And I thought I was badass when I rebuilt a broken roomba and got it to run again… This is awesome

Woah.

Actually, deuterium isn’t that hard to obtain, as it is not radioactive and is sold in lecture bottles for about $150, however tritium (helium 3) is very hard to obtain by an amateur as it is radioactive.

Won’t it end the same way as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
??? :D

Aleksejes- David Hahn’s plan was to build a “breeder” reactor to create fissionable elements and as result, x-rays poured out of his device. In farnsworth fusors, x- rays usually do not appear until the input voltage reaches about 40 kv, which is far higher than mine, which has an input voltage of about -9500 volts DC (from a 15 kv neon sign transformer, full wave recified)

Good News everybody, I’ve just invented a new way to kill all of us. now if you’d all stop complaining I’d like to get on with the experiment!

Good news everyone!

It is practically a fancy neon light

Sure he may have a lead vest on to protect against EM radiation, but the real danger comes from the neutrons that are released if he ever gets this reaction running… I would suggest putting the reactor vessel in a deep pool if you value your life.

@Stu
err, stop spreading nonsense, as the builder said above, the voltage isn’t high enough to generate any radiation with significant penetrating power.

Will: Pretty much, but they’re so much prettier than a standard neon, particularly the last image on this page: http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?bn=fusor_images&key=1088538270&first=75

D-D fusion reactions have a neutronicity (percent of energy released as neutrons) of 0.66.
So once this thing is up and cooking deuterium neutron radiation could be more of a problem. But if it’s in a basement, I’d only be worried about anyone actually in the basement.

just have to watch out for the nuclearphobes who have the same reaction as Stu above, and try to have you arrested.

I just love the continuing “fallout” from the cold war. Everything having to do with atomic power was shrouded with secrecy and miss-information, and as a result you now only need to say the word ‘nuclear’ to make some people’s brains turn off. Have you people ever played with a plasma globe? At this point it’s about the same level of danger.

People have been building these in basements and garages for years. (not to take away from Will Jack’s achievement, just because people have done it before doesn’t make it any easier or less cool)

@24601 @nave.notnilc – NO I will not do my research because I’m not the slightest bit interested in becoming a nuclear fusion scientist, I never claimed that it WOULD generate dangerous radiation, I’m just entitled to be concerned about nutjobs like this guy who could potentially generate dangerous radiation at some point.

If the levels are likely to be dangerous, then he should go to jail for carrying out dangerous experiments in non-industrial areas. Its clearly non govt-authorised, totally unregulated, possibly under-shielded. Simple.

It appears we have some closet nuclear technicians on this comments page, it seems. God knows there’s no concensus on these comments pages as to whether its dangerous or not! I can’t tell whether this shit produces radiation but its damned well irresponsible to find out in a neighbourhood!

@Stu
It should also be noted that though some ionizing radiation is highly penetrating, it still falls off with the square of the distance. It doesn’t have to go far before it falls down to an intensity that is indistinguishable from background radiation.

good thing its fusion not fission:)

counting down to Dec 1012, 10,9,8,7….

@ Stu,

you need to gtfo. take your crazy elsewhere.

@Stu

Your mindset is why scientists are leaving the USA. People can’t advance science when stupid people like you can’t take any slight bit of risk. Do you think electricity was safe when people were discovering it? No way, and many people complained, but look at today, electricity is a must-have. Quit being an idiot and denying science, because science is going to move society forward, your stupid government and their pathetic regulations will only hold it back.

Woah. I was just joking. :) Thought that remembering David Hahn would make everyone smile.

@MS3FGX’s last comment: Well said dude, well said.

There are a lot safer and more scientific ways to build a Farnsworth Fusor.

The first thing you should do is invest in some lead glass and machine a nice metal(lead maybe) enclosure with a window in it.

Some places, such as hospitals and dentist offices being torn apart, are FULL of materials from their X-Ray rooms which you can often have just for the asking or small fees.

You may even be able to find the lead glass there – but bring a friend. Lead and Lead Glass are extremely heavy.

you should put a tungsten carbide shield around it to reflect the neutrons, except for a small hole, on which you mount a neutron collimator, use some laptop batteries in a backpack as energy supply, now mount your fusor on your shoulder like a strogg-railgun from quake.
Now you can go to town and dish out neutron-headshots left and right.

@ Stu:

Apparently ‘Nutjob’ = ‘People smarter than you’

WooHoo My first hackaday comment!

