Fusion, in my backyard?!

posted Jun 24th 2010 6:35am by
filed under: news

Here is the 32nd amateur fusion reactor built in a basement. [Mark Suppes] is right behind [Will Jack], the (then) 17 year old [Thiago Olson], and [Mileiux] in engineering a homemade nuclear reactor. By taking two light elements and colliding them under extreme speed and pressure, a heavier element and energy are produced.

[Mark's] goal is to lasso in investors to earn enough money to build a larger Bussard Reactor, which will hopefully produce as much energy as it consumes. Free energy at only a couple million dollars; who wouldn’t pass up this opportunity?

[Thanks Imp]



79 Responses to Fusion, in my backyard?!

  • Chee says:

    Where’s the Delorean?

  • Stephen Gentle says:

    I’m still trying to find a cheap diffusion pump to make my own one of these!

    And before anyone comes in with something about it blowing up – the greatest risk on these machines is risk of electric shock from the high-voltage power supplies. Fusion requires so much energy to initiate that a thermonuclear weapon actually uses a regular atomic (fission) bomb to start the reaction. This fusion is so low powered that there will never be a chance of any danger, and the small amount of neutron radiation they produce is less than you get at cruising altitude in a plane.

    And no, there’s no chance a machine like this can generate net power. The ions collide with the inner grid, both creating gasses that polute the plasma, and stopping those ions from fusing. The Polywell (Bussard) design is designed to prevent this but costs many orders of magnitude higher than a fusor.

  • Chuckt says:

    After lazers over 5 MW are banned for import and after seeing the oil spill in the gulf, while this is impressive, I think there should be some sort of regulation.

  • harry says:

    millions of dollars for free energy? what about all the types that already exist and have been suppressed by the energy companies, that cost squat. Energy from the vacuum… teslas inventions ect ect

  • The Cageybee says:

    Yay. Soon we could all be living next door to a nuclear power plant.

    Irradiated balls anyone?

    The Cageybee

  • Mythgarr says:

    Interesting (if moderately disturbing) project.

    I, myself would love to see more nuclear power plants built in the US.

  • DUH! says:

    “millions of dollars for free energy? what about all the types that already exist and have been suppressed by the energy companies, that cost squat. Energy from the vacuum… teslas inventions ect ect”…

    YES !!! FINALLY NOT EVERYONE EVERYWHERE IS IGNORANT OF TESLA !!!

    http://www.educate-yourself.org/fe/

    IF FREE ENERGY IS WHAT YOU SEEK, YOU SHALL FINE PLENTY OF MODELS TO FOLLOW… AND DON’T LET ANYONE GIVE YOU THE ANSWERS YOU NEED TO FIND FOR YOURSELF!

    GOOD LUCK!

    • Caleb Kraft says:

      @DUH,
      I’m not going to debate the claims on that page, but this quote sure did get a good laugh from me:

      “The Joe cell died because of the negative DOR energy field which is radiated by NEGATIVE EMOTIONS. This is why people with an avarice intent or those of a negative spiritual orientation -CANNOT GET THE JOE CELL TO WORK. This is the mysterious “Y” factor (“you”) that Wilhelm Reich wrote about when it comes to working with orgone energy (and discussed very adroitly by Alex Schiffer in his book). When you follow Joe’s instructions carefully and build the cell for fun and adventure and have a light hearted attitude about the whole thing, the cell will usually work. If Sol can do it, YOU can do it. Give it a shot..Ken Adachi ]”

  • DUH! says:

    “I, myself would love to see more nuclear power plants built in the US.”

    WHAT THE F*** DUDE! DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND NUCLEAR WASTE AT ALL???? WE ALREADY HAVE PLENTY OF NUCLEAR WASTE WHEN WE HAVE POWERED SO LITTLE WITH THE POWER CREATED… NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE IN EVERY ASPECT A BAD DECISION FROM BEGINNING TO END THEY DO NOTHING BUT BRING DEATH TO THE LIFE AROUND THEM… NOW QUESTION THOSE WHO CALL FOR MORE NUCLEAR PLANTS.

    LOOK HERE: http://www.californiaskywatch.com/documents/htmldocs/pp_us_new_world_role_nuclear_waste-dump.htm

    THIS IS WHO: http://www.nrc.gov/

    SHOULD BE PROTECTING US BUT INSTEAD THIS HAPPENS: http://www.ki4u.com/lost.htm

    DON’T BE A FKING SLAVE, OPEN YOUR EYES AND EARS! THE WORLD NEED YOU TO WAKE UP!!!!!

  • icanhasreactors says:

    You can already buy complete stuff if you have the cash:

    http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-toshiba-micro-nuclear-12.17b.html

    I doubt they care about govt regulations or anything. No one cares about laws over 6 figure deals :S

  • Dave Eaton says:

    I saw an engineering student do a project with one of these to do neutron activation analysis.
    http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/farnsworth-fusor-carls-jr/

    The potential for using this as an analytical instrument is more exciting to me than using it as a power source, which is unlikely.

