The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Taylor opens a cupboard door marked Explosive. “This is always a good candidate to look in,” he says, adding, “Remember when I synthesized some nitrogen triiodide and put a little bit on the doors?” Walenta gives him a how-could-I-forget look.

  “It’s known to science as the most unstable of explosive compounds,” Taylor tells me. “A feather waved over it or a fly landing on it can detonate it. I wreaked some havoc with it,” he says. “But Ms. Walenta was pregnant, so in retrospect it probably wasn’t a good idea.”

  Walenta laughs. Later, when I stop by on my own, she will tell me: “You know how they say if you want to be happy, be around happy people? It’s the same with passion and excitement too. Taylor gets everyone excited in class; he gets everyone into it.”

  “This shouldn’t be here,” Taylor says, pulling out a plastic container. “This should be in the poison cabinet.”

  “You could make an argument for that,” Walenta says.

  Then Taylor and Walenta fall into a deep discussion about ununoctium, the temporary name for the element with the atomic number 118 discovered in 2002, and the possibilities of a yet-to-be-discovered “island of stability” among the heavier isotopes of transuranium elements.

  “If its periodicity is correct,” Taylor says, “then ununoctium should be chemically stable, just like its noble gas cousins.”

  I glance at the clock; any moment now I’ll literally be saved by the bell. But just before it rings, a smaller, darker-haired version of Taylor walks through the door. A broad smile comes across Taylor’s face.

  “Joey!” he yells, walking over to give his brother a big hug.

  There’s no question that Taylor is thriving at Davidson, socially and intellectually. But for his younger brother, the experience has been mixed. Academically, Joey was stimulated, especially at first. He’d quickly moved through Davidson’s math offerings and then into the higher-level courses at UNR: calculus 2, differential equations, statistics, linear algebra.

  But Joey’s interests began to broaden beyond those of many of his fellow students who’d been drawn to Davidson for the chance to pursue highly specialized endeavors. In his second year, he got curious about Japanese. The mental skills needed for foreign-language learning and math are closely related; those who show talent in one subject are usually good in the other. Joey persuaded two friends to attend Japanese 101 at UNR with him. It was just a matter of clearing it with one of the academy’s curriculum directors.

  Though his friends were approved to take Japanese at UNR, the answer for Joey was no.

  “Probably the only thing worse than a kid being forced into making a choice between friends and academics,” says Winner, “is a kid being told that he can’t have either.”

  The issue, apparently, was Joey’s performance in English. He was a good writer, his later teachers would say, but a slow one. “It took me a while to even realize it was a problem,” he says. “But after a while I could tell the English teachers were getting impatient; they’d come over and stand over my shoulder and I’d start getting nervous that I wasn’t doing it right and just delete everything. I guess there was an incompatibility between us. Pretty soon I started falling more and more behind.”

  On the family’s first trip to Reno, even before Taylor and Joey were accepted to the academy, Taylor made arrangements to meet with Friedwardt Winterberg, the UNR physicist who had come to the U.S. in 1959 as part of Operation Paperclip. A protégé of both Heisenberg and Wernher von Braun, Winterberg was a sort of Dr. Strangelove figure, brought over in the postwar years so that the U.S. could take advantage of his physics expertise. With thin, receding gray hair and wire-framed glasses, he looks (and is, at eighty-five) substantially older than the rest of the department’s professors.

  Both Tiffany and Kenneth came to the meeting with Taylor. Winterberg was polite as he invited them into his office and asked them to sit, but he wasn’t really sure what was going on: Why did this child and his parents want to see him? He looked at the adults expectantly, but it was Taylor who started talking. This wasn’t something the German was accustomed to, but Winterberg listened, making a halfhearted attempt to mask his impatience—right up until Taylor told him that he wanted to build a nuclear fusion reactor.

  “You’re thirteen years old!” the professor erupted in an accent fairly bursting with umlauts, “and you want to play with tens of thousands of electron volts and neutrons and deadly x-rays?” Such a project would be far too technically challenging and hazardous, Winterberg insisted, even for most advanced doctoral candidates. “First you must master calculus, the language of science,” he boomed. “Then work your way up through the theoretical physics courses.”

