, wry-and-dry showman mode: Stephen Colbert meets P. T. Barnum.

  “Ah, the good old days,” Willis says, picking up a postcard with a dollop of glow-in-the-dark radium paint, “when you could send loose radioactive contamination through the freaking mail!” He holds a Geiger counter up to the card. “Check it out; it’s still putting out eleven thousand CPM!” (counts per minute).

  “And look at this! Back in 2004, an average Joe could buy uranium oxide from MV Laboratories in New Jersey with nary a question asked.” He hands me a sealed thirty-gram bottle of greenish-black uranium-308. “Now, forget it. Another emblem of American freedom eroded by the drumbeat of irrational fear . . .

  “Fortunately, we can all still own some antimatter,” he says, grabbing a shaker of potassium chloride salt substitute. His detector clicks as he explains that potassium-40 has a positron decay channel; when an emitted positron and an electron collide, they annihilate to produce two photons.

  We follow Willis into his bedroom, where his fusor rests next to a chunk of bomb slag from the Trinity nuclear test and dozens of other gadgets and artifacts.

  Tiffany looks worried. “Carl,” she says, “I’m a little concerned about you sleeping with this stuff.”

  “It’s all about acceptable risk,” Willis says. “Different people would put it in a different place.” He looks around the room, spots one of his prizes—a still-functional antique portable x-ray chamber—and snatches it up. “And now,” he says, dashing back toward the living room, “how about a classic physics demonstration of the penetrating quality of x-rays!”

  Willis and Taylor decide that the coolest handy item to x-ray is a boxed set of socket wrenches. It’s interesting to see the tools inside in real time on the screen, but without any shielding I’m starting to wish I’d worn my lead-lined boxer shorts. I begin backing away, as does Tiffany; she discreetly grabs the collar of Taylor’s shirt and pulls him along with us.

  “Uh, maybe just a few seconds is enough, Carl,” Taylor says. Willis nods and flips the machine’s switch off.

  “It kind of scares me being in Carl’s house,” Tiffany says as we drive back to our downtown hotel.

  “You have to admit I’m better than Carl about that stuff,” Taylor says.

  “You’re not sleeping with it,” Tiffany says.

  19

  * * *

  Champions for the Gifted

  BY THE EIGHTH GRADE, Taylor was spending most of his school days on autopilot, going through work he’d long outgrown as his mind wandered away from classes that were unsuited to his interests, knowledge level, and learning style. Joey, too, now in the fifth grade, was withdrawing emotionally from school, inwardly seething as his math teacher handed out yet another drill-and-kill long-division worksheet.

  But Taylor had, at least, made peace with his science teacher. “We were butting heads at first,” says Taylor, “but then she just gave up and she let me start teaching.” In fact, both Taylor and his friend Ellen Orr often found themselves teaching the classes. “We were in different sections,” Ellen remembers, “and we both independently started out helping everyone understand what was going on after we finished our work. Then it got to the point that she just let us take over most days.”

  “She liked it,” says Taylor, “’cause she didn’t have to prep lessons. But I had to prep, so I started missing other classes. It wasn’t affecting me academically, but the teachers started to wonder why I wasn’t there.”

  Advocates for gifted children are appalled when they hear stories like this. “It shouldn’t be the kid’s job, obviously,” says Ellen Winner. “But it does point out what some of them have to go through.”

  At first, Taylor was optimistic about his chances with the second fusor. With the salvaged ConFlat fittings, he got significantly better sealing, but when he began to put it together, it was obvious that the vacuum pump he’d purchased wasn’t powerful enough to thoroughly clear the air inside the reaction chamber. He and Willis ran some calculations together and determined that the power source was probably not going to cut it either. What’s more, Willis said, without a view port on the chamber, there would be no way to see what was going on once he fired it up.

  “So I’d be running blind,” Taylor tells me, the echoes of frustration coming through in his voice. “The grid could be melting and I’d never even know it.” What’s more, the grid itself was primitive. Though Taylor had convinced Theodore Gray to give him some nice tungsten wire, there wasn’t a nearby machine shop capable of fabricating a hub that could secure the wire pieces in a precise spherical shape that could effectively contain a plasma field. Taylor tried to build it by hand, but after a few tries, he set it aside. The project, it seemed, was going nowhere, just like his education.

  “Seventh grade wasn’t bad,” he says, “but by the eighth grade I was done in. I was bored, they wouldn’t let me do the things I wanted to do. It felt like each school day lasted a hundred hours. I was always just waiting.”

  Waiting was the most common response when Tracy Cross of the College of William and Mary asked thirteen thousand kids in seven states to describe in one word their experience as gifted children. “They said they were always waiting for teachers to move ahead, waiting for classmates to catch up, waiting to learn something new—always waiting.”

  Taylor had dreamed big. His audacious vision of himself creating nuclear fusion and cancer-catching medical isotopes had fueled him and propelled him forward this far. But now his dreams—the reactor he wanted to build, the neutrons he wanted to generate, the pioneering nuclear physicist he would become—were starting to seem like they’d always be just dreams. Taylor had wanted to build his own star, li
terally. But he’d need more than his own vision and ambition to accelerate particles at speeds and temperatures high enough to fuse atoms. To go back to an earlier question, how could a middle-school kid living on the Texas-Arkansas border ever hope to do that?

  The reality is that without some serious support—daily hands-on expert guidance, precision equipment and tools, a well-equipped laboratory—he probably couldn’t. And that, say Janice and Robert Davidson, illustrates the biggest tragedy in American education.

  Though Taylor the eighth-grader had never heard of Jan and Bob Davidson, they would soon become two of the most significant figures in his life.

  Software multimillionaires who developed the Math Blaster and Reading Blaster educational software in the early 1980s, the Davidsons have been championing the idea that the most underserved students in the nation are those, like Taylor, who have big brains and big ambitions.

  “There are so many kids like him, whose talents are wasted in unchallenging environments,” says Bob Davidson.

  Bob, in his seventies, talks fast and decisively and interjects what seems like a well-rehearsed touch of outrage when he talks about his favorite issue, though at other times he can be quick with a joke or a comic comment. He’s tall and he moves quickly, in all aspects of his life. In addition to his fast gait, he races sports cars. (In 2014, he drove over the finish line as his team took first place at 25 Hours of Thunderhill, the world’s longest endurance road race.) As a young man, he burned through degrees in chemical engineering, business, and law before working his way up to executive vice president of an engineering company. Then he came on as CEO of the educational software company his wife had founded.

  Jan, a year younger, is blond and petite. She earned a PhD in American Studies, then, in the 1970s, became a computer pioneer after she had an epiphany that computers had the potential to individualize instruction and make learning fun. Math Blaster debuted in 1983 and was an instant hit, using games to teach and reinforce mathematical concepts. The Blaster Learning System expanded to other subjects, such as reading and science, and in 1996 the Davidsons purchased Futurekids, a pioneering computer and technology training program that focused on tutored computer education centers and preschool technology literacy.