A 12-Year-Old Boy Has Just Created A Nuclear Reactor

A 14-year old teenager in America is believed to claim the title of the youngest person in the world to produce nuclear fusion.

Jackson Oswalt of Memphis, Tennessee, built a reactor in his old playroom at the age of 12 with financial aid from his parents to buy $10,000 of equipment. His lab makes use of 50,000 volts of electricity to help deuterium gas reaches the desired temperature.

Oswalt spent a whole year working in his physic lab with the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium at his assistance. Recently, he announced that it seemed like he had successfully created helium from fusing two deuterium gas atoms. He had a detector and it indicated that there was a neutron ejected from the atoms, which is a sure sign of a nuclear fusion accomplished.

In an interview with Fox, Oswalt shared that he started by following others’ footstep and see what they did to achieve fusion, followed by gathering all the parts he needed. His primary source was eBay but when he failed to get the exact items that he needed, the boy must adjust them himself to be able to use them. The next thing the boy did was to spend the entire following month to figure out how the parts work together.

Jackson Oswalt’s father, an employee of a company supplying medical equipment, thought that people might not believe what his son had achieved until they saw it with their own eyes.

Although this achievement has made the headlines, scientists pay no interest to it until there is a credible organization verifies it and Oswalt’s work appears on a scientific publication.

If what he claimed turns out to be true, Jackson Oswalt will truly be the youngest in history to create a nuclear reaction, taking the spot Taylor Wilson, who did the same thing when he was 14, in holding.