The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  And so Taylor took his quest farther afield, again working his advantages of youth and novelty. Taylor charmed Willis’s boss, whom Taylor had met on one of his visits to Albuquerque, into letting him have an oil-bath insulator worth several thousand dollars for a hundred dollars. The next time Taylor and Kenneth went east, they stopped in Albuquerque on the way back and picked up the green, oil-filled drum, which immediately fixed the problem.

  One of the most vexing challenges for fusor builders is the grid, the spherical wire shell that cradles the plasma. A fusor’s grid must be as transparent as possible, since every particle that hits it will lose energy. The grid needs to be able to withstand the intense heat around the plasma core, which will, if all goes well, probably be the hottest microenvironment on Earth during the minutes when the fusor is running. Since the grid must be robust enough to stand up to the hits by subatomic particles, most achieve 90 to 95 percent transparency—which means that on every pass, up to 10 percent of the deuterons will collide with a grid wire and lose their energy.

  Taylor wanted to do better; he came up with an idea for a grid design that would be about 98 percent transparent and took it to Wade Cline in the physics department’s machine shop. A former Lawrence Livermore engineer who had been on the Greenwater project (a top-secret Star Wars concept for an x-ray laser powered by a nuclear blast; it was abandoned in 1992 after the military had invested a billion dollars in it), Cline was known as a miracle worker when it came to machining extremely high-tolerance doohickeys for departmental experiments.

  Cline and Taylor sat down and brainstormed an approach that would come close to Taylor’s goal. But to make it work, Taylor needed to find some high-purity tungsten, which has a high melting point and is easier to work with than tungsten with even minor impurities. Taylor’s sleuthing eventually led him to Bauer, who had helped establish UNR’s Nevada Terawatt Facility, a laboratory on the outskirts of Reno set up to study the behavior of matter subjected to conditions of extreme temperature and density. At the Terawatt Facility, Taylor found the super-pure tungsten wire he needed. Then he and Cline used a CAD program and CNC mill to design and machine a hub that could secure intricately shaped pieces of wire and mate them with the feedthrough stalk.

  The problem with tungsten, though, is that it gets brittle when superheated. The first few times Taylor and Cline subjected it to high-heat conditions in the fusor, sections of the wires began to glow, and then the ultrathin grid collapsed under its own weight. Taylor and Cline kept tweaking the design and remachining it, going through several iterations until they finally hit what seemed like the sweet spot between strength and transparency.

  By the time Taylor arrived in Reno, he had built up a mostly self-taught base of knowledge in at least twenty fundamental fields of science and engineering, including nuclear physics, chemistry, radiation metrology, and electrical engineering. Now he was learning about mechanics and metallurgy, tool handling and hands-on experimental methods—things that he’d be hard-pressed to learn at any school. He spent a lot of time in the machine shop, learning by watching the technicians work on other projects. With the help of his growing circle of mentors, Taylor began adding expertise in plasma physics and metrology, electronics design, and vacuum technology.

  “I was learning so much,” Taylor says. “The biggest thing was technique. I came in thinking I knew things, but compared to the guys at the lab I knew nothing about the design and method and construction and operation of scientific equipment. They had all the tricks, and they were willing and able to help me figure out a way through just about any technical problem.”

  Back when Taylor was working in his grandmother’s garage, he says, “it was all about function.” He’d use aluminum cans, rubber, the innards of old vacuum cleaners. It wasn’t pretty but the devices worked—sometimes. What he began to understand, watching Cline and the other technicians build extremely high-precision machines and parts from scratch, was the inseparability of elegant design and functionality. “I saw that if you really think it through and build things very precisely out of just the right material, it comes out as an incredibly functional and incredibly beautiful piece of art,” Taylor says. “It not only works better, it’s also beautiful. From then on I was committed: all my reactors and everything I made would not just serve a function; they’d also be beautiful machines.”

