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So my name is Taylor Wilson.

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I am 17 years old

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and I am a nuclear physicist,

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which may be a little hard to believe, but I am.

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And I would like to make the case

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that nuclear fusion

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will be that point,

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that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about

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will get us to.

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So nuclear fusion is our energy future.

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And the second point,

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making the case that kids can really change the world.

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So you may ask --

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(Applause)

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You may ask me,

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well how do you know what our energy future is?

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Well I built a fusion reactor

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when I was 14 years old.

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That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor.

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I started building this project

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when I was about 12 or 13 years old.

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I decided I wanted to make a star.

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Now most of you are probably saying,

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well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion.

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I don't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy.

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Well it doesn't break even.

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It doesn't produce more energy out than I put in,

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but it still does some pretty cool stuff.

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And I assembled this in my garage,

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and it now lives in the physics department

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of the University of Nevada, Reno.

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And it slams together deuterium,

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which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it.

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So this is similar to the reaction

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of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun.

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And I'm slamming it together so hard

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that that hydrogen fuses together,

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and in the process it has some byproducts,

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and I utilize those byproducts.

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So this previous year,

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I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

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I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors

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that Homeland Security has.

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For hundreds of dollars,

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I've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity

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of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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I built this in my garage.

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(Applause)

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And I've developed a system

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to produce medical isotopes.

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Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities

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I've developed a device that, on a very small scale,

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can produce these isotopes.

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So that's my fusion reactor in the background there.

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That is me at the control panel

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of my fusion reactor.

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Oh, by the way, I make yellowcake in my garage,

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so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians.

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So maybe I don't want to admit to that.

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This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland,

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which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world.

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And this is me with President Obama,

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showing him my Homeland Security research.

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(Applause)

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So in about seven years

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of doing nuclear research,

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I started out with a dream

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to make a "star in a jar," a star in my garage,

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and I ended up meeting the president

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and developing things that I think can change the world,

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and I think other kids can too.

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So thank you very much.

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(Applause)