  Later, Winterberg would seem nearly as impatient with me when I asked him about the encounter. “He was only thirteen! And he wanted to do nuclear fusion. It was more than a little outrageous, who wouldn’t think so? And so I told him to concentrate on his mathematical skills, then move into theory.”

  Taylor hadn’t known that Winterberg was considered by the academic community a brilliant but notoriously cranky naysayer; he’d once suggested in an article that Einstein had plagiarized part of the theory of relativity from the notebooks of David Hilbert.

  “He’s the resident crazy German that every physics department apparently thinks they need,” Taylor would tell me later.

  In any case, Winterberg seemed to have put the kibosh on Taylor’s nuclear ambitions. “After that,” Tiffany said, “we didn’t think it would go anywhere. Kenneth and I were secretly a bit relieved.”

  But Taylor still hadn’t learned the word can’t.

  “When Taylor wants something,” says Kenneth, “there’s no way to stop him. Wherever you try to cut him off, he figures out a different angle.”

  In this case he didn’t need to go far to get around the obstacle. Next door to Winterberg’s office, atomic physicist and plasma researcher Ron Phaneuf had an entirely different reaction to Taylor’s plans. Taylor went to talk to him shortly after he started at Davidson Academy.

  “I was immediately impressed because he had a depth of understanding that I’d never seen in a kid this young,” Phaneuf says. “And he was ambitious; he wanted to build a fusor. This isn’t something you hear every day. He seemed to have a good understanding of the risks, but he was telling me he had collected isotopes and was proposing to build the reactor at home in his garage. And I’m thinking, Oh my Lord, we can’t let him do that there. But maybe we can help him try to do it here.”

  Phaneuf, who was four years away from retirement when he met Taylor, is thin, with rust-colored hair and a perennial tan. He wears cardigan sweaters and walks easily in his sneakers. When he’s expressing something thoughtful, his eyebrows come together, giving him an almost-but-not-quite-worried look.

  Phaneuf told Taylor that he’d think about some options.

  “And I did—a lot. I knew right away that Taylor was not like anyone I’d ever met before. He’s so sincere and forthcoming, and so excited about science that you can’t ignore him.” Nonetheless, Taylor was very young (fourteen at that point), and Phaneuf could understand Winterberg’s reaction. “But he’s a theorist; he’s old-school. And I think he may have thought Taylor was trying to achieve break-even energy with his fusor. I’m not sure he understood that Taylor’s intention was primarily to produce neutrons.”

  “Winterberg was the department’s big name, so it was understandable that Taylor would start with him,” says science teacher George Ochs. “But he might have thought Taylor had been spoon-fed information and was just regurgitating it. If he’d taken an interest and gone deeper, like Ron did, he would have found out that wasn’t the case. Taylor is nothing like a lab rat; he’s a lab shark. He’s always going to be the principal investigator on everything he does.”

  Phaneuf invited Kenneth and Tiffany to stop by his office a few days later. “I could see during that first visit that his parents wanted to nurture his special gift, but they were afraid of it too
,” Phaneuf says. “I told Kenneth I could help Taylor try to realize his goal. But I also said that the kinds of things he was proposing to do really should be done in a lab, not a garage. When I offered to see if I could find him lab space in the physics department, where we could do it safely, I could see Kenneth’s shoulders settling. He was relieved.”

  Now Phaneuf had to sell the idea of a fourteen-year-old boy working with hazardous materials, high voltages, and radiation to the rest of the physics department. It didn’t hurt that at the time Phaneuf was chair of the university’s radiation safety committee. He set up a meeting with department chair Roberto Mancini and Davidson Academy officials.

  “We were breaking new ground here,” says Phaneuf, “bending the rules a bit. Everyone of course had concerns about safety, and the academy wanted to support his project but they were a little afraid, justifiably so. We have a lot of radiation sources in our laboratories. Taylor was young and enthusiastic, and enthusiasm doesn’t protect you.”

