The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  “When students have a growth mindset,” says Dweck, “they understand that intelligence can be developed. Students focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are and hungering for approval. They work hard to learn more and get smarter.”

  Years of research by Dweck and her colleagues have shown that students who learn with this mindset show greater motivation in school, get better grades, and have higher test scores. They are not discouraged by failure; in fact, they don’t really see themselves as failing—they see themselves as learning. “Setbacks can actually make kids more motivated rather than less confident,” says Dweck, whose assertion is backed up by a poll of 143 creativity researchers. The most important character foundation for creative achievement, said the majority of the researchers, is the kind of resilience and “fail-forward perseverance” that Taylor showed.

  Taylor says he was “a little disappointed—but not all that disappointed, because I learned a lot, and we had fun. Considering we were in a small agricultural town I think we did a pretty good job. It was a failure, but it was a failure that added to my body of knowledge.”

  Instead of giving up, Taylor kept stretching himself in the direction he wanted to go. He analyzed his mistakes, reached out, and found new resources. Surfing the web, he came across Fusor.net, an information exchange for amateur high-energy physics scientists. Among those frequenting the site was Carl Willis, then a twenty-three-year-old PhD candidate living in Albuquerque. Taylor noticed that Willis had a helium-3 neutron detector for sale, and he struck up an online conversation about the detector and helium-3, which is the rarest, most expensive gas on the planet.

  Taylor also told Willis that he was eleven years old and that he had tried to build a particle accelerator and wanted to take another stab at it. He asked Willis for some tips on collecting equipment and materials.

  After a short conversation, Willis realized that Taylor was not just another geeky kid with a passing interest in nuclear science, someone whose intellectual depths he could plumb with a few technical questions. “I’d been contacted by other young people, but Taylor stood out. He had an impressive level of maturity and passion for the subject.” Willis says he was struck by Taylor’s knowledge, his focus, and his ability to synthesize information.

  Willis told Taylor he’d like to help him pursue his interest in building high-energy atom smashers. But . . . the kid was eleven. “First,” Willis told Taylor, “I need to talk to your dad.”

  13

  * * *

  Bright as the Sun

  TAYLOR DOESN’T REMEMBER exactly when he understood that his grandmother was dying.

  “We tried to downplay what was happening,” Tiffany says, “and my mom did her best to stay her upbeat self. She lost her hair but she still had mental energy, and she still had the kids over there all the time.”

  Nell was a good actor. As her health declined—and as the family sought out one treatment after another, conventional and alternative—she was, Taylor says, “as fun as ever, just maybe not quite as energetic.” During her last few months, though, Nell began losing weight, losing energy, spending more time in bed. The inevitable became clear to Taylor, and he was increasingly upset about the prospect of losing his grandmother—who, Tiffany says, “had always been his biggest, unconditional supporter. Taylor adored her.”

  The cancer was eating Nell up inside, and it was eating Taylor up to see her withering away. “He tried to block it out,” says Tiffany, “but he was pretty confused that summer.” One day he’d be supermanic, running around and yelling and blowing things up and being a nuisance to Joey and everyone else. Then he’d spend the next two or three days alone in his laboratory. “It was painful for him,” Tiffany says, “and he coped by going deeper into his science stuff.”

  What Taylor was getting deeper into now was uranium chemistry. One afternoon, Tiffany found Taylor in the garage crouched over a five-gallon bucket, using her gardening trowel to stir what looked like a thick yellowish-brown mud.

  “Whatcha making there, Tay?” she asked.

  “Yellowcake,” Taylor said.

  Yellowcake? Wasn’t yellowcake what they used to build weapons of mass destruction? Tiffany remembered it from the run-up to the Iraq War, when (ultimately fictional) reports surfaced that Saddam Hussein’s government was trying to get yellowcake from Niger to fuel his (ultimately mythical) nuclear weapons program.

  Taylor tried to explain that yellowcake—partially processed uranium—was misunderstood. It wasn’t a weapon of mass destruction, he told his mom. In fact, it was even less radioactive than the raw uranium rocks that they’d collected on the family’s prospecting trip to the New Mexico desert.

