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Building a Homemade Nuclear Reactor In NYC
yukk writes "Mark Suppes, a web developer for Gucci, is working on his own personal fusion reactor. His work in a NYC warehouse using $35,000 of his own money and $4,000 raised on a website has made him the 38th independent researcher recognized as creating a working fusion reactor. How's that for a hobby?"
This is really cool. Though I'd guess that the neighbors will be up-in-arms soon, even if you tell them it's completely safe.
A Fusor, while not cheap, is not new. This isn't a breakthrough. It's surely interesting, but barely news.
I've worked with a couple of these people online before. Depending on where you mark the threshhold, there are a few more fusion hobbyists than most people would think. They're good to talk to because they are some of the few hobbyists playing with high vacuum technology (which interests me for the purpose of vacuum metalization, aka evaporative deposition).
(yeah, yeah, I know...never trust anything on Wikipedia... but it's still a good reference starting point)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Can it run on garbage yet?
You can do it for a lot less if you have access to manufacturing like cad/cam software and machining centers. You also need to add a lot of electricity to sustain a reaction so getting a deal on some electrical components help too.
Very cool that he did it! I wonder if you get a t-shirt or something.
Does it run on banana peels? That would really be something.
that it isn't a Hahn configuration tritium moderated fission reactor.
"How's that for a hobby ?"
"Dangerous"
Uhhh! I know! I know! Link it to a fridge!
Best source for Nuka Cola and Roetgen Beer!
( by the way.. even my verification picture for this comment said "cooked" )
No.
Uh oh, I've heard this before... Wikipedia article about David Hahn, the 'Radioactive Boy Scout'
somebody must have already done this in my neighbourhood as it's already overrun with mutants.
Can you mount one on the back of a DeLorean?
I'm a BBS orphan in a blogging world.
remember this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Project_%28film%29
He's not making a bomb, he's making a fusion device. A very lower power, low-yield fusion device.
It can create some neutron radiation, but the device is so low power that the radiation is rather negligible.
That's fission, they really are pretty different. On a hobby level, fission consists of lots of playing with radioactive things and all that. Fusion consists of putting some gas in a box, turning it on, putting a whole lot of power in and ending up with a different gas in the box.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
The site you want to visit is www.fusor.net. He got the idea from this site. Spending $35K on this is really high. Most guys make there fusor for around couple $2k-$5K.Some do it for a couple of hundred dollars. It's all in how you scrounge for parts. I wish him luck, but he needs better scrounging skills.
i know everyone is freaked out about the military thoecracy of iran and the cult of personality of north korea with nukes, and that nuclear technology will inevitably trickle down to smaller and smaller states: suriname, east timor, vanuatu... and then factional organizations: al qaeda, FARC, doctors without borders, make a wish foundation, girl scouts...
but when fashion designers have their hands on nuclear technology, i think we can pretty much declare the effort to contain nuclear technology over, and just start writing the epitaph for civilization. we're doomed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He tried to build a fission reactor. This is a fusion reactor.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
That money would sure buy a lot of smoke alarms (a legendary story). ...... Kids, don't try this.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
No, Fission involves the process of heavy (unstable, usually something like Uranium) element decaying into a lighter element and some radiation, where the radiation is used to generate electricity.
This is a proper fusion reactor, as it uses electricity to join (light, usually some form of hydrogen, be it H2 or H3) atoms together, releasing neutrons in the process from which you can generate electricity.
Problem with fusion reactors is that the input (electricity used to join the atoms) is usually bigger then the output, so it's not viable yet as a power source, but when it is figured out, you have a clean power source that uses light elements to produce slightly heavier elements with no radioactive by-products.
Actually, Hahn didn't do this - He created a fission reactor. (Which, IMO, makes him deserve far more credit because fission is dangerous and far harder to get the materials for.)
Basic fusion is easy with the Farnsworth Fusor design. The problem is that it's not a useful design for anything but low-yield neutron generation for experiments - it can't generate power due to operating nowhere close to breakeven and, if I recall correctly, with quite a bit of physics saying that such a design will never be able to achieve breakeven at any scale.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
> Actually, Hahn didn't do this - He created a fission reactor.