  In the end, the officials said that if Phaneuf was confident that it could be done safely, and if Phaneuf could include the project under the university’s broad-scope license for radiation-emitting devices, they’d support it. For safety reasons, someone from the department would have to be with Taylor at all times. Young people can be more sensitive to radiation exposure than adults; their smaller bodies absorb more radiation and their cells are more vulnerable because they’re multiplying quickly.

  The next time Phaneuf and Taylor met, the professor invited Taylor to sit in on his upper-division nuclear physics class at the university. Then he offered to clear out a corner of his own research laboratory for Taylor’s project. “You should have seen his face light up!” Phaneuf says.

  Phaneuf then approached some of the other department physicists and technicians. Most thought Taylor’s chances for success were pretty low, but they were intrigued by this fourteen-year-old nuclear physicist. They said they’d be willing to try to accommodate him.

  Phaneuf introduced Taylor to a colleague, computational and plasma physicist Bruno Bauer, whose daughter Rebecca was a classmate of Taylor’s. Taylor asked Bauer if he had any broken pieces that Taylor could use for the fusor. Bauer said they might be able to do better than that and suggested to Phaneuf that he bring Taylor down to the subbasement.

  “That’s where they keep all the dangerous stuff,” Taylor says. “And that’s where I met Bill.”

  If you’ve been to the Burning Man festival, you’ve likely seen Bill Brinsmead; he’s the guy wearing a tie-dyed bathrobe riding atop a wheeled replica of the Little Boy bomb—a campy nod to Dr. Strangelove.

  “I was afraid that people might see it as a kooky glorification of war,” says Brinsmead. “But they all get it: It’s a fat man riding Little Boy.”

  Taylor and I meet up with Brinsmead at the Hub, a coffee shop where Brinsmead holds court each morning. Brinsmead has a shaggy mustache and solidly muscled arms and wears a gold chain with a Buddha encased in a plastic amulet that dangles over a Sick Chicken T-shirt. As he walks, wearing clogs, an overloaded key chain swings from his dad-style jeans.

  “I’m the only gay man I know,” he says, peering through tinted glasses, “who doesn’t care about how I look.”

  Stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War, Brinsmead wound up with a headful of crazy stories and an I-just-don’t-care approach to life. After twenty-seven years, he’s about to retire as the physics department’s chief technician.

  “Actually,” he tells me, “I’m not retiring so much as I am being retired. More on that later.”

  After Phaneuf offered to let Taylor share his lab, he asked Brinsmead if he’d team up with him to mentor Taylor. Phaneuf said Taylor had exceptional talent and was focused and intelligent. But Brinsmead hesitated. He thought about the numerous technical hurdles that they’d need to overcome to build a working fusion reactor, something that hadn’t been done at the university before. The odds of success weren’t very high. Winterberg was right about one thing: Taylor was biting off more than even the average PhD could chew.

  I head to the counter to grab a shot of espresso for myself and some hot chocolate for Taylor. When I return to the table, Taylor and Brinsmead are engaged in an almost impenetrable conversation, throwing out acronyms like SAGE, Z-pinch, and EMFs. I notice that with Brinsmead, Taylor actually stops talking long enough to listen.

  “Heard that yellowcake you guys made is hotter than hell,” Bill says.

  “Yep,” Taylor says, “real snotty.”

  “If it got loose . . .”

  Taylor finishes Brinsmead’s sentence. “We’d have ourselves an EPA-regulated problem.”

  We drink up and then jump into Brinsmead’s military-surplus electric van, which he’s customized. With high-pitched Thai pop music blaring from the sound system (Brinsmead and his Thai partner co-own a house in Bangkok), we drive to the university, passing the Pneumatic Café, which, I will later discover, has a sandwich named after Brinsmead: the Billzilla.

  “We’ve had electric vehicles in my family since 1910,” Brinsmead says, “starting with the Baker electric car.” Brinsmead built his first EV in 1973 while stationed in Sattahip, Thailand, during the Vietnam War, using parts scrounged from crashed B-52s and bombed-out jeeps and forklifts. “I called it the kamikaze golf cart, and I shipped it home in a big container, along with a lot of other stuff.”

