Do you remember what you used to do when you were 12 years old? Probably, nothing remotely similar to the project initiated by Jackson Oswalt at that age. The small, native of Tennessee, finished his job on January 19, 2018, shortly before turning 13: a nuclear fusion reactor in his house.
Oswalt is now 14 years old and in recent weeks has been the subject of several interviews in the media. And is that this nuclear engineer in the making has achieved what never before had anyone, nuclear fusion at an amazing age.
Obviously, although the term nuclear reactor can evoke radioactive material or a giant installation, the one built by Oswalt is not like that. It is a fusion reactor, rather than a fission reactor, which uses uranium to produce electricity. In the fusion reactor, the hydrogen atoms are converted into plasma and then pushed until they become different atoms.
In the case of Oswalt, he melted deuterium, a special type of hydrogen with a neutron and a proton in its nucleus. As he himself explained on February 1, 2018 in the Fusor.net forum:
For those who have not seen my recent publications, it will be a great surprise and they would even consider not believing that I have achieved the merger. However, during the last month I have achieved a tremendous amount of progress as a result of repairing major leaks in my system. Now I have results that I think are worthwhile.
Apparently, by using 50,000 volts of electricity, the young man was supposed to combine two atoms of deuterium gas, successfully fusing the nuclei in the plasma core of his reactor. After some additional tests during the following months, Oswalt had achieved the merger.
We say "supposedly" because their work has not been peer-reviewed, and until they are replicated and the results are published in a peer-reviewed journal (and we'd love it that way), you have to take all your work with some reluctance.
Be that as it may, not only Oswalt is convinced of that. The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, the space where the child got the inspiration and suggestions on how to build a device of this type, has also verified the results. According to Jason Hull, the webmaster, Oswalt has now been added to the list of successful fusioners of a select group of fans.
In fact, Hull considers Oswalt as the youngest in the world to achieve such a feat. And it is that the previous holder of the record was Taylor Wilson, who achieved nuclear fusion in 2008 when he was 14 years old.
As for the cost of his amazing work, although the nuclear reactor is considered a "small volume fuser", installing it in an old game room in his house cost (his parents) approximately $ 10,000.