  “But Tay,” Tiffany said, “why do you want to make yellowcake?”

  “I don’t know why making yellowcake was so exciting to me,” Taylor would tell me later. “But I’d already gone from collecting radioactive household items on up to nuclear fuel pellets. And I was on my way, maybe, to making new atoms with an accelerator. Trying to refine a radioactive ore into an intermediate product seemed like filling in a gap in my experience.”

  Taylor had gotten the idea from Willis, who, with Kenneth’s okay, had e-mailed Taylor some up-to-date academic papers on accelerators. After the two began communicating regularly, Taylor asked Willis for his yellowcake recipe. Willis sent it along and told Taylor that the proc­ess should be relatively easy for him since he already had some experience with uranium chemistry.

  “What I didn’t know then,” says Taylor, “was that the yellowcake would actually come in really handy for some of the things I would do later.”

  Our drive from the Red Bluff Mine to the Wilsons’ home in the hills of southwestern Reno takes about two hours. As we pull in, Kenneth clicks the garage-door remote control but parks the SUV in the driveway. Taylor jumps out and ducks under the ascending door and into the three-car garage. The darkness rises like a curtain, pushed up by a line of light that illuminates a cluttered assortment of Geiger counters, lead pigs, glove boxes, sealed ammunition cans, and other containers that hog up nearly every square inch of space on the floor, tables, and shelves. Against one wall is a large, upright gun safe festooned with a sign reading CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS AREA. PERSONAL MONITORING DEVICE REQUIRED. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  As Kenneth carries in a box of the uranium ore from the mine, Taylor searches for a place to put it. Finally, he directs his dad to set it atop a box of ore from a previous outing. The addition of the other two boxes from the trunk creates an unsteady stack of rock and buckling cardboard; Taylor stabilizes it by leaning the top box against a chart of the nuclides tacked to the wall.

  I ask him what he plans to do with his new haul. “Not sure,” he says, laughing at the teetering boxes. “But you can never have enough uranium ore.”

  He scratches his head. “Actually, I got an idea. How about tomorrow we use some of it to make us a batch of yellowcake?”

  When I come out to the garage the next morning, Taylor has already arranged a half-dozen buckets, beakers, and jugs in a half circle on the driveway. “I started making yellowcake that summer back when Grandma was dying,” he tells me. “So I always have a lot of mixed emotions every time I do it.”

  We peer into the containers at various yellowish-brown liquids and sludges and powders, plus a few of the rocks we’d collected the day before. “I’ve got several batches in various stages,” he says, “so I can take you through the whole process. It’s actually pretty easy.”

  We start by smashing chunks of ore into smaller nuggets. Nothing fancy here; each of us whacks at them with a geologist’s crack hammer, wearing protective goggles and dust masks. When most of it is down to the size of peas, we screen it through chicken wire, then through a smaller mesh, into a five-gallon bucket. “If I have tougher ore,” Taylor says, “I’ll use acid to break it down first.”

  Taylor pours a solution of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate over the top of the pebbles and dus
t. “Baking soda and washing soda,” he says, stirring it with Tiffany’s gardening trowel. “That’s all this stuff is! Then you come out a couple of times a day to stir the leaching buckets and re-suspend the solids.”

  Taylor moves over to two buckets of slurry that he started the previous week, now separated into uranyl carbonate solution and thick mud. He filters and collects the solution in a flask, checks the acidity with a pH testing strip, adds some hydrogen peroxide, and sets the flask atop a hot plate. The liquid has the appearance of slightly glowing urine.

  “So, now we’ve taken what we want out of the rock by making it into a liquid,” Taylor says. “This next step turns it back into a solid, which is how they export it in from uranium-producing countries.” We bring it to a boil for a few minutes, then cut the flame. We’ll leave it overnight to precipitate the insoluble uranyl peroxide, then we’ll filter off the liquid and slowly heat the sediment to remove the moisture, watching it turn from mud to paste to yellow powder.

