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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.
yeah, slashdot needs to stop posting this DIY crap. Even if it is interesting and nerdy it has no place here. We need to get back to politics and rants about the RIAA!
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?
Agreed. There are at least 25 people who've done it, maybe a lot more. Here's a guide to the whole process if you want to do it yourself: http://brian-mcdermott.com/fusion_is_easy.htm
Does it run on banana peels? That would really be something.
that it isn't a Hahn configuration tritium moderated fission reactor.
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.
Indeed, at our engineering department a student society just had one sitting on a table in a corner and didn't mention it, as though it was a completely normal thing to have around.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
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.
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.
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.
And what, exactly, makes you think it's dangerous? If you're going to call it dangerous, you should be able to lay out a plausible failure scenario that shows the risk; do you know enough about the devices these guys are building to do that, or are you just afraid of anything that uses the word "nuclear"?
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?
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
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.
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.
Don't you mean Apple? The government needs to break them up for all their anti-competative behavior. You can't expect the invisible hand of the market to do anything with a company that makes such cool products.
I drank what? -- Socrates
NUCLEAR IS SCARY!!!
***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
Yes, they are quite different. One is a super-category, and one is a sub-category. Like vehicle and car. All cars are vehicles, but not all vehicles are cars. Similarly, all fusion reactors are nuclear reactors, but not all nuclear reactors are fusion reactors.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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
There are a lot of things I'd worry about. The biggest, if he did make it work (the article didn't say it worked, just that he was trying, which makes it non-news), would be the risk of fire. Ok, so you built a nuclear reactor in your apartment. Did you use sufficient gauge wiring when hooking up everything in your apartment, or are there small gauge extension cords run all over the place? :)
There are plenty of other things to worry about, but they'd be completely project unrelated. Like, waking up in the middle of the night feeling your girlfriend tickling your leg, and then finding out it's a roach. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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.
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!
Well it is. People only noticed mine when I connected it to my NAS.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
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!
After sinking your teeth into a fusor, perhaps you can try to tackle a Polywell fusion device as the next step. While a few dozen or more people have built fusors, the number who have gone after the Polywell devices is certainly quite a bit less.
Of course the tough part of the Polywell devices is the theoretical work that Robert Bussard did to come up with the idea and the raw research being done right now to get the concept working. Supposedly the eighth version of this reactor design has been built and demonstrated by now (with continuing work on the effort), but the research team has yet to report back on the results. If the design works out, the U.S. Navy is interested in potentially using the design for nuclear powered submarines and carriers (why this has naval funding) but it is also useful for pure atomic energy research as well.
As for a hobbyist using a neutron source..... that could get scary for other reasons as a reliable neutron source can be used to transmute heavy metals. While not something in an of itself nasty some kid might be able to get a reaction or two with some interesting metals to get some really fun radioactive isotopes.
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.