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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?"
We all saw spiderman 2.
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?
We all saw spiderman 2.
And we all want the 2 hours of our life back.
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
Uh oh, I've heard this before... Wikipedia article about David Hahn, the 'Radioactive Boy Scout'
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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"?
It's an polywell in fact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
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
***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
Its all the high vac stuff that gets expensive and time consuming, its a real pain in the ass. Good backing pumps and high vac pumps (like Diffusion or Turbomoleculer pumps) are tough to come by for cheap unless you are willing to rebuild them. I bought three smaller diffusion pumps off eBay for another experiment and let me tell you its not an easy task finding parts for a $20 nondescript pump you bought off ebay. Then your need vacuum valves to control the pump down process. First you need to rough the chamber and wait for the pressure to drop to about 4E-2 Torr and then keep it there to remove as much vapor as you possibly can. then close the roughing valve and then open the forline valve to pull the back of your high vac pump down and then open the main valve which exposes the high vac pump to the chamber. Those vacuum parts alone can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Also given the fact that high vacuum fittings like Kf or CF elbows, flex pipes, tees etc can cost $50-$100 each! I applaud him for throwing that much money at the problem, he looks like he built a nice fusor with the right parts the first time so he isn't spending hours trying to figure out why he cant pull a vacuum below the -3's (Torr).
Its fun trying to iron out vacuum leaks! Especially without a $20,000+ helium leak detector. But a little vacuum grease on the KF O rings and making sure you tightened your CF flanges properly should help eliminate your problems.
I was trying to build a small electron beam welder for fun. I work on them for a living now so it looked like a nice little project but its not easy or cheap. As of now its a half assembled pile of parts because I cant afford to keep throwing money at it. The 3HP Stokes Microvane (55CFM) alone cost me 550 bucks. And that was a lucky find, don tthink the seller knew what he had. And it needs a rebuild because it cant pull lower than 7E-1 Torr. I also need good vacuum gauges (dial gauges arent much help below a few Torr, and the old Hastings I got from work are not that reliable), Hastings makes real nice ones, have them at work but they cost about a grand for the low-med vac gauges (1E-4 Torr) and I believe 1500+ for the one that goes all the way to ultra high vac (good to 1E-10 Torr).
Anyone who puts this kind of time, money and effort in to their hobby is a real dedicated person. My hats off to you Mr. Suppes.
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 seems to be a lot of humor impaired moderators this week.
Up in arms? Like perhaps EIGHT arms?
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.
insert ghost busters reference about unlicensed nuclear devices strapped to our backs.....
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
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!