 Okay bingo, it's about science and likable science and when you want to do a show about likable science You want to have a likable scientist? Okay, that's Ethan Allen. I'm Jay Fidel. He's the host guest, and I'm the guest host Okay, I'm gonna talk about nuclear fusion today because you know why not There was an article in one of the science journals that we saw involving this kid named Jackson Oswald Oswald with a T at the end In in the state of the state of Tennessee Which is near where Oak Ridge might have been or still is you know doing nuclear things And the story about this kid was that he's 13 years old or not quite 13 when it happened And he designed a nuclear fusion device in his home Um with a very loose supervision of his parents Who are only concerned that you know there might be nuclear radiation Well, and you know he's working a super high voltage Things too right right on that. Yeah, so I mean it's remarkable. It's because it's in the it's in one of the red states if you will It's in a state where you don't expect the you know science education to be that good And yet this kid goes out and I guess he reads up and he finds out how to do it and he does this and And there was some question about scientists who had to certify That it actually worked as nuclear fusion But ultimately they did find a scientist who said that it was right a legitimate Fusion device that there's an open source fusion research Consortium that apparently is sort of certifies Whether or not you've achieved fusion and at least one of their one of their verifiers Looked at his data and basically said yes, so you really is Okay, so so we thought he is the youngest person now to have ever done this Yeah, I mean it's like you know Ripley's believe it or not. Yeah Well, it is amazing after I saw this story. I Googled I was reading up on fusion reactors and the fuselor, which is what he built the chamber that you You do and sort of an approach And you can just google directions for building a fuselor and pops right up as you know, it's a do-it-yourself project Here's the materials you need here's how to do it, you know Da da da da. Why do I feel if you know the science? The science fair is coming up. I think in april or maybe april. Yeah at the convention center Where 700 kids are selected from around the state present their projects, you know Why do I feel if some kid brought a Nuclear fusion device out of the science fair, there would be kind of an issue somewhere about somebody Complaining there would be yeah one of them You know because you are using a little tiny bit of very mildly radioactive stuff in it That's enough to scare the pants In a state where you can't have nuclear power without a specific Vogue of I think in three quarters of the members of the ledge That's not not nuclear power. I mean he created nuclear fusion His his device and all of these fuselors take use much more energy than they ever give out They're terribly inefficient in that sense. Okay, so that opens the whole door to our discussion Okay, our likable science who sees an alan the host of likable science on fridays Is going to tell us a little bit about what this is what this means how you do this And and you can take notes and try to do it yourself But don't bring that project to the science fair Okay, I will be very surprised if it does come to the science fair So what is nuclear fusion? So in simple terms nuclear fusion is the combining of two atomic nuclei together into one And that process If you do it with the right nuclei Releases a huge amount of energy You are familiar with nuclear fission That is which is a splitting of big atomic nuclei and that releases a lot of energy more That was a whole bunch of energy fusion is far far greater fusion releases Much more per unit weight. Yes. Oh, okay. Now. We're all getting really interested in a little concern Yeah, this is this is why the fusion bombs the h bombs are bigger than the a bombs basically Because you can get a lot more bang for your buck as it were as it were Well, you know this conversation is Particularly relevant because mr. Putin has said that you know, he's re-arming because Mr. Trump pulled out of the arms treaty for intermediate missiles So Putin is going ahead with his project And you know where we seem to be closer to a cold war and a war maybe a hot war Then we've been since the 50s And you really wonder about about the president you wonder about Putin, of course And the strange relationship between them, but then that's mr. Mueller's concern We'll find out soon what that relationship is anyway So in a world where nuclear power and nuclear bombs are still relevant Any experiment in Tennessee or otherwise involving nuclear fusion, which could be the process by which a bomb would function Um is very interesting to us. Right, right now There's there's two things there's uncontrolled nuclear fusion as in a bomb and as in really what happens in the center of the sun Basically what powers the sun is fusion. It's it's cramming a bunch of hydrogen together and smacking it into making helium Every second In the center of the sun about 600 trillion tons of hydrogen are converted into a slightly less mass of helium Uh, it's 626 trillion tons of hydrogen being 606 trillion tons of helium per second And those that extra 20 trillion tons basically is all comes out as energy This I can