  Brinsmead grew up in Reno and spent his teenage years “building crazy things.” He’d ride to a scrapyard with a basket on his bike, maybe pick up a four-stroke engine or discarded city signs, which he would rehab and sell at school.

  “One day I got called down to the principal’s office, and the cops were there. I just showed them the receipts and they started laughing.”

  Brinsmead says he wishes he’d had the kinds of opportunities Taylor has at Davidson. “Grownups would pretty much ignore smart kids who wanted to work with their hands, so we turned into little rebels.” One of his teachers did convince him to enter the regional science fair, though. He built a laser out of an old TV and neon signs.

  “But I got beat by a girl with a really lame experiment involving guinea pigs and vitamin C. The difference was that hers was well documented.”

  Brinsmead’s father flew B-24s in World War II, and his grandfather ran a bakery car on a troop-supply train in World War I. “But my dad didn’t want me going to Vietnam, so he used his connections to have me serve in the coast guard in Lake Tahoe. I was so rebellious, I went down and joined the army and told ’em, ‘Send me to Nam.’”

  After he scored high on the entrance test, the recruiter told him he could choose any training he wanted. He went to Thai language school and ended up training the Thai army, repairing equipment, and recovering aircraft that had crashed in the jungle.

  Once we reach the physics building, our first stop is Brinsmead’s office/workshop, which is cluttered with antique physics equipment and other oddities: an ancient cinnamon roll hanging from the ceiling, a bat in a vial, a jarred bottle of dust from the playa at Burning Man.

  Brinsmead’s irreverent demeanor has often put him at odds with university administrators. “Bill is seen as a bit of a loose cannon,” says Phaneuf, “which is something he makes no effort to thwart.” But Brinsmead’s salvage skills translated well to civilian work at UNR’s physics lab. According to Phaneuf, it was Brinsmead’s ability to find essential equipment on a tight budget that enabled the university to properly launch its physics department. “To researchers like me, having someone like Bill is essential.”

  Brinsmead developed a knack for knowing which research and development labs were closing or changing over to new equipment and for showing up at just the right time to claim their surplus high-tech gear. “I always went to the back door and tracked down the facilities manager. He has a problem: too much stuff. You point to your diesel trucks and tell him, ‘I’m willing to take everything,’ and you’ve just solved a big problem for him.”

  Some of Br
insmead’s skills have rubbed off on Taylor. “The other day,” Taylor tells him as we walk down the hallway, “I asked a hospital if they had anything they could donate. I got some detectors with carbon-14” (a rare radioactive isotope).

  “The storage room is always in danger,” Brinsmead says as we approach. “The professors can’t do without it, but the administrators wish they didn’t have it, because it puts the equipment out of their control. If you control the equipment, you control the research.”

  As Brinsmead tries to locate the key, I can see a look of anticipation, almost awe, come over Taylor’s face

  “I remember coming here for the first time with Bill and Ron,” he says. “It was one of the most exciting moments of my life.”

  Brinsmead finds the key and pushes the door open.

  “First time I met Taylor,” Brinsmead says, as we walk in, “I have to say it was quite a surprise to hear these Nobel Prize–level words coming out with that Arkansas accent. I couldn’t figure out at first if he was just filled up with buzzwords or if he really knew what he was talking about. It didn’t take long before it became apparent that he did.”

  Brinsmead and Phaneuf took Taylor around the storeroom, crowded with a geeky abundance of high-precision gear.

  “The first thing I spotted on the shelves was a neutron detector,” Taylor says. “Bill handed it to me and he says, ‘Have it.’”

  After a few minutes of rummaging, Brinsmead found what they’d come for: a salvaged high-vacuum chamber made of thick-walled stainless steel, with two view ports. Fabricated with great precision for the semiconductor industry, it had likely cost tens of thousands of dollars new. Lightly used and liquid-cooled, with precisely machined fittings, the piece would be perfect for the fusor’s plasma chamber, which would have to withstand extraordinary levels of heat and vacuum.

  Taylor hesitated, then stammered, “Can—can I use it?”

  “What do you think, Bill?” Phaneuf said.