Teen Builds Nuclear Detector Device

17 year old Taylor Wilson have built a functioning device that can detect nuclear weapons smuggled in cargo containers. It works via a nuclear fusion reactor that he also built 3 years earlier.


Taylor Wilson was recently honored at the Intel International Science Fair for his project, which he's dubbed "Countering Nuclear Terrorism."

It's a scanner that can automatically check to see if a cargo container may have a nuclear bomb hidden inside. Today that has to be done manually, and given the amount of containers that comes into the country, that essentially means most of them aren't being checked.

Taylor stated:

[B]asically how it works is it fuses together heavy hydrogen – deuterium. And when these deuterium atoms fuse together, they give off neutrons. It's that neutron radiation that goes into the cargo container, and depending on what the makeup of the cargo container is, it will react in such a way that it gives off radiation. I detect that radiation and it's specific to whatever that cargo container's contents are.

He then said:

Some people may not go into science because they think, just nerds go into science, or science isn't cool. But the thing is, science is cool, and me and my friends who do science are cooler than the people who don't. So, I really think that science is a cool thing and if you really want to change the world, go into science. Because that's the future and that's who will really change the world.