No he didn't. A pile of radioactive scrap is not a reactor.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Attention hadrons: you are not welcome here!
Yes, I know they meant "radioactive", but it's a bit rich to publish folksy "We don't take kindly to your new fangled 'science' round these parts" vox-pop quotes when you can't even get the single most significant safety aspect of fusion vs fission right yourself.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Lots of people have made fusors, even high school students for science fairs.
The article is really light on details, his setup looks far more complex than a basic fusor would need to be and I assume that's where he spent all the money. Getting good deals on things like used vacuum pumps you could probably do this for a couple of thousand. It's a neat hobby but fusors are far too inefficient to be used as anything other than a cheap neutron source, and even then only if you really up the voltage. Most make for a cool looking lamp.
actually... yes it is... google "Travelling Wave Reactor"
As a (non-amateur) physicist and former fusion researcher, I recommend putting in a deposit at a sperm bank for any man intending to do this.
Contrary to popular belief, fusion does cause significant radiation.
That said, this is pretty cool. It's too bad people like this don't go all the way and do physics professionally. Perhaps if advanced physics research paid as well as working for Gucci...
Yeah! well you just wait until we hit peak light elements~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Im sorry how does one get away building a freaking unsafe amateur nuclear device IN NYC, I know he is an expert and all (you kinda have to be to develop a static web catalog) but Jesus
last time I went up there, I couldn't carry a travel size tube of toothpaste and this dink is making a bomb in his basement
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the basic reaction of 99% of the population* when they read this story.
:(
*people who know precisely dick about physics
This guy will be lucky if his neighbors don't lynch him.
Should say
if((Prototype.Browser.IE && (/MSIE 6\./.test(navigator.userAgent))))
window.location = 'http://www.google.com/chrome'
});
FTFY
But what happens to the neutrons? Wouldnt that be something similar than beta-rays?
bickerdyke
By no radioactive by-products we are ignoring the walls of the torus which do become radioactive and do need to be replaced.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
put it in a car that can go 88MPH!
I didn't see a torus, it looks like a fusor in the article. They still produce neutrons, but the issue isn't the shape of the device or the confinement method it's the fuel you use. Not every reaction produces neutron radiation; if for example we can get a useful p+11B (hydrogen + boron-11) device we'll have a pretty plentiful fuel source and helium coming out of the exhaust pipe.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
http://www.google.com/images?q=david+hahn
what that is is kaposi's sarcoma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaposi's_sarcoma
if you need a hobby, radioactive materials is not your best choice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...or is a 'nuclear reactor' quiet different from a 'fusion reactor'?
It's an polywell in fact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
"Beta-rays" means electrons and positrons. These are light charged particles. Neutrons are heavy and neutral.
That being said, being in a high neutron flux for any length of time can be harmful to a human.
Of course this is handled with shielding. And I believe in any serious fusion reactor breeder blankets (not sure which material) are put in place, which absorb neutrons to generate lithium. Lithium is required for the D-T reaction.
Since I'm no expert in fusion I'm sure someone else can give a more precise answer.
Beta particles are high energy electrons, not neutrons. And so long as you don't swallow a beta emitter, you're not going to get hurt from beta particles.
Learn something new.
Didn't Dr. Octopus do this? You see how that turned out.
The game.
it's not a tokamak. there is no torus. There are neutrons, which will make something radioactive, eventually, but it'll take a while at the rate a device like this produces neutrons.
The walls are damaged by the neutron emission, but not all radiation damage results in the material becoming radioactive. The induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor is much less significant than it simply becoming brittle. That's the reason why it needs to be replaced.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's actually a Polywell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
[I maybe have posted it before, but it didn't show up because I've blocked that "Anonymous Coward"]
Fusion is relatively easy to achieve on a small scale. What's extremely hard to achieve, judged on the efforts of various organizations over the past 60 years, is fusion that produces more power than it consumes.