do in my bedroom No, you can't But uh, we did we figured out how to do something sort of like that in making the H bombs hydrogen bombs which which basically In essence, you're taking a a light material like lithium or Utterium and putting it in the center of an atomic bomb. So your atomic bomb goes off and As it explodes It pushes inwards on this light stuff and crushes it down and forces these light atoms Or light nuclei that want to repel each other together And then they combine they fuse and their explosion overwhelms the a bomb part of that You say lithium. Yes, like the like the like the compound or rather the the element in a battery Yes, exactly. Lithium is one of the good things if you under the fusion You you probably end up using some lithium or beryllium or helium or hydrogen. You want small light Elements for fusion you you confuse big heavy ones, but you get no energy out or you actually you lose energy in the process because of Pretty all the complex. So let me see if I understand. How do you detonate this bomb with the with the lithium or the beryllium in the middle? That's why you you put it in the middle of literally in the middle of a uranium bomb a fission bomb very carefully geometrically packed so that your Uranium or plutonium goes off all at once and it's perfect in a perfect sphere or a perfect rod Surrounding it and just crushes the the material All sides uranium crushes the lithium in the center of them You know the the power of that explosion you see you've seen what an a-bomb explosion looks like right? So imagine in a little space this close to it. You're just crunching that down to nothing, right? Right and that that Power of that crushing power is what actually forces the nuclei of the light material so close together that they they will fuse And so it's that that actually detonates the explosion right then that that fusion itself releases tremendous energy much more than the shell of plutonium exploding around it This is you know, this is why these bombs are really big bombs big in terms of kilotons and all that Yeah, yeah, I have huge huge massive yield. Um again, it's a it's a so it's it's To get in the in the nuts and bolts of it, right? So atoms are the smallest component of matter right to have Properties atoms have electrons on the outside, but they have the nucleus which has protons and neutrons Protons of a positive charge neutrons are neutral They are stuck together by what's called the strong nuclear force But protons being positively charged will repel other protons now In a in an atom that has several protons in it the nuclear force strong nuclear force That holds the things together, but trying to drive Another proton into that nucleus is very very hard right the protons really repel each other You have to get them very very very close together Where that strong nuclear force will take over a lot of force a lot of force to drive them right and that's the point With the lithium there's a lot of force driving The atoms in the lithium together right that the force of the atomic explosion just outside of them driving them all into the same spot And this is but it would be an atomic explosion even if there were no lithium right right, yeah, but it wouldn't be as big right Exactly this sort of enhances the explosion right if it boosts it. Yeah But this is actually it's a nice sort of segue because the the fusor that that Jackson Oswald built basically Is a sphere With two electric with two grids inside of it two spherical metal grids one on the outside and then one very close to the center And then Jackson essentially evacuated the sphere made it completely a vacuum Put a positive charge ran a little tiny bit of tritium gas or deuterium gas into Put a very big Positive charge on the outermost grid and the negative charge on innermost grid Electricity electrical charge huge voltage difference between these things. Yeah, so the atoms then were literally ripped apart With the the protons it from this deuterium hydrogen protons that you're heading towards the negative Electroelectrical point on the inside right on the inside and as they're all whipping down towards that some of them run into each other and Fuse they run into each other in the center or in the x the outside periphery. No, it's in the center and that's why And then there are a few extra neutrons released in this process and they count those neutrons That's how they know fusion happened because the neutrons wouldn't wouldn't be released unless that was a certification talking about to make sure that That was a neutron counter and it was working well and yeah, okay, so this is not we're not using nuclear material in the outside the outside no just a little a little bit of gas which Tritium is hydrogen with a couple extra neutrons on in order deuterium which is hydrogen with a one extra per water Yeah, yeah, exactly. Deuterium and and that's what's used in the H-bomb too, right? That's where they say H It's heavy water hydrogen. Yeah, it's either deuterium or tritium which are both essentially hydrogen but with an extra Uh, neutron or two extra neutrons. So this 12 year old kid, you know gets gets this. He had to learn all this stuff Yeah, I mean, yeah, he he admits that a couple years before he was just Normal kid playing video games and then realized like he wanted to do something different That's