Calling what the 19 year old Taylor Wilson built at age 14 a "fusion plant" is somewhat misleading. For me, a "fusion plant" is a device that generates power. His machine, a Farnsworth fusor, should more appropriately be called a "reactor", because it can only sustain a fusion reaction, but it cannot generate power. Building Farnsworth fusors is not too hard, given access to the right tools.
Building fusion reactors that can be used as power plants, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. The design is a lot more complex, because plasmas don't scale well and tend to get unstable as they get bigger.
For comparison:
A Farnsworth fusor can be built for around 1000 Euros, but it's Q-value (=output_power/input_power) is so low that I have trouble even estimating it. Based on a quote of "multiple hundreds of thousands of neutrons per seconds" for describing a "dangerous design", the fusion power is somewhere between a nanowatt and a microwatt, which makes the Q-value something like 10^-10.
For more complex fusion reactor designs based on magnetic confinement, the best Q-value that has been achieved so far was a value of 0.7 at the JET facility in the UK, 1997. A new reactor is currently being built in southern France. It is called "ITER", and it is hoped that it can reach a Q-value of around 10. This is the type of Q-value that you need for a fusion power plant. ITER is projected to cost around 16 billion euros.
No doubt, this guy is brilliant. That said, hobbyists have been building IEC fusion reactors like the one in the video for decades. It's not unheard of for people to build them for high school science fairs. A site with a lot of information on the subject is <a href="http://www.fusor.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fusor.net/</a>
It's common to see parents push their children into doing things that they aren't ready for to create the illusion their child is gifted. I don't see any evidence of that in this case - the kid truly seems both smart and hard working which is a rare combination.<p>Truly speaks to the power of diversity within a large population. You will get all kinds of anomalies with 7 billion people on the planet. Some large, some small, some dim, some bright. Every once in a while appearing to generate a profoundly gifted person that does have the ability to change the world. In this instance we're fortunate he was born into the resources that allowed him to use it rather than, for example, dying from malaria at the age of 5.
I came here to see the predictable comments of "f@?k him, I could do the same thing in an afternoon with wordpress and php." Sure enough, that was the gist of almost every comment.
Just a "you need flash" page for me.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson</a> seems to be it.
The school he goes to, Davidson Academy for the profoundly gifted reminds me a ton of the 1980s movie Real Genius <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/</a>