  • Paul says:

    @harry

    What about those things? The problem is that they don’t actually exist in real life.

  • nnx says:

    @harry:
    Please tell me you are trolling.
    What would the energy companies gain from _suppressing_ such inventions?
    Maybe using and monopolizing them for themselfs, but suppressing is just plain stupid.

    Also: great project, unfortunately it is impossible to break-even with this kind of reactor design, a polywell maybe, but not a fusor.

  • harry says:

    @nnx
    oil industries rely on being able to ‘sell’ power…

    @Paul
    hate to break it to you, but it’s real. theres methods which use back EMF to induce voltage spikes from radiant EM energy… stuff like that, ive been delving pretty heavily into it myself recently.

    http://www.energyfromthevacuum.com/

    heres a documentary series im downloading by PHD’s n people like that, the first DVD talks about tesla n people who’s had their inventions supressed… sounds fanatical I know, but thats what research is for :D

  • killerabbit says:

    Great. Now when can I order my Mr. Fusion?

  • imsolidstate says:

    That’s cool. Ride your bike to work, make webpages for a fashion company, then ride your bike home and mess with nuclear fusion.

    @DUH – BE AFRAID!!! Did you actually read the article? ["There is no chance of any kind of accident with fusion," says Neil Calder, communications chief for Iter, a multi-national project begun in 1985 with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of fusion power.
    "There's no CO2 pollution, there's no greenhouse gases, you can't use it for proliferation [the spread of nuclear weapons] – it has so many advantages,” he said.]

  • osgeld says:

    DUH! capslock, turn it off, tween you ranting like a moron and trying to sell us free energy devices that run on emotion your getting pretty high up on the retard scale

  • Trekna says:

    I’d rather live downwind of a nuclear plant than a Coal plant for sure..

  • charper says:

    @Harry, Duh

    Yeah, I’m a big Tesla fan too… but he had some really dumb ideas. Get your head out of the sand and go do some research. A lot of Tesla’s myths aren’t real. The FBI released all the documents (no proof ofc) back to his home government. His mechanical resonator never existed (if he really caused earthquakes in Manhattan why was there no newspaper article?). He believed you could get free energy forever by electrolyzing water into H2 and O2, letting it rise and recombine into water, and turning a paddle wheel. He actually filed a patent on this late in life, apparently he hid it from everybody because he was afraid they’d use it, but thought he had nothing to lose when he was too old. Finally, despite the claims, his Tesla coils were actually far less efficient than modern-day versions. Note, however, that his purpose was transmitting ‘electrical vibrations’ through the ground instead of the air. He actually wrote Marconi and told him he had it all wrong. So, the ‘efficiency’ of his wasted energy is debatable.

    Also, be careful about internet mumbo-jumbo. It’s really holding you back from real knowledge. Vacuum energy is theoretically possible. It’s a real research project with real PHDs (and lowly underpaid grad students) and millions of dollars in funding. Now, having said that, it has nothing to do with vacuums or spinning disks or electrons or anything.

    Just be careful – the internet lets anybody talk with any kind of authority they can say they have.

    Seriously, I’m begging you… if half the people that believed all this stuff put their creative energy towards something useful the world would be a much better place.

  • derp says:

    nuclear power is the future of energy production. get used to it, kids.

  • TheFish says:

    @DUH
    its not fusion that creats so turnoff you’re caps lock, your getting fusion confused with fission. Fission is the one that creats the wast, but it is not that large amounts, and the wast is buried deep under ground.

  • DUH! says:

    @Caleb,

    haha, I know educateyourself.org has it’s foot in both the fiction and non-fiction, which is unfortunately the pattern for many sites that have bits of important information/ resources…

    If you haven’t heard of Wilhelm Reich and his “Orgone energy”, here’s a reader’s digest: “Orgone Energy” is what Reich named a non-visable energetic substance that he was able to isolate. He basically created a “filter”, by layering a few common substances, that localizes this “Orgone E”. By using these filters on plants and testing them on people with injuries, Reich found that increasing “Orgone” in an area dramatically accelerated growth / healing… so, yes…. for all you nerds: “Orgone Energy” = “The Force” !!

    you should check out these:

    http://members.dslextreme.com/users/rogermw/Reich/accumulators.html

    http://www.orgonelab.org/

    I USED TO THINK THAT EVERYBODY EVERYWHERE WAS BY DEFAULT GOOD, I NOW KNOW THAT THOSE WHO SEEK TO HOLD THE POWER HOLD NO RESERVATIONS FOR THE WELL BEING OF OTHERS… KNOW THYSELF, KNOW THY ENEMY

    PEACE AND PROSPERITY,
    DUH!