I am in a club here at the University of South Florida called X-Labs, and we have a small IEC Fusor. We use it for demos, but hopefully it will fuse some day. The Fusion reaction is not dangerous at these voltages at all. I am 15 years old and I have built power supplies for the thing. I love seeing one in a glass bell jar. The plasma is so much more viewable, it makes me want to use a bell jar. Great post and great design; i love seeing more people do hacks like this!

http://xlabs.eng.usf.edu/

@Will Jack, you could try using a Biphase Doubler rectifier for your neon sign transformer, this should give you almost the full -15kv instead of your -9.5kv. The problem with neon sign transformers is that their secondaries are center tapped to the case, so they become hard to fully rectify.

lol, stu sez “i be ignant”

coyt, you’re 15? you’re in a club at UofSF? wow, lots of respect for you, but… you know you’re gonna be a virgin for like… ever, right? well maybe not, cuz skolnick and the gang did all right, but still…

hawkeye++ for trying to turn this into a political nonsense too :P

@Stu
“That renders it more dangerous than an LSD production lab.”

good troll :)

Stu said: “Its clearly non govt-authorised, totally unregulated, possibly under-shielded. Simple.”
The gov’t doesn’t restrict this type of experimenting—it is, indeed, totally unregulated. Simple.
the_captn

Journal of M. McFly
——————–

Doc Brown and I just got back from 2015 where I was totally surprised to learn that Will Jack made the 2014 Darwin Awards. He was named right above the guy who tried to improve the thermodynamic efficiencies in his apartment furnace with the unfortunate side-effect of burning down the whole complex.

But, all of you should be pleased to know that Doc and I tried to change the time-line so that Will would live, (we made him more concerned with making his mortgage payments) but Will got iced by terrorists when the poor guy tried to sell them some “Helium 3″ he was calling Tritium. I guess those Libyan terrorists knew their isotopes.

Oh well. Back to the Future for us. I hear you can mod your Mr. Fusion to triple the amount of energy it produces per unit time. There’s a slight possibility of it exploding but I’ll put a couple of layers of lead tape around it. Should take care of any mishaps.

But if an exploding, falling sky-DeLorean (TM) happens to knock you dead, well, as long as I get to research what I want, where it’s convenient to me, it’s OK.

Then again, there might be a reason why test-facilities exist… maybe they limit the damage to others when things (radiation, fire) go unexpectedly wrong.

M. McFly

Marty, your Back to the Future reference is funny, although do your research before commenting, this device is no more dangerous than a neon sign or a plasma ball.

Deuterium’s actually pretty dang easy to get your hands on. Here’s the easiest source I know of:

http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=16_17_69&products_id=135

$10 for 10 grams of heavy water. Separate the deuterium using electrolysis, just like you probably did in high school chemistry with the regular hydrogen in water.

Tritium’s not totally unobtainable, either. I have a bit here on my desk, in the form of a sealed glass tube with a phosphor coating. You can get much bigger ones from self-luminous exit signs, but I really wouldn’t suggest messing with that unless you know what you’re doing.

Tritium would be harder.

This basement fusion reactor is more dangerous than cannabis consumption!

CALL THE FBI!!!

I don’t know if this has been said already (can’t be bothered reading all the comments) but Deuterium is a non-radioactive isotope of Hydrogen and costs about $150 a bottle from gas suppliers near me… It doesn’t require any licensing or anything to get. Tritium is radioactive and thus a controlled substance, but Deuterium is dead easy to get hold of.

And for uninformed people like Stu, the radioactive aspects of this are not remotely dangerous – the biggest danger for this guy is that he is doing it in a glass bell-jar, which could have a big risk of shattering at the low pressures required for fusion. Usually fusors are made with metal vacuum parts.

Then there’s the electrical risk – although they use extremely low current (a few milliamps), fusors generally operate at around -10kV to -40kV (the inner ring is at a negative potential relative to the grid, which is ground).

All you have to worry about apart from that is a few fast moving neutrons, but home built fusors are so inefficient (compared to, say, industrial ones that are actually used as sources for fast neutron radiation) that you’d have to sit less than a metre away from it while it was operating for a few weeks or months to do any real cell damage…

i love it next start up some dark matter and we will have a episode of fringe

One thing you could do with this design to get some better efficiency would be to make the outer electrode a larger copy of the inner one. Having two different electrode patterns prevents the fusor from operating in ‘star mode’ where the ions that collide with the grids are preferentially removed and the ones remaining are on trajectories that pass through the spaces in the grid. The grid collision losses are one of the big barriers to efficient operation, and anything that can be done to reduce them results in big gains. That’s the (very simplified explanation warning) theory behind the polywell modification as well. Magnets to trap electrons, in order to create virtual electrodes rather than ones requiring wire, so that grid collision losses don’t occur.