spent a year or two really learning all these different components that he had to and then he had learned skills like welding and Uh, you know a bunch of different strokes from different Okay, so the outside sphere is going to contain this water I'm sorry hydrogen with a funny a funny part to the atom and the hydrogen atoms Well, the outside sphere is just a shell to hold everything together So you can get a vacuum so that you can get a vacuum between the outside of the inside sphere Right and in that vacuum you put some hydrogen Gas exactly with with funny atoms on it. Right. How do you create that? How did he create that? Um, I'm not sure whether he had to create it himself or whether he could probably buy tritium Uh, I'm surprised anyone sell it as a gas so a 12 year old, but uh You know, well you can't buy cigarettes or you buy nuclear material But tritium again, it's it's a weak beta emitter. So it's it's uh, it wouldn't hurt you In general it can't get even through your skin. It's it's probably not good to inhale it, but you know more swallow a bunch of it, but Okay, so now that in order to make this happen You have the hydrogen trillium hydrogen Uh, and you're going to want it to penetrate The smaller sphere Yeah, go ahead. Well, no, there's only the outer sphere is is a shell there It's the gas is now loose in in this other otherwise vacuum Yes, an electrical charge comes on with a very very high voltage difference with a negative A negative hole in the center and a positive charge in the outside not a lot of wattage though Uh, just presumably But but big big voltage many thousands of and you can with a transformer you can get that right out of the plug In your house exactly the 120 plug I suspect he maybe had to do a little extra. Yeah, I mean I'm not suggesting that you guys should do this But at least you should understand what what was his name Jackson Oswald Oswald? Okay, oh wait, we're gonna take a break. Okay. We're gonna take a break so that it all settles down. You can finish writing your notes We'll come back. We'll continue to quit Just 10 questions multiple choice. We'll be right back Aloha and Mabuhay. My name is Emmy or tega Anderson Inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy power Hawaii with think tech Hawaii We come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to uh, listen watch For our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich and lighten educate entertain and we hope to empower again Maraming salamat po Mabuhay and aloha Aloha, i'm Dave Stevens host of the cyber underground This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just kind of scare you out of your mind So come join us every week here on think tech Hawaii calm 1 p.m On friday afternoons, and then you can go see all our episodes on youtube Just look up the cyber underground on youtube all our shows will show up and please follow us We're always giving you current relevant information to protect you keeping you safe. Aloha What a kid 12 years old, you know, what did you do for your science project Jackson? I'm sure that it's not not that he's the first one, but he's probably the only one who ever did that So let's go further. So you have the you have this a shell of uh Hydrogen Trillium gas Okay, and and now you're gonna aggravate that Activate it with high voltage Electricity that you can get from the 120 120 plug in your bedroom If you crank up your Transformer to get that that high. How high do you know? I forget it's measured in the thousands of electron volts. I mean it's way up really high. Yeah. Yeah, okay Now the the gas is activated. What happens, right? So literally because it The gas small gas atoms are bouncing around and they feel this huge electrical field The electrons all head off one way to the positive charge and the protons all head off the other way to the negative charge It's just a smaller right in the center sphere, right? It's a it's a it's a point roughly ideally you have a zero Dimensional point in the center ideally. Yeah, because it has to be perfectly round And then you can achieve the point. Yeah, you should you should have it roughly spherical. Yeah, um And so literally the electrons are stripped away from the nucleus And you have what the atom has been ionized and you have what is called a plasma Then it's the fourth state of matter that it's all liquid gas and plasma Which is what is that like gas? It's like a gas, but it's a highly energized gas where where the It's all ions. It's no longer a whole atoms. And what is in the center again? What is what just it's a Negative charge negative electrical point So all the all the protons are now hurtling down towards that point. There's no there's no actual material Well, I mean there's got got to have some piece of metal as an electrode to have that charge But you're not filling it up with any particular element off the tape the table of periodic And as these protons all converge on this point now moving at a high rate of speed They have some of them a few of them have enough energy. They knock into one another And fuse And produce a new heavier element probably helium to create a new atom When they fuse they've created a new atom with my healing a new alignment of Atomic material in the middle right and and usually in that process it kicks out a neutron And that's actually how they what they sort of