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High Schoolers Use Homemade Nuclear Fusion Reactor To Dominate Science Fairs (us.com)
An anonymous reader writes: 20 high school students gather every Friday night in a basement of a modest home in Federal Way, Washington to work on science experiments using a home-made nuclear fusion reactor. [They've also reportedly won top honors in science fairs as well as college scholarships.] This extreme science club is the brainchild of Carl Greninger, a Program Manager at Microsoft by day, scientist by night. He was concerned about the current state of high school science education, [and] lamented that the public school system does not truly expose students to the excitement of experimental discovery.
So using his own money (and one-ton of radiation shielding), Greninger "gathered some students and built a working nuclear fusion reactor in his garage."
So using his own money (and one-ton of radiation shielding), Greninger "gathered some students and built a working nuclear fusion reactor in his garage."
If you look at the images on the site, you can see it is a Fusor. It has the wire cages and all of that.
Fusors are pretty cool. Was thinking of building one myself. You can definitely build one as an amateur. It's like 1950's TV era technology.
Of course a Fusor is not a power plant, but it's a decent neutron source.
They are trying to use the same concept for an actual power plant with the polywell, which uses magnetic fields instead of the wires to provide the confinement and the charged particle acceleration.
Since the Fusor's inability to be a power generating source is due to radiation and conductive energy loss from some of the particles impacting the physical surface of the wires, the magnetic confinement should dispense with that issue.
The major problem is that getting the right geometry for the magnetic fields is difficult and it hasn't been demonstrated whether it is possible to get the fields to allow for this approach yet.