MosheFeingold
MosheFeingold's JournalTeen builds working nuclear fusion reactor in Memphis home
By Charles Watson | Fox News
02/19/2019
MEMPHIS, Tenn.- Some kids spend their time on social media, other kids spend their time playing video games. When it comes to 14-year-old Jackson Oswalt, his time is spent in a laboratory working on a nuclear fusion reactor.
The Memphis teen finished his reactor and achieved fusion at the age of 13. He’s regarded by experts as the youngest in America – maybe even the world – to accomplish it. Jackson built a steel machine made up of vacuums, pumps and chambers that is capable of smashing atoms together through force in a smoking hot plasma center that releases a burst of fusion energy. If you’ve ever wondered how the sun and other stars are powered, the process within Jackson’s nuclear fusion reactor is comparable.
He began working on the fusion reactor at 12 years old, after concluding that he didn’t want to dedicate his leisure time solely to playing games like Fortnite. He began scouring the Internet for nuclear-related things because that’s what he says held his interest. Yes — at 12 years old.
During his research, Jackson came across Taylor Wilson, who in 2008 at 14 years old garnered international recognition as the youngest person to achieve fusion after building a nuclear fusion reactor in his parents’ garage in Texarkana, Ark.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/teen-builds-working-nuclear-fusion-reactor-in-memphis-home
Jackson, like any 12-year-old would, thought he could at least try to beat the record set by Wilson. From there he got to work.
“The start of the process was just learning about what other people had done with their fusion reactors,” explained the mild-mannered teen. “After that, I assembled a list of parts I needed. got those parts off eBay primarily and then often times the parts that I managed to scrounge off of eBay weren’t exactly what I needed. So, I’d have to modify them to be able to do what I needed to do for my project.”
Building the nuclear fusion reactor was no game for Jackson. He converted an old playroom in his Memphis home into a functioning lab. With the financial support of his parents – he spent between $8,000 and $10,000 over the course of a year collecting the parts he needed to build his nuclear fusion reactor – that was apparently the easy part.
Putting the fusion reactor together and testing to see if it worked was the real challenge. Since there isn’t exactly a manual on how to build something like that he relied on trial and error and the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, an online forum for amateur physicists, to ensure that he was taking the proper steps toward successfully building a fusion reactor and hopefully achieving fusion.
“After a while, it became pretty simple to realize how it all worked together, but at the start it was definitely figuring out one aspect of it, memorizing what that actually meant and then moving on to a different aspect of it,” Jackson said. “Eventually all those pieces of the puzzle came together to make a good project.”
ackson’s father, Chris Oswalt, had no real understanding of what his son was working on. To make sure Jackson was safe he had experts speak to him about the dangers involved with working on a potentially deadly fusion reactor, like being exposed to high levels of radiation or being electrocuted by the 50,000 volts of electricity he uses to warm the fusion reactor’s plasma core.
Outside of his safety concerns, Chris Oswalt was astonished at what his son was attempting to do.
“Being a parent of someone that was as driven as he was for 12 months was really impressive to see. I mean it was everyday grinding; Everyday learning something different; everyday failing and watching him work through all those things,” he said.
Throughout the process, Jackson posted his results to the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium up until the point when he was able to achieve fusion on Jan. 19, 2018 — hours before his 13th birthday. In Jackson’s case that meant combining two atoms of deuterium gas in the fusion reactor’s plasma core which ejected a neutron into a device that slowed it down and detected nuclear fusion.
“You have to jump through the right hoops, and we have to believe you and see what you’ve done,” said Richard Hull, 72, a verifier with the research consortium and an administrator for its website Fusor.net.
Hull, a retired electronics engineer from Richmond, Va., verified both Jackson’s and Wilson’s results. He now regards Jackson as the youngest in America – possibly the world – to achieve fusion.
On a larger scale, scientists have yet to figure out how to produce a nuclear fusion reactor that, like the sun, is able to release more energy than it takes in to power things like homes and buildings.
“We are still far away from making a working nuclear fusion reactor to produce electricity so you can think about how challenging it is to make a fusion reactor,” said Dr. Jingbiao Cui, professor and chair of the Physics department at the University of Memphis.
With a young mind like Jackson interested in becoming a “nuclear engineer working on more projects like this,” scientists could work out the kinks of fusion reactors sooner rather than later.
A brief response regarding Judea and Samaria (JEWISH GROUP)
I posted this elsewhere, but I cobbled this together regarding the common canard about Israel having illegal settlements. Now there are many kinds of settlements going on, but I picked Judea and Samaria as my example because it's the most common.
Here are the facts:
Let's talk about Judea and Samaria, commonly called the "West Bank" (as in, the west bank of the River Jordan) in the Western press.
Go back in time to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that accelerated after WWI, and the division of the stateless land into two states -- now Jordan (largely Arab) and Israel (largely Jewish).
At the time of initial division of this stateless land, the land on both sides of the river Jordan were to be part of the Jewish National Home by the 1920 San Remo Conference, including Judea and Samaria. This was confirmed by the League of Nations (predecessor to the United Nations) in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate to Britain, and affirmed by article 80 of the United Nations charter in 1945. When Israel’s leaders declared sovereignty in all territory relinquished by England on May 15, 1948 (including the land west of the Jordan river) it was recognized as the State of Israel by the General Assembly and Security Council by May1949.
At that point in time, Judea and Samaria (again the "West Bank " ) were legally Israel.
Well, the Arab homeland (again, Jordan, interestingly with an Army staffed with former Nazi officers) didn't like that much, so Jordan invaded (along with four other Arab states) and conquered Judea in 1949, annexed it in 1950.
Jordan's actions were illegal under Article 2 of the UN charter, which forbids the acquisition of territory through war, so no one recognized Jordan's occupation, except England (who was pissed off at the new Israel for a rather nasty war).
In 1967, Jordan again initiated war against Israel (along with two other Arab states) but Jordan was pushed out of the territory (back to Jordan’s recognized boundaries on the east bank of the Jordan river) by Israel. This re-acquisition of the territory by Israel was legal because article 51 of the U.N. charter permits a nation to defend itself from attack.
Given the fact that Israel had legal title to the territory that was recognized by the international community and Israel’s final control of Judea was a result of self-defense rather than aggression (while Jordan’s control of the territory was never recognized as legitimate by the international community), common sense shows that Israel merely won back territory that legitimately belonged to it in the first place.
Regardless, Jordan (the only potential claimant) relinquished all claims to Judea and Samaria in 1988 and recognized the territory as part of Israel in a peace treaty signed in 1994.
So, no, settlements in Judea and Samaria are not illegal occupation of Jordanian land.
The various proclamations by certain committees of the UN have no binding effect under international law. It's just like Senate resolutions from whomever condemning things. Lots of sound and fury, but they don't actually mean anything.
Profile Information
Name: Moshe FeingoldGender: Male
Hometown: NY, NY
Home country: Poland
Current location: Ruidoso, NM
Member since: Sat Mar 22, 2014, 04:43 PM
Number of posts: 3,051