  The UNR physics department gave Taylor more than just access to the infrastructure and expertise he needed; it also gave him the chance to develop camaraderie with much older people who spoke his language. Taylor loved hanging out at the lab, the machine shop, and Brinsmead’s office. At fourteen, he was playing at the edges of the major leagues, having conversations that would have been unimaginable only three months earlier. He might walk into the lunchroom and find himself in the middle of a chat between physicists and/or technicians about yet-to-be-discovered heavy elements or whether a certain experimental alloy might work for the ITER reactor’s walls or if the neutron howitzer was due for a renaissance.

  Taylor could start a conversation about just about anything, and his chain-reacting ideas came out of his mouth almost as soon as they came into his head. One day, he walked into the lunchroom, sat down at a table, and asked, “What if you took radioactive fuel, encapsulated it in buckyballs, and accelerated radioactive decay?” initiating an hourlong speculative debate. Another day he asked, apparently apropos of nothing, “Have you heard about the Museum of Stillborn Babies in Kazakhstan?”—a question that started a long discussion comparing the Soviet Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan to its American counterpart, the Nevada Test Site.

  For the professors and technicians, having Taylor around injected both amusement and energy into the once-quiet department. “Having a young guy in here with Taylor’s enthusiasm was pretty exciting; it was something different going on,” says Phaneuf. “The doctoral fellows in particular were always fascinated by him; they became his biggest cheering section. He’d bring them out of their shells. I remember I had one German postdoc who was very curious, but shy. At first, he’d peek around the corner at what Taylor and Bill were doing, but pretty soon his shyness was disappearing and he’d just walk in and become part of the group.”

  Over the next few months, as work on the fusor progressed, Phaneuf watched Taylor’s side of the lab transform from an empty space into a sprawling goat’s nest of parts, tools, and other clutter. “Myself, I like things neat,” Phaneuf says, “but neither Bill or Taylor are particularly neat, and when I looked over there I tried to keep in mind that a creative mess is better than idle tidiness.” Phaneuf typically spoke up only when safety was an issue, such as when Taylor left something in the middle of the floor.

  Sometimes, Phaneuf would look over and see Taylor working on his machine in an intense state of concentration, totally absorbed in what he was doing. He’d fallen into what Phaneuf and Brinsmead would call the zone. Often they’d have to call his name two or three times to snap him out of it.

  “Time just disappeared,” Taylor says. “I’d be so into working on something that I’d think maybe ten minutes went by, then I’d look at a clock and it was three hours later.”

  “VIP in the lab!” Brinsmead shouted toward Taylor, whose head was wedged between the shelves of the IBM rack as he snaked a patch cord through a thick mass of wires. Taylor disentangled himself and straightened up.

  “Oh, hi, Sofia!” he said.

  Though he was still lacking a few crucial components, Taylor had begun to test-assemble the reactor, which was now bolted atop the chest-high rack.

  “Wow,” Sofia said, stopping a few feet away to take it all in. “It’s not what I expected.”

  “What did you think it would look like?”

  “I’m not sure. I thought it might be . . .”

  Brinsmead, sitting on a chair at a nearby workbench, couldn’t resist. “Bigger?”

  “It’s definitely complicated-looking,” she said, moving closer and peering into the glass portholes.

/>   The one area that wasn’t moving forward in Taylor’s life was romance. Taylor had made no secret of his attraction to Sofia, but things had gone nowhere—even after she broke up with her boyfriend. And yet, there was no hint of awkwardness when they saw each other. They hung out regularly, often with Ikya and other friends. And as far as Taylor or anyone else could tell, that was as far as it was ever going to get.

  “So, look inside the window there,” Taylor told her. “Can you see that circle of tungsten fingers? That’s the grid, that’s what’s going to cradle to plasma field. What I’m going to do is basically mimic the conditions inside the core of the sun and try to get the atoms to fuse so they’ll release their neutrons.”

  “Wait, back up,” she said. “You’re going to mimic the conditions inside the core of the sun?”