GP's post was about the difference between fission and fusion. While the story is about a fusor (I am guessing here). Fusors are not capable of getting to a break even point do to the screens they use. Tokamaks are though. When discussing Fission vs Fusion for energy creation. Fusion while being a clear winner of fission is not completely clean.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Please go die in a fire. No one is impressed at your weak attempt in snarky humor. If you put more energy into moving around, maybe you wouldn't die a lard assed cheeto-fingered virgin.
Wait, you mean human skin is powerful enough to block beta particles? Can we block electricity too?
Cool!
I drank what? -- Socrates
***This guy will be lucky if his neighbors don't lynch him***
People who live in NYC don't generally care enough about their neighbors to lynch them. Now Texas or Oklahoma, There any half way decent rabble rouser can get a lynch mob together with just a megaphone and few cases of beer.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
however, they are lot better behaved than the radioactive byproducts in fission
hhere is such a thing as nuclear waste with the idea of fusion power. however we are talking about things with half lives and types of radioactivity that makes handling the waste not a permanent nightmare, more like a manageable sustained effort
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did they really mean Fusion, or did they mean Fission?
I was under the impression that a Fusion reactor was a little harder to build.
Curious about Storage and Virtualization? Check out
When I first read your comment I thought you said torso and wondered how one replaced the walls of ones torso... mine don't look replaceable.
So he's built a fusion reactor in an old warehouse in New York.....
...Does he bust Ghost as well?
Quite.
Stacking some Americium (from smoke detectors) and Radium (from glow-in-the-dark clock paint) does not a "reactor" make.
Just because the kid used a Geiger counter to know when he got a bigger reaction from more stuff doesn't make him a brilliant amateur physicist.
with quite a bit of physics saying that such a design will never be able to achieve breakeven at any scale
Because physics has never been wrong about anything, ever.
Mr. Wizard -- Today Timmy, we're going to take an old spatula, an inner tube and some macaroni noodles to make a nuclear reactor.
Timmy – Gee, Mr. Wizard! Aren't nuclear reactors dangerous?
Mr. Wizard -- No, Timmy! But old spatulas are! They can poke your little eyes out!
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Don't have a problem with your explanation except for the part about generating electricity with radiation. When the neutron hits an atom within the uranium and splits it, energy is released as both radiation and heat. The heat from the process is used to produce steam which is used to spin turbines, etc... The radiation part is useless except to make gophers glow and help you grow an extra arm or eye, if you are into that sort of thing.
Which is why it isn't a Fusor he's building.
It looks like one but a Magnetic Grid fusion device replaces the electric grid of the Fusor with a self-shielding magnetic grid. The idea is to create a "virtual Fusor" with the magnetic fields inside, thus eliminating grid losses.
A full-scale prototype has yet to be built, but I have seen an estimate that a magnetic grid of under 2m diameter is necessary for break-even which is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper to build and test than even the cheapest Tokomak.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
with no radioactive by-products
Not entirely. The elements formed during nucleosynthesis may generally not be radioactive, but the gamma rays given off during the fusion process certainly are.
Basic fusion is easy with the Farnsworth Fusor design.
Good news everyone!
Image what the title would have been, if he was an Arab....
So, pretty much any NASCAR race, rodeo, or BBQ then? :-P
I kid, I kid. (Especially since people from Texas and Oklahoma are known to carry guns. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Heat produces thermal radiation, so as radiation I meant both heat and gamma particles, but your explanation is more clear.
A good read:
The radioactive boy scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor
Don't tell the governor..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Gee, Dad, it's a Farnsworth.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
radiation destroys the immune system
99% of us carry herpes around, constantly held in check by our immune system
so when our immune system is destroyed, whether by HIV or radiation, out comes our wonderful viral friends, to lay waste to our bodies completely unimpeded
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm calling bollocks on the BBC. These folks are working on fusion reactors. They are taking advantage of ignorant Americans and instilling fear with the "N" word. (nuclear in this case)
"Good news, everyone! I have created a device that smashes atoms together and will provide enough energy for New New York indefinitely! Yes, indefinitely..."
