by Tom Clynes
We watch a Black Hawk helicopter leave the base and head south. Abruptly, it diverts from its course and starts toward us. “They’ve spotted us,” Willis says. “Happened last time too. You always wonder if they’re drawing a bead on you with that M134 Minigun.”
“Six barrels and six thousand rounds a minute,” Taylor says, looking up as the copter circles us, then continues on its way. Taylor turns on the metal detector, which starts beeping immediately. He digs with his hands, pulling up small pieces, many radioactive. “Oh my God, Carl, it’s hot out here!” he yells. “This is so exciting! This place is loaded!”
Suddenly we’re finding radioactive debris under the surface every five or six feet—even though the military claimed that the site was completely cleaned up. Taylor gets down on his hands and knees, digging, laughing, calling out his discoveries.
Willis is having fun too, and so am I. “It’s the thrill of the hunt!” Willis says. I find something that looks like it’s made of Bakelite, an early form of plastic. Then Willis picks up the coolest thing we’ve seen yet, a large chunk of the bomb’s outer casing, still dull green. He calls Taylor over.
“Wow, look at that warp profile!” Taylor says, easing his scintillation detector up to it. The instrument roars its approval. Willis, seeing Taylor ogling the treasure, presents it to him. Taylor is ecstatic.
“It’s a field of dreams!” he yells.
Tiffany checks her watch. “Tay, we really gotta get going or we’ll miss our flight home.”
“I’m not even close to being done!” he says, going back to digging. “This is the best day of my life!”
“Taylor just hates for things to end,” Tiffany says, watching him with exasperation and amusement. “He likes to drag everything out till the last minute.”
By the time we manage to get Taylor into the car, we’re running seriously late—and we’ve got a trunk full of uranium ore, bomb fragments, and shards that we’ve collected over the past few days.
“Tay,” Tiffany says, “what are we going to do with all this stuff?”
As we race toward Willis’s house and then the airport, Tiffany’s question becomes more critical. “Well . . .” Taylor says, dragging out the word like southern Arkansas folks do when they’re working out what to do about something but not in any kind of expedited way. Tiffany, at this point, is passing through bemusement toward annoyance—a state in which I’ve rarely seen her.
“Carl,” she says, “want to keep it at your house and we can give you some money to ship it back to Reno?”
Willis isn’t too interested in adding another item to his to-do list. “I think the more of this stuff we can get out today, the happier we’ll all be,” he says. “Listen, for fifty bucks, you can check it on as excess baggage. You don’t label it, nobody knows what it is, and it won’t hurt anybody.”
A few minutes later, we’re folding closed the flaps of a too-flimsy box and taping it shut. As we load it back into the trunk, Taylor says, “Let’s see, we’ve got about sixty pounds of uranium and a bunch of bomb shards and radioactive shrapnel. This thing would make a real good dirty bomb.”
Taylor is again exaggerating. In truth, the radiation levels are low enough that, as long as no one stands too close to it for an extended period, the cargo poses little danger. Still, we stifle the jokes as we pull up to the curbside check-in. “Think it will get through security?” Tiffany asks Taylor.
“There aren’t radiation detectors in most airports,” Taylor says. “In fact, the lack of radiation detectors in our transportation system is, in my opinion, a pretty major security problem.”
While the skycap weighs the box, I scan the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) prohibited-items sign. Spray paints, fireworks, and bleach can’t be checked on, but radioactive materials are not specifically mentioned. That seems odd, considering that possibly the only thing Barack Obama and Dick Cheney ever publicly agreed on was that their worst fear was a nuclear terrorist attack on American soil. (Later, a TSA spokesperson would respond to a query about this with a clarification of sorts: “When a hazmat is not listed in the exceptions it does not mean that it is allowed in baggage.”)
The skycap drops the box onto the belt and takes Tiffany’s credit card.
“Taylor,” she says, turning to her son, “you owe me fifty bucks.”
“No problem,” he tells her. “I can sell one of those uranium rocks on eBay and make a hundred dollars.”
When we go through security, Taylor gets pulled aside so the TSA officers can take a look at the gadgets in his carry-on bag. The Geiger counters and metal detectors attract quite a crowd of officials, but the real showstopper is Taylor’s belt-mounted neutron ray radiation detector. “It can detect gamma rays and neutrons,” the boy tells the circle of agents. “You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things I’ve found with it.”
The agents call for their supervisor, who asks Taylor what he’s doing with all this gear.
“I’m an amateur applied nuclear physicist,” Taylor says.
The supervisor turns the detector over in his hands. “Wow,” he says, “that’s cool.”
“Hey!” Taylor says, catching sight of a passive millimeter wave scanner that’s being installed for testing (a different body-scanning technology would eventually be deployed in airports nationwide). “I know the guy who developed that!” He leads several TSA guys over to the imager and gives them a walk-around explanation of the device’s features. “The amazing thing about these,” he says, “is that they don’t actually hit you with any radiation; it uses radiation coming off your body and whatever you’re wearing to create the images.”
A couple of hours later we land in the Reno airport and head for the baggage-claim area, where Kenneth and Joey are waiting. We scan the carousel for the box.
