Today’s speaker at All School Meeting was John Rice. He is the Principle Researcher over at the fusion reactor at MIT. I haven’t been there in a few years, but when I taught the Junior Science Seminar, I used to bring the students on a tour there every year. There are not many places where you can walk around inside of a nuclear fusion reactor! The wires going into this thing are thicker than me!
When you go in there you have to wear a hard had.
Maybe if I teach it again I’ll take another trip there. Or maybe I should go there with the freshmen in June.
I got my own start with nuclear fusion doing a two week summer program when I was 21 working at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It was fun, and I was working on a Kerr Cell for what they called the Nova Upgrade, which is the other type of nuclear fusion which uses Internal Confinement Fusion. In other words, really BIG lasers.
