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by Amy Dusto
BY
aylor Wilson says that he lives and breathes nuclear physics, and his
track record of projects and science fair awards certainly supports that
claim. Now the 17-year-old from Reno, Nevada, is using his passion for the
subatomic to combat terrorism. His recent inventions—two portable detectors that can be used to scan cargo containers for weapons-grade plutonium
and uranium—earned him top prizes at last May’s Intel International Science
and Engineering Fair (ISEF).
Early Spark
Growing up in a small Arkansas town with his
parents and two siblings, all non-scientists, Taylor
Wilson isn’t sure how he got hooked on nuclear physics.
He was about 10 years old when he started e-mailing and
calling physicists around the world (he estimates he has
over 100 contacts by now) to get answers he couldn’t find
online or in books. It wasn’t long before he wanted to
do his own experiments.
By age 11, Taylor was contacting semiconductor
and technology companies to seek donated parts
to build a Farnsworth Fusor, a reactor that fuses
two atoms of deuterium (also called heavy
hydrogen), releasing neutrons. With
the donated spare equipment, Taylor
built a reactor in his garage.
When he was 14, the reactor
generated neutrons, and Taylor
became the youngest person
in the world reported to have
produced fusion.
Then Taylor’s family
moved West so that he and
his brother could attend The
Davidson Academy, a public
school for the profoundly gifted
housed on the campus of the
University of Nevada, Reno.
He set up the reactor at his new
home, but soon had another
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research opportunity. The university, impressed
with Taylor’s self-directed efforts, offered him a
laboratory in the physics department. “With it
came basically all the parts I needed, and I had lots
of people helping me,” Taylor says.
Top winners at the 2011 Intel ISEF
(r-l): Matthew Feddersen and Blake
Marggraff (Gordon E. Moore Award),
Taylor Wilson (Intel Foundation Young
Scientist Award), and the team of
Tanpitcha Phongchaipaiboon, Pornwasu
Pongtheerawan, and Arada Sungkanit (Intel
Foundation Young Scientist Award).
and because they rely on helium-3, an extremely
rare isotope of helium, they are also expensive.
Inspired by detectors he saw in Geneva, which
used high-energy neutrons to look for exotic particles, Taylor set out to create a detector that didn’t
require helium-3.
Competitive Edge
Beginning in ninth grade, Taylor started bringing
his fusion reactor to the Intel ISEF. The first year,
2009, he simply presented the device, which was
noteworthy not just because it worked, but because
Taylor found a way to multiply its output of neutrons. That project was titled “Subcritical Neutron
Multiplication in a 2.5 MeV Neutron Flux.”
At this point, the Department of Homeland
Security became interested in Taylor’s work. He
traveled to meet with them in Washington, DC,
and since then, the agency has provided Taylor
with technical support.
The following year, Taylor returned to ISEF
with his reactor. This time, he shot a beam of
neutrons at a sample to identify its chemical signature. That project, “Fission Vision: The Detection
of Prompt and Delayed Induced Fission Gamma
Radiation, and the Application to the Detection of
Proliferated Nuclear Materials,” won Taylor a trip
to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research in Geneva, Switzerland. There, he toured
the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, and the campus’s other facilities.
With strong interests also in both nuclear
and military history, Taylor had been looking
for ways to apply his work to counter-terrorism.
Specifically, he wanted to invent a better method
of screening cargo at shipping ports for radioactive substances used in nuclear weapons.
Standard plutonium detectors are inefficient,
www.cty.jhu.edu/imagine
Reading Radiation
All radioactive elements spontaneously emit
particles or energy in a process known as radioactive decay. This emission looks different depending
on the element, so when a detector picks up a particular emission pattern, the contents of a container
can be identified. At shipping ports, detectors typically search for the two most common ingredients
in nuclear weapons: highly enriched uranium or
weapons-grade plutonium.
Taylor invented a method of detection for
each. Because uranium emits radiation at an
energy too low for detectors to pick up, Taylor
decided to bombard a container with neutrons
and look instead for the pattern of particles coming out of it. “It’s like an x-ray, but instead of using
x-rays, you’re using neutrons,” he says.
Plutonium, on the other hand, emits energetic
radiation in the form of neutrons. Standard plutonium detectors have an inner layer of helium-3;
when helium-3 absorbs plutonium’s emitted neutrons, the reaction creates charged particles that
register in the detector. Taylor’s challenge was to
figure out how to do this without that expensive
helium isotope. In the end, he found a way, using the
cheapest, most available substance on Earth: water.
His solution is based on a principle used by
some of the detectors at CERN. In a vacuum, nothing travels faster than the speed of light. But in a
medium such as water, light travels at just 75 percent
of its regular speed. In such non-vacuum environments, because of a phenomenon known as the
Cherenkov effect, particles can sometimes be sent
through a medium faster than the speed of light.
When this is the case, the particles actually give off
light, which can be measured. “Cherenkov detectors
have been used in astrophysics and particle physics
for many, many years,” says Taylor. “But they had
never been applied to counter-terrorism, and they
had never been used as a neutron detector.”
Since plutonium already gives off neutrons, it just
needs a boost of energy to shoot them through the
water fast enough—energy that Taylor’s reactor can
provide. The water-based neutron detector was born.
This past year, Taylor brought his two streamlined, low-cost nuclear weapon detectors to Intel
ISEF, winning First Place and Best in Category for
Astronomy and Physics, as well as the Intel Young
Scientist Award. In all, he went home with $58,000.
Powered by Science
Taylor has a patent pending for his plutonium
detector, and he plans to get a PhD in nuclear
chemistry in addition to starting a company to
do government contract work in applied physics.
For now, though, he is not sure where he wants
to go to college or even what the next step is. But
he knows he’s found his passion. “This is 24/7 for
me,” says Taylor about his work.
His next projects involve producing medical
isotopes for disease diagnosis and treatment, and
working to reuse and destroy spent fuel from
nuclear power plants. “Science is a cool thing to
do because scientists are the ones who change the
world, more than rock stars, movie stars, or even
politicians,” he explains. “You have the opportunity to eradicate disease, find new sources of clean
energy, keep people safe, and raise the quality of
life for all people.”
Amy Dusto recently earned her MA in science
writing from the Johns Hopkins University. She has
written for Cogito.org and Discovery News and is
now working as science writing intern at CERN.
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