“Hope it held up,” Taylor says. “And if it didn’t, I hope they give us back the radioactive goodies scattered all over the airplane.”
Soon the box slides onto the belt and makes its way slowly toward us. Joey moves to intercept it.
“Better let Dad,” Taylor says. “That stuff’s pretty hot.”
Kenneth picks up the box, which is adorned with a bright white strip of TSA tape. Inside, there’s a note explaining that the package had been opened and inspected by the Transportation Security Administration.
“They had no idea,” Taylor says, “what they were looking at.”
Taylor’s airport-security experience led to his second fusion epiphany. He’d been thinking about what kind of project he could do for the next International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), which would be in San Jose. To truly compete against the planet’s brightest young scientists, Ochs had told him, he’d need to demonstrate a compelling real-world application. His medical-isotopes application was the obvious choice, but he was still a long way from the proof-of-concept phase.
Over the previous several months, Taylor had gotten increasingly consumed by issues of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism—so much so that he’d started having nightmares about being kidnapped by hostile agents who milked him for knowledge.
According to the New York Times, “The world is awash in 2,000 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear material spread across hundreds of sites around the globe.” The International Atomic Energy Agency says that about 100 incidents of theft and other unauthorized activities involving nuclear and radioactive material are reported every year.
Although it’s theoretically possible that terrorists or rogue governments could assemble enough weapons-grade fissile material to build a crude nuclear bomb, experts say a far more likely threat is a dirty bomb, in which radioactive materials are dispersed with conventional explosives. According to George Moore, a former senior IAEA analyst, “Many experts believe it’s only a matter of time before a dirty bomb or another type of radioactive dispersal device is used.”
Taylor came across a report about how the thousands of tons of air and ocean cargo entering the country daily had become
the nation’s most vulnerable “soft belly”—the easiest entry point for weapons of mass destruction. Security experts have been struggling to devise ways to strengthen cargo security without paralyzing global trade. Most cargo is packed into shipping containers, which are unloaded from container ships and dropped onto waiting trucks and railcars. Only a small percentage of the containers are checked, a process that is currently done manually.
Taylor knew, from his past few months of experiments, that he could use neutrons from a fusion reaction to force heavy atoms into fission. Lying in bed one night, he hit on an idea: Why not use a fusion reactor to produce weapons-sniffing neutrons that could scan the contents of cargo containers as they passed through ports?
Over the next few weeks, he devised a concept for a drive-through device that would use a small reactor to bombard passing containers with neutrons. If fissionable weapons materials were inside, the neutrons would induce the atoms into fission, emitting gamma radiation. A detector, mounted opposite, would pick up the signature and alert the operator. While working through the design, Taylor had a flashback to his nuclear chemistry class and realized that the neutrons would, if they encountered conventional explosives, activate nitrogen nuclei that would emit detectable gamma rays.
“Using neutrons as an interrogator made sense,” says Phaneuf. “And no one had come up with a way to do it using a small, portable device, so it was quite an innovative and timely idea.”
Taylor named his science-fair project Fission Vision: The Detection of Prompt and Delayed Induced Fission Gamma Radiation, and the Application to the Detection of Proliferated Nuclear Materials.
It was one of those “Why didn’t anyone ever think of this before?” ideas, as evidenced by the buzz around Taylor’s exhibit at the International Science and Engineering Fair, where Taylor won four awards, thirty-five hundred dollars in cash, and an expenses-paid trip to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland.
At ISEF, tech companies are always in attendance, scouting for talent. So are representatives from top universities and research institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, all of them looking to tap into the prodigious talent in the exhibit hall. Rumors abound that operatives from spy agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA (and several foreign governments) are also milling about, although the CIA is the only agency that would comment. When asked, CIA media spokesman Edward Price said agents from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, which is devoted to recruiting talent, especially physicists and mathematicians, attend science events and fairs, “but I’m not able to speak to whether we’ve participated in the specific venue you mention.”
The Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t confirm whether its agents were there, but shortly after the fair, the DHS invited Taylor to Washington to meet with officials from the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.
“It was hard to describe how crazy it felt,” says Tiffany, who accompanied Taylor, “to see him sitting at a conference table with these high-level officials treating him as an adult, and looking to him for answers. I realized then that he wasn’t just my boy, he was someone who was really going to make a difference.”
All agreed that container traffic was a vulnerability that needed to be addressed, and they talked about how Taylor’s inventions could be put to work to intercept weapons that terrorists might try to smuggle into the country. DHS officials invited Taylor to submit a grant proposal to develop the weapons-detector design.
While in Washington, Taylor also met with Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson, who says the encounter left her “stunned.”
“I would say someone like him comes along maybe once in a generation,” said Johnson, who also participated in science fairs in high school. “He’s not just smart; he’s cool and articulate and unbelievably focused. I think he may be the most amazing kid I’ve ever met.”
The trips to Washington and Switzerland inspired Taylor, but not as much as the ISEF experience itself had. Building his reactor, conducting and documenting his experiments, and presenting his work to the judges had all helped to build his confidence. And watching the winners at the awards ceremony had opened his eyes to bigger possibilities.
