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Students Build Reactor For Scavenger Hunt
Posted by
Hemos
on Thu May 20, 1999 09:30 AM
from the mmm-i-love-school dept.
from the mmm-i-love-school dept.
MattJ writes "At the end of this NYT story about a scavenger hunt at UofChicago, you discover two physics students got points for building a working nuclear reactor, in a day, from scratch. It's a bit scary how easy it was for them to actually produce plutonium. " Reminds me of some of things we did in Biochem. But the lawyer says I'm not supposed to talk about that.
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The World's Largest Scavenger Hunt Returns 102 comments
mresolver writes "University of Chicago students have once again emerged from the library after a long winter to participate in the world's largest scavenger hunt. The multiple day event is famous for the working breeder reactor that students managed to build during the 1999 hunt. This year, the official list (PDF) includes a superconductor, working wood refrigerator, hot air balloon made to Montgolfier specifications, one-way funhouse mirror, and a walk-in Kaleidoscope."
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University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt Returns 91 comments
mresolver writes "We've discussed it in previous years, and now the world's largest scavenger hunt at the University of Chicago has returned. The event may be best known for the working breeder reactor students built for the 1999 hunt. This year, some of the 330 list items (PDF) include 3-D (and 4-D) Twister, a hand-built Theremin, a recreation of the Moon landing, the world's largest Newton's Cradle, and hyperbolic crocheting."
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Students Build Reactor For Scavenger Hunt
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Longer article (Score:5)
Re:More info, anyone? (Score:5)
who made the reactor on the University of
Chicago local newsgroups: Enjoy!
Alright, I just want to set a couple things straight, so here are some
responses to oft heard comments the last few days:
1. "I assume they used U-238 to get to Pu-239..." we did not start
with any uranium or plutonium, that would have ruined the fun, and the
point was to make fissionable materials. Our starting material was
thorium, which can be found at any hardware store. we happened to have
some in our dorm room... The final products were Uranium 233 and
Plutonium 238. I'm not going to spoon feed the decay chains to anyone,
you can figure it out yourself if you really need to.
2. "You endangered the life of my son!" We created a neutron source
using some shit we pulled out of a trash can. This source was safer and
less radioactive than the radioisotope Americium 241 found in the smoke
detector in each of your rooms.
3. "Someone said your roommate lost his job because he built a nuclear
reactor" Neither I nor my rommmate have lost our jobs since doing this.
4. "I hear you paid another group to steal Plutonium for you" We did
not steal Uranium or Plutonium from anywhere. Nor did we have anyone
else steal some for us.
5. "but to qualify as a true breeder, doesn't the reaction have to be
self-sustaining?" No. A breeder reactor just means taking advantage of
all those tasty neutrons flying off from whatever source you have, be it
a sustained fission reaction or a naturally radioactive source. The
best neutron source on campus would be the Physics Dept's neutron
howitzer. But since the howitzer produces neutrons from the decay of
Plutonium, you have to agree it would be silly to use it to try and make
plutonium.
6. "(I'll be really impressed if the two come up with a micro-fusion
reactor.)" We'd fly back next year just for that one...
- Juniper Tasks
Just some clarification for the readers who've forgotten their nuclear
physics:
U-235 is the fissionable used in the Hiroshima bomb and Pu-239
in the Nagasaki bomb. U-238 is used in fast breeder reactors
to make weapons grade Pu-239. (U-238 is also used in fission-fusion-fission
bombs, so technically it is fissionable with a net gain of energy
but you need really fast neutrons).
Thorium was to have been used in slow breeder reactor technology which
turns out U-233 as its fissionable. (Is Pu-238 fissionable at low neutron
energies with a net gain? The even Z makes me think not...)
I thought you had started with depleted uranium to make a fast breeder;
didn't know the thorium isotope available from hardware stores was the
one used in slow breeders.
Well, with a small sample of thorium and a neutron source, you can make
the U-233. But with a fully functioning breeder don't you need some of the
U-233 created to fission and transform the rest of the thorium without
running away and slagging the reactor or damping out so you never
end up with more thorium than whatever's directly exposed to your
neutron source? I suppose the nuclear engineering definition of a
breeder has to be more pragmatic.
Fred and Justin didn't begin with any uranium.
(Uranium, after all, ain't a commonly available thing.) They began with some
thorium and an alpha source, which they just happened to have lying
around. They used the alpha source to make a neutron source, and bombarded
the thorium. This induced a chain of reactions, the final products of
which were fissionable uranium and plutonium.