Generally, physics hasn't been so far off that something that was thought not to work actually could be made to work.
Nuclear fusion and fission are pretty well understood by physics at this point, and if all the experts say that this design from the era when television was just invented won't be able to break even, then I believe they're correct. Instead of constantly trying to prove the physicists wrong with the same old design, maybe it's time to come up with a design that DOES work, and generates more power than it uses.
So at $39,000 to build and my current average electric bill of $50/month - this would only take 65 years to pay for itself! And that isn't even reasonable seeing I haven't figured in the fact it would take (guestimate) probably $100 worth of electricity to produce $65 worth of electricity. I mean yeah, cool you invented a fusion reactor. But why? No practical use other than uber-geeky bragging rights. Not quite sure that is worth a personal $35,000 investment.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Fusion consists of putting some gas in a box, turning it on, putting a whole lot of power in and ending up with a different gas in the box.
... plus a bunch of neutrons that really, really want out of the box.
Cool. I guess I should become more knowledgeable about fusion. Here I thought I had an awesome layman's grasp of the situation and find out I am behind the times again. Damn. How am I supposed to stay current in the knowledge to do my job well and keep up on all the other things that interest me. I need to get rid of my children i guess.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You know, a working fission reactor has been done already... I think it's called the "sun". I believe the process goes something like this: 1) Place order for at least 2.0E30 Kg of Hydrogen 2) Wait for UPS/Fedex to deliver to your house 3) Wait for gravity to pull all of this Hydrogen together .....
4) Profit!
I remember a science toy advertised as an 'Atom Smasher' and example of 'Ionic Space Propulsion' - turned out to be a small VanDerGraff Generator that could, on cold winter days, maybe work up 200,000 volts. Amateur scientist articles from the 50's and 60's are full of homemade lasers, plasma generators, cyclotrons, etc. One was a 100KW Laser - yes it was, a flash only 10 nanoseconds long but technically, 100KW (power being energy/time - a small amount of time make it look like a lot of power, altho it was powered by a 6volt lantern battery) Not too surprising that people could fuse a few atoms - lets us know when it can safely put out more energy than it takes in.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It will be a fissioned reactor if one of his neighbors cleaves it with an ax.
Nullius in verba
Generally, physics hasn't been so far off that something that was thought not to work actually could be made to work.
History is littered with such accounts. Take something as obvious as black holes and the theory of relativity.
Tell that to Fermi.
the paradox of fusion is that you need to have neutrons flying about to call success. this is also a very bad thing for nearby life forms and mutatable elements that can absorb neutrons and become prime particle emitters.
it is also a bad thing to have a exothermic fusion system because... well, the prime examples are stars and H-bombs. the exothermic reaction tends to feed on itself.
stuck up in a warehouse loft in the middle of NYC with two layers of foil tape over it is not exactly the place I'd pick for the thing. unless I was bin Laden.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The physics of black holes don't have anything to do with any devices that I've heard about. As for relativity, when has the lack of understanding there (i.e. before Einstein came along and made his theories) caused a certain design of a device to not work, and then the improved understanding of the physics allowed the earlier design to work?
No one's saying that fusion (energy-producing) can't be made to work. They're saying that this particular design for a reactor, which is a very old one BTW, can't be made to work. New understandings in physics will most likely lead to an entirely new design for a reactor, not some way of getting an old design to work.
When there are trillions of big balls doing this without anyone designing them. Where you ask? Just look up the (night) sky!
There is really no harm in actual fusion reactor with what limited raw materials to create fusion for most people could get. The problem of most fusion reactors is getting the first "spark" or ignition to get the fusion process started. After ignition the other problem maintain the fusion process.
Good luck Mark
Or Jagerminz S'more-flavored Schnapps.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There is an amusing-yet-horridly-terrifying story about one of Fermi's fission experiments, which took place underneath a football field at the University of Chicago, early in the war. Now, at that time, fission was only a theoretical proposition; nobody really knew what would happen when a sustainable reaction began. (E.g., some people thought they would set the atmosphere on fire.)