One day, he rushed into Phaneuf’s laboratory. “Ron, I’ve got an idea!” he said. “And I think it may be the coolest thing I’ve thought of so far.”
Taylor had been brainstorming ways to complement his active-interrogation system—which used nuclear fusion to detect weapons-grade uranium and conventional explosives—with a weapons-grade plutonium detector. Plutonium emits radiation in the form of neutrons and gamma rays, but the emissions are not difficult to shield, making it all too easy to transport small amounts of plutonium without detection. Neutrons don’t carry a charge and are impossible to detect directly, but they can create reactions in absorber materials that subsequently create signals for detection. Security agencies typically use neutron detectors that incorporate an inner layer of helium-3, a lightweight isotope of the gas that lifts birthday balloons; it reacts with plutonium’s emitted neutrons to form charged particles that register in the detector. But helium-3 is the rarest gas on Earth, and supplies are quickly running out. Though U.S. security agencies have sought to install neutron detectors at ports and border crossings since 2001, the short supply and expense of He-3 (it sells for several thousands of dollars per liter) has prevented widespread deployment of plutonium detectors.
Taylor realized, he breathlessly told Phaneuf, that he might be able to replace the He-3 detectors with a portable neutron detector made with the cheapest, most available substance on Earth: water. His brainstorm came after he traveled to CERN, where he’d gotten a firsthand look at the large dielectric detectors that astrophysicists and particle physicists use to detect rare particles like neutrinos and muons. The detectors make use of the so-called Cherenkov effect, named after the Russian scientist who discovered that subatomic particles can travel through a medium such as water faster than light can travel in that medium. When this happens, the particles produce light (the brilliant blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor core), which can be measured.
“Of all the ideas Taylor had come up with,” Phaneuf says, “this was the most novel so far, and the one with the most commercial potential. Cherenkov detectors have been used in astrophysics and particle physics for many years, but they’d never been used in a portable neutron detector and applied to counterterrorism.”
Taylor went to work on the project in Phaneuf’s lab, experimenting with different materials and configurations. He settled on gadolinium (a rare-earth mineral known for its exceptionally high absorption of neutrons) as a doping compound and built a scaled-down, portable prototype. After a few months of trying different concentrations and forms of gadolinium (“the secret sauce,” Taylor jokes), he used his fusor to generate neutrons to test the device.
Thus, the first portable water-based neutron detector was born. Significantly, his detector was more sensitive than existing helium-3 detectors and could be manufactured for roughly a thousandth of their cost. Taylor now had a passive method for detecting plutonium, and he combined it with his active Fission Vision systems to create a comprehensive suite of counterterrorism detection devices. He called his ISEF entry Countering Nuclear Terrorism: Novel Active and Passive Techniques for Detecting Nuclear Threats.
That year, Ochs again worked with Taylor to prepare for the fair, to be held in Los Angeles. “Okay,” Ochs said, “your first year you didn’t have enough data, and your display was minimal, a little cartoonish. You can interview well, but you need data and facts to tie in.”
“I think data collection and documentation is the biggest area I’ve grown in,” Taylor said. “I’ve gotten more precise about it.”
“You’re right,” Ochs said. “Your display is a lot better, more polished. This year, I want to work with you about listening and thinking before you speak, so that your elevator speech doesn
’t turn into a PhD dissertation.”
“Going into the fair, I thought I had a pretty good entry,” Taylor says. “But I didn’t know how the judges would react. Then I started noticing there were more judges than usual coming by.”
Before long, Taylor’s exhibit was swarmed. Among the visitors was Harvard professor Dudley Herschbach, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986. Herschbach, who overcame intense skepticism about what he calls his “lunatic fringe” research using crossed molecular beams, immediately hit it off with Taylor.
“I could tell he had a contagious enthusiasm for knowledge,” Herschbach says. “Just like me.”
Shortly after Herschbach departed, Taylor was approached by Renée Montagne of NPR’s Morning Edition. She switched on her recorder.
“Taylor Wilson, you’re fifteen, sixteen years old?”
“Just turned seventeen Saturday,” Taylor replied.
“You know, what would you say is the motivating force for you?”
“So, you know, I’ve been doing applied nuclear physics for, I would say, six years now. And there’s some people at the science fair, for example, in the physics category, that enjoy working on, you know, solving the questions and the mysteries of the universe, you know. How did we get here? Where did we come from? Me, on the other hand, I like taking new things that’ve been discovered and applying them to real-world problems. So most of the research I do is trying to solve a problem, whether it be terrorists bringing nuclear weapons through ports or curing cancer with radioactive material. So it’s taking this new physics that’s been discovered and applying it.”
Montagne mentioned that many of the entrants had patents and asked Taylor if he had any.
“Yeah,” Taylor said. “One patent pending, and then three other patents in the process.”
“Okay. Your patent pending?”
“It is a new neutron detector for the Department of Homeland Security. The current material used for neutron detection is the rarest and most expensive substance on planet Earth. It’s called helium-3. I’ve developed a neutron detector that uses water. So we’re going from the most expensive, rare substance on planet Earth to the cheapest and most abundant.”