Re:What amount of Plutonium is Safe? (Score:5)
I was in his scout troop... (Score:5)
Dave (or Glow Boy as we called him, not Radioactive Boy like the Harper's article says
I've heard several stories from him on how he got caught. One was that he got caught when he was pulled over by the local cops who thought he was stealing tires from cars. The looked in his trunk and freaked out when he warned them it was radioactive. Another was that a chemical spill sensor at a railoroad crossing kept going off at the same time every day (when he was heading to school).
Very strange guy... I got a letter from him a while ago - he's writing a book, and apparently a movie is in the works.
This is more fun than you can believe (Score:5)
As pointed out elsewhere here, the nuclear reactor is entirely believable. I might point out that the chief danger from plutonium in small amounts is not its radioactivity, but its poisonousness. Even 1 gram could kill a heck of a lot of people.
Like the article hints, you don't win these days without setting up a LAN and using some database technology. There are too many items to track otherwise. The big items everyone remembers, but there are lots of little 5- and 10-pointers, like ostrich eggs or whatever, that tend to get forgotten. Read the list [uchicago.edu], and you'll be amazed, but some teams get almost everything within 72 hours.
Back in my day, we got an airplane, a one-ton animal, a telephone pole, and a marching band. We found a collector of turn of the century train cars from the Chicago Elevated to loan us an El car, but we couldn't get permission from the city to take such a heavy load on the streets.
Teams that really contend for the top prizes are made up of 100 or more people, of whom at least 25 must be willing to dedicate the ENTIRE 72 hour period to collecting and building. Usually, you specialize, putting your smooth talkers onto tasks like wheedling Olympic medalists into loaning their medals, your skilled researchers onto finding the answers to obscure questions like the location and population of Waldo, your exhibitionists in the latex paint-on pants, etc.
I have never done anything more fun in my entire life.
Re:More info, anyone? (Score:3)
Here's an updated URL for the article:
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastwe
I love going to the UofC.
Re:Will the Gov ban it? (Score:4)
Look it wasn't a working breeder reactor. It took Thorium to Uranium and then to plutonium. It took Justin and Fred(the guys who built it) about 2 days to build it. However they started with 4 grams of thorium(alpha source) and got about 8000 atoms of uranium(neutron source) after a day and about 100 atoms of plutonium. Plus it took more energy to sustain the reaction then it producded. All in all, it wasn't a viable way of producing large quantities of uranium or plutonium since you have to separate a very messy mixture.
Link doesn't seem to work (Score:4)
Re:Link doesn't seem to work (Score:3)
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fast
Will the Gov ban it? (Score:3)
U Chicago's ScavHunt web site (Score:5)
Re:The List (Score:5)
It's really fscking long, so I won't post it directly.
http://www.ryans.dhs.org
another possibility (Score:3)
(Or maybe "Convince a local newscast to run a story about hackers stealing AOL credit card information from a web page and threatening users if they didn't forward the message to 10 people.")
Re:This is more fun than you can believe (Score:4)
100 people?! a LAN and 'database technology'?! what do you think this place is? northwestern? MIT? hell no! as far as that manpower, the winning team (Burton-Judson) had less dedicated members than you're saying need to stay up for 3 days, and nobody but the Shoreland even came CLOSE to having 100.. and the Shoreland got third!
I can only speak for my own team, but all WE had was a box of index cards, a whole lot of copies of the list, and a dozen people with FEVERISH dedication. The Ward, as the score list will testify, wasn't exactly the pinnacle of organization, but that was the paradigm we used for our roadtrip team, which whomped the asses of the other roadtrip teams (and the nation of Canada ;). It only took two people to arrange a real live vending machines which sold Flamin' Hot Cheetos, Jolt Cola, and condoms. Division of labor? Minimal! The whole point of the ScavHunt is that it's FUN, it's HARD, and it's CRAZY.. and EVERYONE GETS WET..
Perhaps you've had contact with BJ and have learned of their 24-hour-manned internal database; I wouldn't know. But I'd wager they were closer to 24-hour-manned battle-scarred checklists and boxes of hastily scrawled index cards.
(By the way, Waldo is in Wisconsin, between Milwaukee and Green Bay. Its population is in the 400s. And it doesn't look it. :)
-- neil, still recovering from roadtrip (and from eating a few dozen packets of ramen flavoring)