they have detectors that count neutrons And when they see neutrons being emitted They know that you you know Like calculating correctly, you know that you had some fusion occurring. Okay, it's highly Energy inefficient. I mean it pumps a tremendous amount of energy in this to get Literally a handful of uh fusion events. It's not it's not efficient. No, no You know, I'll tell you the truth. We had a we had a professor from ua. This goes back in the early days of Think time professor ua. So I'm not sure he was really elderly actually very emeritus kind And uh, he spoke of fusion and he spoke of fusion as potentially a source of energy So how does that work if it's inefficient? Well fusion Having fusion as an energy source Has always been 25 years in the future. It was 25 years in the future back in 1930 when they first sort of thought about it It's been 25 years in the future ever since then some things never change There are a couple of experiments now running the iter and a couple of these big things They believe they're getting they're making progress that they're being able to get plasmas now Hold plasmas in confinement better Get get them dense. They make these plasmas and they Set up strong magnetic fields to compress them into into very tight Uh rings and then run them around very fast and slam these beams together and get more and more collisions happening And if you do that correctly You can begin to get significant amounts of energy out, but they have not yet achieved what's called break even where You build this thing and you pump tons of energy into it They're getting close to break even now they're getting some that they're putting out a good deal So the ratio is changing the efficiency is right. So someday the 25 years may be less than 25 years in theory I think in 2029 they're supposed to have uh, they're supposed to hit that At that point or something this is better than nuclear energy itself Such as we have in what accident is a different form of nuclear energy. It's fusions out of vision So is it better than the kind we're using in the nuclear reactor? Yeah, it's certainly better in the sense that you're not dealing with a lot of things like uranium plutonium The these really toxic long-lived heavy Very highly radioactive things you're dealing with stuff like trudium and deuterium Which it has some mild radioactive stuff and you sure it has life right and you're creating relatively and you're creating By bombarding things with neutrons you're creating things and reinvent neutrons as radiation, which is not a really grand thing but again, so relatively they are much less risky than Typical atomic plants. Yeah, you don't worry at them overheating indeed the problem is get everything stable enough to make it work And that's been the huge technological challenge. Yeah. Yeah, but if they could do it and maybe someday they will With the help of kids like this, right? Um, then maybe we could find a nuclear energy we would trust yes That wouldn't blow up right. So what's the worst case analysis if I do it wrong? And you know, I put that high charge into the hydrogen trillium thing And it hits the point and it goes haywire. What can happen? I mean really a little you what you probably though probably what happens is you ruin some hideously expensive equipment And you've cost yourself tens of millions of dollars Maybe hundreds of millions of dollars and set your experiments back. We don't necessarily kill anybody. But no no Again sort of as soon as you break The conditions that again if they do that in vacuum and they do it with the magnetic fields Everything just sort of falls apart because your magnetic fields break down your vacuum is ruined You got a little bit of treatment to cure them gas leaking out You know and again some surfaces that might maybe are emitting some neutrons Being where they shouldn't but you know It's a relatively minor compared to the potentials of nuclear power power plan or vision vision plans So it was what's interesting. I mean, you know one of the thoughts that I get on this is that we haven't really taken nuclear power down You know a peaceful mode. This is still what we're using now nuclear reactors is still the technology That they use in nuclear bombs. It's still the same thing um, I mean They're they're fission they're a fusion. Yeah, and those are the same. Yeah, the same It seems to me that if we're that if we're I mean just this opens the possibility that we can play with a nuclear material in a way that's not so dangerous We can play with nuclear material where we can get an efficient Um energy result a long term Right, you know cheap energy result and maybe solve a lot of energy problems without risking anything Right, so they're working on another type of fusion experiment where you take a little tiny bit of Tritium gas and you put it in a very thin shell of gold a little thin gold bubble almost You set that position very carefully on a little stand and around you have a bunch of high powered lasers all pointing right to that little gold shell And then you blast out with all these lasers. They blast in it and literally the Causes again laser powers pushes that tritium together And the tritium goes bang basically it releases a bunch of energy if you could harvest that energy It's a whole different design Which has the potential if it works to be very good