
14 Year old Thiel Fellow creates his own nuclear fusion plant [video] - petenixey
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21134540/vp/52207962#52207962
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maho
Calling what the 19 year old Taylor Wilson built at age 14 a "fusion plant" is
somewhat misleading. For me, a "fusion plant" is a device that generates
power. His machine, a Farnsworth fusor, should more appropriately be called a
"reactor", because it can only sustain a fusion reaction, but it cannot
generate power. Building Farnsworth fusors is not too hard, given access to
the right tools. Building fusion reactors that can be used as power plants, on
the other hand, is an entirely different story. The design is a lot more
complex, because plasmas don't scale well and tend to get unstable as they get
bigger. For comparison: A Farnsworth fusor can be built for around 1000 Euros,
but it's Q-value (=output_power/input_power) is so low that I have trouble
even estimating it. Based on a quote of "multiple hundreds of thousands of
neutrons per seconds" for describing a "dangerous design", the fusion power is
somewhere between a nanowatt and a microwatt, which makes the Q-value
something like 10^-10. For more complex fusion reactor designs based on
magnetic confinement, the best Q-value that has been achieved so far was a
value of 0.7 at the JET facility in the UK, 1997. A new reactor is currently
being built in southern France. It is called "ITER", and it is hoped that it
can reach a Q-value of around 10. This is the type of Q-value that you need
for a fusion power plant. ITER is projected to cost around 16 billion euros.

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basyt
I think there is a lot of sensationalization, because teens aren't really
expected to do much while they are teens and you do something like this - then
catch words like wizkid and wonder boy or whatever get thrown around - "he
certainly has shown the stupid scientists spending billions of dollars
building a fusion reactor!"

fact of the matter is - today there is just so much information available on
the net that you can pretty much build a 3d-printer or a cat scanner or
whatever else you fancy at your home.

the bar for being a genius has significantly lowered since the 90s.

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bpicolo
If you watched the video, it's pretty clear that the kid is actually a genius.
He's done a heck of a lot since what he did at 14.

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rthomas6
Minor nitpick, but I don't like this characterization of genius. He has not
accomplished a lot through just being a genius; he accomplished a lot through
discipline and extreme effort. Genius probably made it all easier, but I feel
that ascribing one's accomplishments to one's intelligence ignores the hours
upon hours of hard work that goes into them.

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Zak
No doubt, this guy is brilliant. That said, hobbyists have been building IEC
fusion reactors like the one in the video for decades. It's not unheard of for
people to build them for high school science fairs. A site with a lot of
information on the subject is [http://www.fusor.net/](http://www.fusor.net/)

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DennisP
And the current issue of Make has instructions for building one.

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300bps
It's common to see parents push their children into doing things that they
aren't ready for to create the illusion their child is gifted. I don't see any
evidence of that in this case - the kid truly seems both smart and hard
working which is a rare combination.

Truly speaks to the power of diversity within a large population. You will get
all kinds of anomalies with 7 billion people on the planet. Some large, some
small, some dim, some bright. Every once in a while appearing to generate a
profoundly gifted person that does have the ability to change the world. In
this instance we're fortunate he was born into the resources that allowed him
to use it rather than, for example, dying from malaria at the age of 5.

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teh_klev
I agree. He comes across as a great communicator, cheerful and outgoing, and
is genuinely driven by his interest in science, as opposed to being forced by
his parents (who seem nice/normal) to be "a genius" which can often lead to
bad things later in life as an adult - burnout, depression, substance abuse
etc.

It's a shame many HN'rs on this discussion thread can't see the bright side of
things with this kid. Yes I agree he didn't build a full blown power
generating fusion reactor, but what he did get to work on (and understand how
it works) is far beyond what most kids get up to at age 14. Good luck to him
and I look forward to seeing him contribute good things to humanity through
his science and research.

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holms
Finally a teen, who can talk in non-bias way and without fallacies :) I wish
this world would be like he is..

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quarterto
Someone fix the title? It's a video, and he's 19.

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mstrem
But he was 14 when he created the nuclear fusion plant! I enjoyed the video.

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bencollier49
"Theil Fellow created his own nuclear fusion plant aged 14"?

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deanpeterson
I came here to see the predictable comments of "f@?k him, I could do the same
thing in an afternoon with wordpress and php." Sure enough, that was the gist
of almost every comment.

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kelvin0
Well he isn't 'disrupting' any web technology, and hasn't written a bouncing
'hello world' with only CSS ... pity.

Wait until he has a 'real' promising startup idea, like a site to post
messages to his friends, then we'll be mildly impressed.

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fulafel
Just a "you need flash" page for me.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson)
seems to be it.

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kirk21
His conclusion? We are stuck in the fifties (unsafe power plant designs were
created then)...

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brianbreslin
The school he goes to, Davidson Academy for the profoundly gifted reminds me a
ton of the 1980s movie Real Genius
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/)