The experiment that day involved the gathering together of the first critical mass of fissile material -- literally a pile of uranium and graphite blocks. To control the reaction, Fermi had a cadmium rod dangling from a rope over a pulley (and an automatic safety rod too, to be fair, that they didn't know would work). When the reaction hit the point of being self-sustaining, one of his colleagues would take an axe and chop the rope, dropping the control rod back in place to absorb the excess neutrons and halt the reaction before it was too late.
It's a fun read. "The First Atomic Pile"
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Good comment. I laughed.
Free Fusion Reactors: Just look up into the night sky and choose any star. There are plenty for everyone.
The problem is getting the energy back.
Nuclear is nothing to mess with, our company has put bilions of dollars into protecting the public from any radiation leaks and people think its a fun party toy to show off. the radiological hazard produced if that science project falls over is nothing to take lightly
In fact, our open source fusor forum, http://www.fusor.net/board/index.php?site=fusor doesn't even know this guy, or I don't recognize him, anyway -- we usually use our real names there. It's been around for quite awhile too -- if you go there look at the archives and see for yourself. Not only does this represent a dupe, and not to take anything away from this guy, he's far from alone, and unless he is making over 2 million neutrons/second on less than 5w power input, he's not even caught up to the current hobby record, which as far as I know, I hold -- some of it shown at http://www.coultersmithing.com/ , my site (which can take a slashdotting much better than the forum can, which is "some guy" hosting from home -- the perfessor we call him and are grateful. If you go there you'll find many more than 38 folks with working fusors I think. The pic in the BBC article looks in fact like one copied from one of our (main) forum members fusors, Richard Hull (see wikipedia on that). Again, not taking anything away from the guy -- the more the merrier -- hope he catches up with the rest of us at some point, as we have refined the Farnsworth concept quite a bit over the years, and made much more progress than is normally reported, because what funding is done is either to ITER with their non working approach, or NIF, which is really a weapons stewardship test device. Mod me up, damnit -- this is sick, we've been doing this for decades and are pretty good at it, and nearly all of us have done it *purely* with our own earned bucks, not taking contributions from people dumb enough to donate for no return. I guess we mostly care more about the science than being 15-minute famous. And most of us (but not I) have done it for a lot less money than that. We have a few high school students who have made working fusors on high school student spare change kinds of money. I had the bucks, so I went whole hog and do a real science approach myself, but I am the exception, not the rule. Strictly speaking it's against regulations to make a device that makes either X rays or Neutrons without some paperwork, so that's another incorrect statement, and many hobby fusors make amounts that would be dangerous if we weren't careful, and part of what we do on our forum is mention what we have "activated" eg made our own radioisotopes via neutrons from fusors.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Yeah, there was a joke about that in Last Action Hero.
"Hello? I've just shot a man in cold blood, and I wish to confess."
"Hey, quiet down out there!"
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Neutrons are best blocked with materials containing light elements like hydrogen. Sometimes a combination of lead bricks and polyethylene bricks is used around a target in a fission based neutron source. The lead bricks block gamma rays, and the neutrons scatter off the hydrogen in polyethylene, slowing them down until they can be absorbed. In Alcator C-Mod tokamak, a concrete neutron shield is used.
Lithium is mined, not generated. It is used in the breeder blanket to produce tritium by the reaction n + 6Li --> T + He.
Correct, of course. I knew this, just not last night :) Thank you.
The physics of fusion reactors is quite well documented including several naturally occurring ones. ("natural" fission reactors have also been observed BTW.) The problem is how to create a fusion reactor that doesn't involved gravitational binding of the fusible materials.
Since one of the four major forces of nature has to be ignored due to scaling issues, the other three must be called upon and studied in order to get it to work, with the hope that a productive fusion reactor can be made containing plasmas within some sort of electro-magnetic field. The problem always is being able to sustain a reaction long enough that the energy from the reaction produces more energy than it takes to create the containment field. Every form of fusion research tries to deal with this issue in one way or another, including the "cold fusion" reactors that attempt to use atomic binding on a molecular level to create these electro-magnetic fields and Tokamak reactors that do this on a much larger scale.