  As Marie Curie discovered, and as Taylor told his mother, yellowcake is far less radioactive than both the original ore and the waste sludge that Taylor stores in plastic bottles. That’s because most of the ore’s radioactivity is produced not by the uranium itself but by its “daughters,” decay products such as radium-226, radon-222, and polonium-218. Despite the intrigue that the word yellowcake arouses, the stuff itself isn’t very dangerous.

  It’s what you do with it that matters.

  “Remember Dubya’s famous ‘sixteen words’?” Taylor asks and then quotes from George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “‘The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ That was about yellowcake. It turned out to be a totally fabricated story, but even if he had some, there was nothing he could’ve done with it.”

  Taylor and Willis have refined uranium further, creating uranium tetrafluoride (known in the uranium refining industry as “green salt”) and isolating it down to almost pure elemental uranium metal. “But lacking any mechanism for improving it to weapons grade,” Taylor says, “that’s as far as we, or anyone, could go.”

  Manufacturers of nuclear fuel or nuclear bombs transform the green salt to gaseous uranium hexafluoride and then use a centrifuge or some other device to enrich it and convert it into a ready-to-use solid fuel. Those processes require a tremendous amount of infrastructure and know-how.

  “And so we went to war because the president said Iraq might be getting nuclear weapons and we couldn’t afford to wait,” Taylor says, surveying his sloppy science project. “But I’ve got a more advanced operation than Iraq ever had right here in my garage.”

  Taylor had told me over the phone that he has one of the largest private collections of radioactive materials on the planet.

  “Taylor does exaggerate,” Kenneth had warned me. But in the amateur nuclear physics community, Taylor’s collection is renowned, as is Willis’s. Now Taylor shows me his spy-agency radiation detectors, his water samples from Fukushima, his Soviet Geiger counters, his germicidal black light—“which I use sparingly ’cause it can cause cataracts and skin cancer.”

  He pulls out a box of thoriated tungsten welding electrodes, which he promptly spills all over the floor. “This is a hobby that introduces you to some weird stuff you wouldn’t otherwise know about,” he says as he crouches to pick up the rods. “Tungsten is within a few decimal points of the density of gold, so if you plated these with gold and sold them to someone who checked the density, it would work out. You could make billions before they’d figure it out. That’s why I tell kids, ‘Go into chemistry!’”

  The upright gun safe was a recent Christmas present, and probably a very good idea. “I use it for my high-activity sources, the weapons and dirty-bomb stuff,” Taylor says. “There are some very valuable, very radioactive things in here. Some very dangerous things. Some very proliferatable things. Proliferatable,” he repeats, pausing to think. “Is that even a word?”

  Taylor unlocks the safe and starts opening pigs; he pulls out samples of thallium-204, some thorium compounds, a small bit of cobalt. “Aha,” he says, grabbing tweezers and removing a small black pellet. “Here’s a plutonium fuel pellet from the Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma—the one where Karen Silkwood worked.” Silkwood was a union activist who in 1974 testified to the Atomic Energy Commission about the lack of safety at the plant and then died in a mysterious car accident while on her way to meet New York Times investigative journalist David Burnham. She was found to have been contaminated by plutonium.

  “Let’s put this away quickly,” Taylor says, dropping it back into a pig.

  “There are a few things in here,” he says, rummaging around in the safe, “that I don’t even want to show you.” He grabs a small vial containing a clear liquid. “Here’s one thing,” he says, taking it out of the safe, “that I really don’t like to take out.

  “Because if it were to drop and break open . . .”

  I ask him what would happen. He doesn’t answer.

  “Let’s just put it away,” he says.

  He’s putting on a good show. I glance at the yellow-orange hazmat jumpsuit hanging from the rafter. Taylor has, since the age of eleven, worked with radioactive materials that are potentially lethal if mishandled. Taylor loves to be dramatic, but I can’t help wondering out loud what would happen if he made a catastrophic mistake.

  “That,” he says, “is something that I always keep in the back of my mind. But I’m much more worried about chemical exposures. There’s enough arsenic on a shelf in the physics lab at UNR”—the University of Nevada–Reno—“to kill half a million men. I don’t fear radioactivity, because I understand it. And that gives me the power to protect myself.”

