Get your white coat, your plastic gloves, glasses and turn off the lights… you have just made your first nuclear fusion reactor and you want it to work. At least that’s what instructables.com user Christensent suggests through a DIY posted on the site, aimed at those who want to do some exotic research.
While working with dangerous voltages, a fusion reactor is something you may want to see, given the fact that by starting with this simple DIY you may one day discover how to actually make it produce usable energy.
The fusion reaction happens when (at least) two deuterium atoms collide, and, by their collision, they join at extreme temperatures and pressures and could supposedly generate huge amounts of extra energy.
You generally have to encase fusion reactions inside magnetic fields (produced by so-called “tokamaks”), because any material that would come in contact with the produced plasma would melt instantly.
Christensent uses the following materials to build his home-made fusion reactor:
-A vacuum chamber, preferably in a spherical shape
-A roughing vacuum pump capable of reaching at least 75 microns vacuum
-A secondary high vacuum pump, either a turbo pump or oil diffusion pump
-A high voltage supply, preferably capable of at least 40kv 10ma – Must be negative polarity
-A high voltage divider probe for use with a digital multimeter
-A thermocouple or baratron (of appropriate scale) vacuum gauge
-A neutron radiation detector, either a proportional He-3 or BF3 tube with counting instrumentation, or a bubble dosimeter
-A Geiger counter, preferably a scintillator type, for x-ray detection and safety
-Deuterium gas (can be purchased as a gas or extracted from D2O through electrolysis – it is much easier and more effective to use compressed gas)
-A large ballast resistor in the range of 50-100k and at least a foot long
-A camera and TV display for viewing the inside of the reactor
-Lead to shield the camera viewport
-General engineering tools, a machine shop if at all possible (although 90% of mine was built with nothing but a dremel and cordless drill, the only thing you really can’t build without a shop is scratch building the vacuum chamber)
I’d suggest if you want to try out building this one you should go somewhere outside the city, maybe a dumped industrial site and have your lawyer write your testament. Still, if your guts tells you to, go ahead and do it in your lab at home, but make sure you know what you’re doing.
You may be researching the world’s greenest power source but you may also be doing harm to yourself and your beloved ones, so take care, Dexter.
This design is nothing but a fusor, of which you may learn more about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
Its not even a new design as it was discovered back in 1930.
However, its fun though and may find its usefulness in projects requiring a controllable neutron source.