The main problem with a Tokamak reactor is again a scaling issue, where the reactor is so incredibly huge that it can only be built with international cooperation for one that even in theory could be used for power production. One aspect that some "armchair physicists" tend to forget is that often a reactor design scales with a power function on the cost as well. Polywell reactors seem to have a "Big O" notation as applied to the cost of the reactor vs. its size with a slightly lower power function than the Tokamak... as documented by the original article spawning this thread. That meaningful research towards a study of the Polywell design can be done for less than $100k is something that certainly helps. It is too bad that more research universities aren't putting serious efforts into at least that design, given the costs involved.
As for being able to apply new physics to solving practical devices, where a lack of understanding of that physics would cause the device to fail or at least have inferior precision, one application I've known about is in regards to navigation. Yes, you can use Newton's equations for acceleration and motion to calculate both the current position and predictive future positions, but in order to get the accuracies needed for modern navigation it is imperative to use Einstein's equations to "tweak" the results of any navigation calculation. Modern GPS receivers simply wouldn't even be possible without applying relativity into the design, as would most celestial navigation across the Solar System. It is hard to conceive of an engineering design from the 18th century that would have required the precision of relativity, but it is something that has been beneficial in the 21st century. It makes navigation with accuracies of several miles using Newton's equations vs. precision of just a few feet using Einstein's equations. 18th century navigation was lucky if you hit the correct continent, much less actually getting with several hundred miles of the target destination.
Generally, physics hasn't been so far off that something that was thought not to work actually could be made to work.
History is littered with such accounts. Take something as obvious as black holes and the theory of relativity.
The physics of black holes don't have anything to do with any devices that I've heard about.
Go back to the context in which my statement was made. The simple fact is, most people didn't believe black holes could exist. In fact, the math break down rather abruptly which led most to draw the wrong conclusion. Despite physics being very far off, we now know that not only do they exist, they exist all over the place. The universe is littered with them. They are extremely common; despite what the math has to say about it. Its just one of many disconnects from reality physics commonly experiences until we gain yet one more piece of information. The problem is often we don't know what we don't know and so we draw the wrong conclusion when even when the math says its a safe conclusion. History riddled with such cases.
It's *alpha* emitters you definitely don't want to swallow; alpha is stopped by skin or a few metres of open air, beta goes straight through you but can be blocked by some sheets of thick metal or concrete.
The reason radon gas is so hazardous is that is decays into an alpha emitter; if it's in your lungs when it does that you can expect some heavy chop.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
The problem is, if UPS are a few days late delivering your parcel, they get all the profit and not you.
I reckon any union workers would have grounds for a strike due to unsafe working conditions, however.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
He built a fission "breeder" reactor. He was trying to manipulate scrap radioactive materials into something more interesting and powerful.
Two elements. And that's per nucleus. You get quite a few different fission products in a typical nuclear reactor.
Very little energy is contained in the radiation as compared to the kinetic energy the fission fragments get from the fission. In either case it is the heat that is used to generate electricity, and while radiation certainly contributes to it, most of it comes from the kinetic energy of the fission products.
As far as I'm aware there aren't really any practical ways to generate electricity from neutrons other than to simply let them be absorbed in something so their energy becomes heat, then you do as with any other reactor.
This is not true, the structural materials of the reactor gets irradiated by neutrons and hence become radioactive. The hope is that the materials can be chosen so that the radioactive waste generated in this way will be small in quantity and short-lived.
Essentially the main advantage with fusion is that unlike fission, it stops producing heat the moment you shut it down. With fission the radioactive waste products in the fuel rods contribute about 10% of the power, and can still cause a meltdown even after reactor shutdown. Therefore reliable cooling systems are required since there is no way to prevent the decay-heat from being generated. Fusion doesn't have that problem.
Until there, I was wondering, now I'm wondering something different.
...that is either a medium-interesting fusion rig, or a really KICK-ASS HOME BREWERY!