Been there done that.
It’s not THAT bad.
…Unless you have a big old cap, I think it was 500uF/35V, so old it was about 3/4" diameter and 2.5" long, old enough to be old when I wasn’t born yet. It survived for a couple minutes on a lead-acid battery charger (the biggest PSU I had access to, for feeding a Tesla coil), then it exploded with a loud bang, filled the desk with its guts and the entire room with white smoke. There’s still a small stain on the wall, 25 years later.
Some of the adults involved probably do feel incredibly embarrassed but feel that it’s better to keep their mouths shut for fear of making things worse if they admit any guilt.
Of course if that’s true they’re just protecting themselves and should feel even more ashamed.
Or it’s part of the social/political behaviour in the town - Greenwald’s article has some background on Irving, money quote: “The mayor of Irving, Beth Van Duyne, became a beloved national hero to America’s anti-Muslim fanatics”. (not my find, @anon61221983 posted the link somewhere in Wrath)
If you have a family and/or a mortgage to feed, in the lousy and uncertain job market, you’ll be hard pressed to not protect yourself.
It’s not Texas. It’s the whole country.
Meanwhile: 14 year old white kid builds a nuclear reactor and Homeland Security offers to help him out
Calling an electrostatic confinement fusor a nuclear reactor, which is almost always understood to be fission based, is what I’d consider to be strongly deceptive.
The DoE getting involved is reasonable here, as talents are needed for future energy research.
What the DHS was doing there is a mystery to me. I’d guess they got DoEsplained that the thing is not a bomb before they managed to make asses out of themselves again.
I used to be an avid scuba diver, and I know Morse code. That must make me a friggin’ Navy Seal. The only difference me and James Bond is spending time in a rubber raft with a blonde and a bottle of vodka. …Oh, yeah; done that.
No one feels shame because they are just protecting everyones’ precious snowflakes. If anything they are goddamn heroes.
Apparently, DHS found out about his nuclear experimentation and invited him in to see if he could offer any insights into their anti-terrorism initiatives. If he was brown, and doing the same kind of work trying to collect nuclear material online, I have a feeling that DHS would be offering him a different kind of invitation.
Although a working fusor does spew out some neutrons. The bigger ones can also emit xrays. Nowhere near demon core levels of neutrons though.
Blew up? Is that a threat? Are you some kindo terr’ist?! Call the po-lice!!
I read a long time ago a story about a highschool/university teacher building with his class an atomic bomb, the only missing component was the uranium core. The US military completed the beast and detonated it successfully in a nuclear weapon test.
Can someone verify/falsify this story?
To correct myself: I probably misremembered - there were students developing nuclear bombs ([0] [1]) but the devices were never built and only theoretically assessed as working constructions.
Yes, but rather few.
I should build one sometime…
Wasn’t it this?
This may be an amalgam. I remember a guy building a to-scale replica of Little Boy. But he got no help from the gubmint.
If you do, build a polywell. And do it with a soccer-ball shaped containment that hides the interconnections, not the weird leaky cubical magrid that seems to be all the rage these days.
I should have his book. Misplaced it so cannot remember where it is, but I bought it for $50 and it was well-worth the cost.
…also, re the Nth Country Experiment, what would be fun today would be trying the same with the thermonuclear bomb. The interstage design is still classified, but there is enough of information about neutron and xray optics out there by now, and enough opensource hydrodynamics simulation frameworks, I don’t know which one to pick because I am inexperienced in the finite elements stuff.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has invited Ahmed to something (can’t quite remember the details from my quick feed check). But no mention of the president’s invite or Chris hadfield’s!
You are certainly entitled to what you consider fun. I, personally, find nuclear bombs about as interesting as neurosurgery: fascinating, technical, full of mental expansion… but nothing I want to try at home.