because you could just then Bop in another little gold bead and bang do it again But bop another gold bang do it again You've got the power for the lasers, but if you're you're breaking even point might be a lot lower Yeah, so efficiency right and again a few years ago. Well now quite a few years ago the ponds inflation and had May recall the cold fusion For debacle they thought they had a desktop tabletop kind of thing that would would produce Fusion energy would produce the neutrons showing fusion energy with Really sort of simple lab benchtop equipment And but that was never Replicated sufficiently Any people that was it was a tremendous stigma, you know on nuclear energy and look what happened, you know and In japan a few years ago And the bombs of course scare you scare our whole society forever It's beyond deterrence. It's it's real Because we've seen it happen And so and it does incredible damage for an incredibly long period of time and it ruins the the earth's the environment And if we ever have a nuclear war any kind of nuclear war, we'll we'll see that in space. We'll see that far greater Far greater scope scale. You remember what albert einstein said at one point very famously. He said I don't know what weapons are going to be used in world war three But I can tell you that world war four will be fought with sticks and stones. All right But So getting weapons if we can right do some more creative research atoms for peace Yeah, atoms for peace we can do energy and that affects climate change, doesn't it? Yes It also it also helps an economy of a given state Which is doing it because an estate which has cheap energy Is is a better economy. Everybody knows so this kid, you know raises those questions This kid with his with his home kit Raises those questions So you were telling me before the show that you can find all the stuff out on the internet Scary which you can find on the internet and that's what the kid did at the age of 12 But I mean literally just just google directions for fusion reactor Things will pop right up sort of giving you step-by-step instructions on how to do it what you need how to put it together And he went to the Hardware store in ebay and he found the necessary things he had to do some adjustment some modifications And he had to do some some iron work, right? So now welding and electrical wiring and things like that But yeah, and he did it on himself. Yeah, and his father only said keep that nuclear material away from me Yeah, his father wanted wanted not to get sick or hurt or contaminate household I think most dads would say that In fact, most dads wouldn't let this happen at all Right. No, he's got to have supportive parents for sure. So, um, you know, this really goes somewhere You know, uh, I'm thinking That we are doing atomic research um, maybe in, uh Oak Ridge, I don't know if it's still going on there Uh, we we did it under under the bleachers in Chicago the Manhattan project. We did it in, uh, Los Alamos, Los Alamos, which I think is still there. My wife and I visited we had a tour Los Alamos a few years ago. It was really interesting and I have a tingle in my skin. I'm not kidding Of course, we did some of our testing out in the marsh lilons Oh, yeah And we talked at all If you really read Simon Winchester's book called Pacific Yeah, there's a couple of chapters there Dedicated to what happens to a given environment when you start blowing up nuclear material And those places were damaged forever. Oh, yeah Yeah, some of the some of the bombs were sort of duds Instead of a good fission reaction based all your fuel gets vaporized And you don't really leave too much bad stuff around but in a bad one You know big chunks of your material are sort of Half vaporized and half melted and strewn about that's what happened there with a number. Yeah, yeah, they're terrible And they've scraped all that together into they call runit dome And covered it with concrete basically and that's now leaking Into the water. Yeah, the water that flows in our direction and there and there are people living about 15 miles away from it On the other side of the moon. They must be affected Well, you know, to me, I think we maybe we don't spend enough time thinking about nuclear for peace And nuclear for energy. I think it was Hitachi That was engaged in making small nuclear reactors that would be put in the ground and very small the size of a Volkswagen And you and Fred Hemmings in the state senate at the time was advocating for that for hawaii Especially, you know in island an island state to have these things one of those things the size of a Volkswagen could run a whole A whole island, right? But we didn't do that and I don't think Hitachi is doing it anymore We have other fish to fry. We have solar. We have wind and so forth But maybe they'll become until it be time When we'll take a closer look at that I guess the first order of business though is to stop global war. That's the first order of business So, um, I I hope I hope this kid has the opportunity to study and learn more I hope more people see what he's doing and maybe get somehow, um, you know interested in a better Science around nuclear energy. Exactly. That'll be that'll be good. Great. And that's and that's the takeaway from our show Better science from nuclear energy. Thank you. You're a likable scientist. Thank you, Jay