  “Yeah,” Taylor said. “But the sun’s got two things that we haven’t got here on Earth, unless we build them. The first is, it’s got really high temperatures at its core. The second is, it’s got massive gravity”—here Taylor spread his arms wide and then drew them in—“which pulls the hydrogen atoms together at super-intense pressure.”

  Sofia peered through the view window.

  “Go ahead, you can touch it,” Taylor said. “It’s not plugged in.”

  She walked around the fusor, tugging on hoses, touching the stainless steel.

  “How hot will it get in there?” she asked.

  “The plasma in the grid gets about forty times hotter than the sun,” he said.

  She stepped back. “Whoa. Seriously?”

  Brinsmead, watching and listening while he pretended to attend to something else, smiled.

  “But,” Taylor added, “[most of] the particles won’t get that hot; they’ll only get up to about a million degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the beauty of a fusor. If we get a real good vacuum and really high voltages, we can fire those deuterium ions at super-high speeds into the middle of the plasma. Then they collide and fuse together, and some of their mass is released as energy. You know, E equals MC squared and all that stuff.”

  “Wow, Taylor,” Sofia said. “It’s like you’re Einstein or something.”

  “Sofia!” he said, exaggerating a disappointed look. “I’m an applied nuclear physicist. I take basic science, like Einstein’s theories, and add engineering to it. Then I make something useful.”

  “As useful,” Brinsmead chimed in, “as a star in a jar.”

  “Well,” Taylor said, “I will be one of the few people on earth that can birth a star. And I’ve got all kinds of plans to make stuff with it.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  Taylor explained that the fusor would produce x-rays and neutrons, “which are lethal if you’re standing in the wrong place for very long.” He showed her where they would soon set up a wall of lead blocks to shield the control-panel area, and he showed her the camera they’d use so they’d be able to see what was going on inside the reactor.

  “She seemed pretty impressed,” Brinsmead said after Sofia had to run to catch her ride home. “I don’t know, Taylor. Maybe you’ve still got a chance with her.”

  “Nope, I kinda doubt it,” Taylor said. “I think I’m just going to have to accept that we’re just going to be really good friends. Which is okay by me.”

  A few days later, another VIP visited the lab. When Elizabeth Walenta stopped in, Taylor had circled the machine with yellow radiation-warning tape and signs. He and Brinsmead were building the wall of lead blocks, and the control panel was taking shape.

  “Wow,” Walenta said, “looks like you’re getting close.”

  “Still need a couple more pieces,” Taylor told her, “then we can fire it up and start making our test runs.”

  “You know,” she said, addressing both Taylor and Brinsmead, “next week I’ve got someone coming in, George Ochs, to do a presentation about the Western Nevada Regional Science Fair. He directs it, and he’s helped quite a few kids out.”

  Walenta circled the machine. “This looks really good,” she said. “You may want to think about entering it.”

  George Ochs was at first completely baffled by Taylor. A retired honors-level science teacher and wrestling coach, Ochs has a husky physique, a round face with thin wisps of hair on either side, a brushy mustache, and friendly blue eyes.

  “So, this incredibly skinny kid comes in and he’s superexcited,” Ochs says. “He’s talking about radioactivity and how he’s got one of the largest collections of radioactive materials in his garage, and now he’s going to fuse atoms and produce neutrons. And I’m thinking, If this is all true he’d be glowing in the dark. So we’d better get this checked out.”

  Ochs asked Taylor a couple of specific questions about radiation.

  Taylor answered quickly, and in detail.

  Then Ochs asked him about monitoring and permits.

  “He answered confidently and it seemed like he knew what he was talking about. But I thought, wow, how could such a young guy be so articulate about such a highly technical subject? I mean, how many people even know what neutrons are? So I asked him more, and it became apparent that he’s got what seemed like basically a PhD-level knowledge base about this stuff.”

  Ochs had twenty-five years of science teaching under his belt, but he’d never met a kid like this. To verify Taylor’s story, he called Walenta, then Phaneuf, then Kenneth.

  “It all checked out,” he says. “He had all the bases covered. And he wanted to enter the science fair, which was great. After that, I started calling him Neutron Boy.”