  Later that evening, I find Taylor in the garage. He’s bent over a five-gallon bucket, stirring—and so focused that he doesn’t notice me when I come in. When I say hello, he glances up and tells me that he came out to check on the yellowcake batches. Then he looks down and stirs some more, frowning slightly. A minute passes before he speaks again.

  “When I first started doing this,” he says, “boy, that was a tough summer.”

  He moves to the next bucket. “But as bad as it was with Grandma dying and all, that urine sure was something.”

  Urine?

  Now Taylor looks sheepish. He knows this is weird. “After her PET scan she let me have a sample. I checked it with a Geiger counter and it was so hot from the diagnostic isotopes that I had to keep it in a lead pig.

  “The other thing is . . .” He pauses, unsure whether to continue—but, being Taylor, he’s unable to stop himself. “She had lung cancer, and she’d cough up little bits of tumor for me to dissect. I got some college microbiology and medical texts and some biotechnology books, and I figured out how to make a serum. I put in nutrients like what you find in blood serum, salts and proteins. Then I put the cancer cells in the medium and cultured them and got them to grow for a while.”

  He stops stirring and looks up.

  “Some people might think that’s gross, but I found it scientifically very interesting.”

  With the passing years it’s become clear that Taylor the eleven-year-old wasn’t using science just to block out the pain of his grandmother’s impending death; he was using science as an act of defiance against it. Everyone was saying, toward the end, that there was nothing more anyone could do for Grandma. But there was Taylor in the laboratory he’d built in his grandmother’s garage refusing to accept it, thinking, There must be something I can do.

  What no one understood at first was that, as his grandmother was withering, Taylor was growing, moving beyond mere self-centeredness. The world that he saw revolving around him, he was starting to believe, was one that he could actually change and make better. As he held the clicking Geiger counter over the toxic urine sample, an idea began to take hold.

  What if nukes weren’t just about power and awe and magic?

  Nuclear
medicine had already saved far more people than nuclear bombs had killed. What if those lifesaving medical isotopes could reach even more people, faster? What if people like his grandmother could get earlier diagnoses? The challenge, as David Boudreaux had laid it out, is that isotopes for diagnosing cancer are extremely short-lived. They need to be, so they can get in and illuminate the targeted tumors and then decay away quickly, sparing healthy cells. Delivering them safely and on time requires expensive handling—including, usually, transport by private jet from the multimillion-dollar reactors and cyclotrons where they are made to the distant cities where they are administered to patients.

  But what if those medical isotopes could be produced more cheaply, and closer to the patients? How many more people could they reach, and how much more quickly could they reach them? With an earlier diagnosis, how many more people like Taylor’s grandmother could be saved?

  Taylor had already thought about using the radioactive elements he was collecting to irradiate materials and transmute them into medical isotopes. Shortly after Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband, Frédéric, discovered that they could create short-lived radioisotopes this way (the discovery that won them their 1935 Nobel Prize), medical researchers began experimenting with treating cancer by injecting patients with irradiated silver nanoparticles (diagnostic medical isotopes would come later).

  But even in the best case, Taylor would be limited by the amount of radioactive materials he could collect and by the risk of spills and contamination. “I saw that using the naturally radioactive stuff was hit or miss,” he tells me as he stirs the third bucket of yellowcake-in-progress. “Even if I eventually collected every isotope, I needed a way to make things radioactive that I could control more precisely.”

  That summer, as Taylor stirred his grandmother’s toxic urine sample, inspiration took hold. He peered into the swirling yellow center, and the answer shone up at him, bright as the sun. In fact, it was the sun—or, more precisely, the process that powers the sun: nuclear fusion. What if, instead of creating those isotopes in multimillion-dollar reactors and cyclotrons and then rushing them to patients, he could harvest the neutrons released by nuclear fusion reactions and use them to transmute materials into medical isotopes? What if he could build a small, tabletop nuclear fusion reactor that could produce those lifesaving isotopes as needed in every hospital in the world? There would be no need for huge production facilities, for private jets, for expensive logistics.