FARK.com: (7573651) Things for teens to do in a small, middle of nowhere town: Going to keggers, tipping cows, building nuclear fusion reactors in the shed. Wait, what?

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		Things for teens to do in a small, middle of nowhere town: Going to keggers, tipping cows, building nuclear fusion reactors in the shed. Wait, what? (trib.com)		14
		More: Cool, nuclear fusion reactors, nuclear reactors, World Geodetic System, science fairs, nuclear fusions, sheds, cattle, teens

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5240 clicks; posted to Geek » on 04 Feb 2013 at 12:45 PM | Favorite | share:

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weiserfireman		2013-02-04 12:55:56 PM

4 votes:

basemetal: I hope they don't have a HOA.

It's rural Wyoming Most of them can't spell HOA

BigLuca		2013-02-04 05:23:47 PM

3 votes:

Meh.

When I was 17 I drank a half dozen glow sticks, farted in the bathtub and then screamed at the bubbles. Did I get a new article written about me and my precocious experiments in bio-sonoluminescence?? Noooooo...

StopLurkListen		2013-02-04 01:07:30 PM

2 votes:

"Amateur fusion" ... Wow

It makes me proud, as an American, that we have people with such amazing talent and drive and ability to create such things. And that I live far away from the blast radius.

wildcardjack		2013-02-04 06:09:26 PM

1 votes:

I clicked thinking "someone else has built a Farnsworth fusor.

Lo and behold the families name is Farnsworth. Probably related to Philo, and Mormon. This is the kind of stuff their kids get up to instead of drinking and smoking.

earthworm2.0		2013-02-04 05:40:26 PM

1 votes:

BigLuca: Meh.

When I was 17 I drank a half dozen glow sticks, farted in the bathtub and then screamed at the bubbles. Did I get a new article written about me and my precocious experiments in bio-sonoluminescence?? Noooooo...

What exactly was the purpose of screaming at the bubbles? Did that activate something?

Optimal_Illusion		2013-02-04 05:18:35 PM

1 votes:

Home-made reactors?

rwfan		2013-02-04 04:38:33 PM

1 votes:

Karac: rwfan: I am not liking any of the above analogies that "explain" the hundreds of millions of degree temperatures of the plasma of a fusor.

Hey, it's an analogy - not an exact description. I was just trying to explain, as my pastor put it in a sermon once, 'how somebody could create something 6 million degrees Fahrenheit without burning up half the county'.

OK but there are better analogies, a static electric shock for example. It takes 4 to 20 keV of potential to get a spark to jump a cm air gap. That's a pretty hefty spark but I think I had a car (well car seats) that could get me up to that levels of static electricity in the winter. So when I got out of that car and touched the metal door I was producing some electrons and ions that had kinetic energies equivalent to millions of degrees Fahrenheit. Not enough to set the world on fire, just the gas tank.

/that car really sucked in the winter, I quickly learned to wear leather gloves which took most of the sting out.

oldfarthenry		2013-02-04 03:20:52 PM

1 votes:

I wonder what Gramps thinks of him?
i1151.photobucket.com

If that little f**k irradiates my El Camino one more time I'm kicking his ass!

bhcompy		2013-02-04 03:10:22 PM

1 votes:

Ned Stark: Cow tipping is a myth.

v022o.popscreen.com

Nope. Real. Saw it in a movie.

give me doughnuts		2013-02-04 01:48:27 PM

1 votes:

Karac: Hack Patooey: zipdog: Hack Patooey: 600 million degrees?

/skeptical

Heat and temperature are two different properties. Temperature is related to the velocity of the particles in the plasma. To get fusion to happen, you have to get particles moving fast enough to collide before electrostatic repulsion pushes them apart. The density of the plasma is very low, so heat capacity of this system is likewise going to be very low.

Thanks, that explains it.

/wait, no it doesnt
//off to Google

It's 600 million degrees, but only in a very small area; small as in atomic-scale small. So if you took all that heat energy and spread it over a larger area, say an electric stovetop coil, you wouldn't even notice it.

Here's an analogy - take a paperclip, straighten it out. Hold it by each end and start bending back and forth, back and forth. After a minute or so you can still hold onto the ends no problem, but if you touch the middle, you'll burn yourself.

Or more straightforward: Turn your oven on and let it heat up to 250 degrees, then boil a pot of water. Next, put one hand in the oven and the other hand in the boiling water.

You'll discover that the higher density but slightly lower tenperature water burns your hand more than the higher temperature yet lower density air in the oven.

SnarfVader		2013-02-04 01:02:03 PM

1 votes:

Slaves2Darkness: Get that kid a scholarship outside of Wyoming STAT!

FTFY

basemetal		2013-02-04 12:21:35 PM

1 votes:

I hope they don't have a HOA.

jehovahs witness protection		2013-02-04 11:36:38 AM

1 votes:

On sale at an auto parts store near you.
http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/detail/EB00/121GMF.oap

Cythraul		2013-02-04 11:33:05 AM

1 votes:

"Oh yeah? Look what I made."

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