  On a Friday afternoon in late February, Taylor and Brinsmead tightened the last bolts. They were ready to bring the machine up to full power. Moving behind the wall of lead bricks, Taylor flipped the main switch. But nothing happened. It took the rest of the day to diagnose the electrical problem and get everything rewired. As soon as they finished fixing it, Kenneth arrived to pick up Taylor.

  Taylor begged his dad to let him stay and make their first full-power run. But the family had plans that night. Taylor would have to wait until next week. It was a relatively minor setback, but to Taylor, the weekend felt like an eternity.

  On Monday afternoon, though, he and Brinsmead were back at the lab. They checked the machine over, then powered it up. Taylor increased the voltage to ten thousand, then twenty thousand volts. He looked at Brinsmead.

  “Go for it,” Brinsmead said.

  Taylor twisted the knob a little more. Then, suddenly, there was a small pop, and the instruments went dead.

  “I think,” said Brinsmead, “we just fried the power-supply unit.”

  Taylor and Brinsmead repaired the power supply and fired up the machine again. At low voltages it worked fine, but each time they took the power up a notch, another problem would arise. Taylor troubleshot the electrical issues, as well as the pesky vacuum leaks. He replaced malfunctioning gauges, methodically working through each problem.

  They pushed the voltage up again, with disappointing results. It was becoming clear that the high-voltage feedthrough Taylor had scrounged was not up to the task of handling the voltages that fusion would require.

  A more robust power supply would cost at least six hundred dollars. But doors continued to open for Taylor. The next time Phaneuf was at his Lawrence Berkeley Lab, he asked around and found a colleague who had a power supply he wasn’t using that would be perfect for the fusor. “That was probably one of the most critical things,” Taylor says. Finally, he had the kind of power he needed to hurl atoms together with enough oomph to fuse them.

  In February, once Taylor had the new part installed, he and Brinsmead started making test runs with increasingly higher voltages. After a few successes, they decided to take their first shot at generating plasma. Then they would make the final big push toward fusion. “Next week,” Taylor told his family and his friends at Davidson, “could be the big week.”

  Taylor wanted to fuel the fusor with deuterium right away. “I was thinking, Why waste time, let’s just go fo
r the neutrons.” But Phaneuf and Brinsmead suggested that they first use argon as a test gas. An inert noble gas that transforms into a bright blue plasma, argon could stand in for deuterium and give them a very visible plasma while they made sure all the systems were running properly.

  Taylor worked the instruments, slowly increasing the power and vacuum, then adding in a little argon gas. Brinsmead watched the video monitor for signs of the eerie glow called a Paschen arc, which would indicate the presence of a plasma field. As Taylor brought the power up to ten thousand volts, Brinsmead saw a distinct bright spot appear in the center of the fusor’s inner grid.

  “I think—yep, there it is!” Brinsmead yelled. But before Taylor could look, it was gone. In a few seconds it appeared again—then disappeared. The plasma field kept blinking out. What was going on?

  It took hours, but they finally figured out what was happening: the electricity feeding the grid was short-circuiting between the feedthrough stalk and the case.

  A few days later, having fixed that, they powered it up again. Taylor and Brinsmead played around with the system, trying to optimize gas, vacuum, and voltage levels. They cranked it up to ten thousand volts, then fifteen thousand. When they brought the voltage beyond twenty thousand volts and pumped out the gas, the instruments detected x-rays—lots of x-rays—coming through the top view port.

  “I’m glad we’re behind these bricks,” Brinsmead said. He and Taylor watched the video monitor, and in a few moments they saw what they were looking for: a glowing ball of blue-white plasma developed in the middle of the grid. This time, the plasma field didn’t go away; Taylor had succeeded in producing a stable and sustained high-temperature plasma.

  That night—actually, it was 3:40 the next morning—Taylor sent documentation of the event, including photos, to the Fusor.net forum. The posting, dated March 5, 2009, reads:

  Hey Guys,