In another vein, if you ever do get a decent neutron flux, lining your chamber (metal chamber only for this) with lithium will result, if I recall correctly, in neutron activation of the lithium to tritium. Basically this would be the breeder reactor configuration. Start it on deuterium, make enough neutrons to start breeding tritium, and then continue to fuse the tritium for more power.

K

i want to see the nuclear accident from this

@ tantris

Because he’s making it clear that he has no idea what the project’s actual dangers are or are not, and is promoting a climate of hostility against hackers and basement research.

A similar example: not that long ago, police busted a nearby amateur soapmaker, because her neighbors had noticed that she was buying chemicals and had lab supplies. While eventually charges were dropped, it took her a lot of money and a lot of time, she has a police record, her neighbors still treat her as a pariah, she never did get her chemicals and equipment back, and the judge gave her a statement basically saying that the whole thing was her fault, and that no one outside research institutions should have chemicals, make their own products, or do their own research, and that the police and neighbors were entirely right to treat her like a scary person. What a slap in the face to someone who’s doing a process that’s been known and done at home for thousands of years. What a slap in the face to everyone who actually makes things, does things, and thinks.

When I see someone promoting this sort of bullshit, my blood boils, and I can tell that a lot of the other actual hackers on this board have a similar reaction. Guys like stu can go to hell.

K

@polossatik @khordas: yes, yes, yes
and i can’t tell you how much i hate this anti-science paranoia. but i don’t think a project that -if it ever worked- would (slightly) irradiate your neighbor’s kids, is the project to cry freedom-to-hack over.

Godwin’ns law

/end comments

Am i the only one who thinks this thing should be placed inside a bender-bot in honor of farnsworth :D

Maybe it can be used to give the bender-brew still some nice glowing eyes!!

In all seriousness, I made about ten of these one year(very little, cost me like 300$ total, all new supplies :p) and noone ever complained… and i hung them on my fething deck.

Not to diminish from his work AT ALL, this is a remarkable project, but I really want people… to understad that unless he ups the voltage ten, increases the vaccum, AND starts injecting deuterium w/ tritium, we, and the neigbours cat, have nothing to worry about.

There is a fusor-like without inner grid, it uses electrostatic and magnetic confinement of plasma.

Hah! stu is “entitled” to disallow us from learning because a completely different project with a similar name MIGHT be dangerous. LOL

@ Roger, Make that 8 built by high school kids, I’m a freshman in high school ;)

Right on Will Jack, good for you. Have you seen Andrew Seltzmans website? He has a Flouro cooled grid plus an ion gun, his craftsmanship is excellent.

http://www.rtftechnologies.org/

This is really interesting to me, im allways trying to find things that are interesting, ive pretty much masterd computers(Gay) and im moveing on to electronics and id love to build one of thease babys

theres a few things that are ticking over in my brain

to create 15,000V at , i think i read like 20mA
How many amps would be drawn from the primary winding? and would it be at 240v??

How much heat is generated?

WHat will happen when Deterium in “Injected” into the Core, What kind of reaction will occour??

im no Physics genius as you can probally see from my questions

“In another vein, if you ever do get a decent neutron flux, lining your chamber (metal chamber only for this) with lithium will result, if I recall correctly, in neutron activation of the lithium to tritium. Basically this would be the breeder reactor configuration. Start it on deuterium, make enough neutrons to start breeding tritium, and then continue to fuse the tritium for more power. ”

when u say “and then continue to fuse the tritium for more power”

do you mean fuseing tritium will result in a higher energy output as Heat???? than deterium

And anouther idea , are the effects of microwaves or an electron gun known on the plasma???

chris Ramsay

P.S Stu if your Denying experiments then you might as well remove yourself from the gene pool.

Justify your existance!

Thanks Will * Goes to fusor.net

Im greatley interested in this ,,, will have to take a trip back up to Royal derwent, its a abandoned mental hospital dateing back from 1830′s if i remember corectally ,

theres huge pressure vessels for the hot water boilers so i could make a good chamber out of one :D

some one said that tritium is hard to find but i wear a vile around my neck…in glass coated with phospherus pouder and then a layer of plastic:) lol now i just know sum tard is going to be like ” but dude its radio active” first off i know… secondly i also know its only hamful if inhaild or mixed with water and then injested. also ther are alot..alot of radio active material all around…in your house even. some of its gamma and not betta like whats on my neck. but anyway you can get tritium fairly easy… look up betta markers or betta light..or somthing of that nature… lol sorry spelling wasnt my fave in school. but do check out what im saying and you will see what i liked to learn in school