Ryan King

Project: Research with Professor Ryan McClarren

With my summer research concluding, I am pleased to say that despite some issues along the way, I ultimately believe that I achieved my goals with this research. When I first began the summer, I had one major goal in mind: to be able to understand and speak on the basics of nuclear fusion with some level of proficiency and have some knowledge of more advanced topics, which I believe that I have succeeded in. This was not without its challenges, as I definitely struggled with approaching my work as stated previously in my last reflection. Additionally, I also at times had difficulty with being able to stay focused for such long periods of time just taking notes, which has always been a struggle of mine. When exploring the different equipment required to construct my reactor, I quickly realized that I would have to make significant changes to the parameters to remain within a reasonable budget range. Trying to design the reactor with this constraint while also doing it in a way that can be scaled in the future proved to be problematic

Despite these minor hiccups, overall I am very pleased with what I was able to learn this summer. One of the more interesting topics that I learned about was mean free path and its relationship to nuclear cross section. I was aware of what nuclear cross section was, that being the area around a nucleus that, if another nucleus enters, they fuse. I was also aware that this value was often expressed as a probability, but I was unsure how. Then this summer I learned about mean free path, or the average distance a particle will travel before colliding with another particle. It is through mean free path that nuclear cross section can then be expressed as a probability. This summer also allowed me to begin working on the logistics of my reactor and begin drafting up an equipment list, budget, and vendors to acquire everything. Logistics are a challenge that was not at the top of my priorities list initially but is of supreme importance. After some work, I have created a budget that I believe is very feasible, along with reaching out and building connections with vendors that will be instrumental in the future.