By Devin Powell
PITTSBURGH — Ben Bartlett, a 17-year-old from Lexington, S.C., built a portable nuclear fusion reactor in his parents’ house and earned himself a trip to Pittsburgh where he has a chance to take home one of the top awards later this week at the world’s largest precollege science fair.
Nevadan Taylor Wilson won a Young Scientist Award at last year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for a similar reactor that detected radioactive materials by spraying out subatomic particles called neutrons. Bartlett’s project goes a step further by training the neutrons to move in one direction. That directionality could be useful for fashioning intense neutron beams used in treating some kinds of advanced cancers.
“One of the reasons why neutron therapy is only administered in a few locations is because it’s so hard to get the necessary concentration of neutrons in beams. The method of directionalization I’ve come up with … should have widespread applications in neutron therapy or any application requiring a high neutron flux,” says Bartlett, a junior at Lexington High School.