  • Paul says:

    @Harry

    You said it was being suppressed by big energy.

  • cornelius785 says:

    @DUH

    LOL!!! I jsut fine it hilarious that someone is proclaiming the facts in free energy, perpetual motion machines, and other fringe/questionably provable devices, but is scared about nuclear, something can is very real and can be done now.

    I’m all for more fission nuclear power plants. To me atleast, the problems with nuclear are not technology based, but based in policy because some people are so anti-nuclear that they will raise heaven and hell to stop a nuclear power plant. the newer, more modern nuclear plants are much more safer, produce less waste, increased effeciency, etc. . I’m hoping that some of the money obama is allocating for building nuclear power plants can be spent on informational commercials and websites to educate the public that nuclear powere has advanced over the decades and rebute the lies and partial truths the anti-nuclear groups spew out.

  • DUH! says:

    “nuclear power is the future of energy production. get used to it, kids.”
    – I pray not… have you heard of the Sterling Motor? There is enough sunlight ALONE to power all of Humankind’s needs… but there’s no one to pay for it, so it is kind of confusing, huh?

    “but it is not that large amounts, and the wast is buried deep under ground.”
    – haha, ok… because things we do deep under ground NEVEEEEEERRRR backfire …
    (http://www.google.com/search?q=oil+spill)
    but seriously, are you kidding me?? What kind of awful world would it be if everyone was so short-sighted?? o yea… :(

    PEACE AND PROSPERITY,
    DUH!

  • Gert says:

    The UK annually spend more on ringtones than on Fusion Energy Research.

    I assume it’s the same in the US.

    There needs to be a Manhattan Project-like fund for Fusion Energy.

    We cannot survive using oil.

  • Wes says:

    It’s more likely then you think!

  • osgeld says:

    “have you heard of the Sterling Motor? ”

    yea and after 126 years its still using more energy than it puts out, and has such low torque its own friction can stall it

    quit trying DUH, if all these BS internet free energy even remotely worked they would have been in use, considering that most of them are older than “the man” that supposedly kills researchers and suffocates their work

  • JohnSmith says:

    Hey, awesome, FAMULUS is finally getting some attention. He’s been talking about this over at talk-polywell.org for a while. I’ve been following his blog at prometheusfusionperfection.com for a little while, this guy is a true hacker.

  • JJ says:

    @DUH!

    I’ve built a sterling, and there are few devices that are less efficient than those..
    They are fun to build and watch, but they produce so little mechanical power from massive heat differentials. Show me one that can turn more than a few inch/lbs of torque, without having to burn massive amounts of stuff to build the heat needed.

  • chrelad says:

    Super cool! :D Good job and keep up the good work

  • taintedkernel says:

    Great job on the project, pretty impressive for a backyard experiment. As for achieving breakeven though, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Traditional “hot fusion” requires an absurd amount of input energy to keep the system stable. My money is on a breakthrough with the Fleischmann-Pons cell, knowing a few PhD’s working on the research always helps.

  • me says:

    Wow, These comments went the opposite direction that I thought they would.

    I expected the Safety patrol to start harping on how many sharp edges the Fusor has.

  • eDave says:

    @DUH
    In a few years we may well be able to burn the nuclear waste itself in next-generation fission reactors.
    Thorium (one of the principal waste products of nuclear energy) still harbors quite a bit of energy. In theory, as the technology advances, we could keep reacting the waste products until they are about down to iron. The shorter half-lives of the next-generation reactors’ waste will make storage problems much smaller.
    So basically, the less we freak out about nuclear energy, the more efficient it can become, and the better chance we have of safely disposing of the waste we have already accumulated.

  • Chris says:

    @DUH

    Tesla’s methods of sending energy weren’t shown to not work, they did work, it was simply shown that it is more energy efficient to actually run a wire than use air or the ground to transfer energy. Electrically speaking, it is still more efficient to use a wire for communication than radio based, too, though, that can cause logistical problems, such as environmental issues in the middle may cause that wire to break, blocking the communication. When you think about it, for communication, we put several watts (on HF, 100W is not uncommon) into the air, to pull a few microwatts out of the air at the reciever. If we were to do that by wire, we could easily get by with much less than a watt.

  • zeropointmodule says:

    same problem here, no diffusion pump.

    i have a roughing pump here recovered from a broken car aircon system, however this is good for .01 atmospheric (a really really lousy vacuum) however it is slightly better than nothing.

    apparently Tesla developed a flat plate device to remove air from a chamber which relies on binding the oxygen into metal oxides, in a similar way to a “getter”.

    might work for getting the last bit of air out of a chamber once pumped down, but you will need a turbopump no matter what.

    i did come up with an idea using a piece of copper “pickled” in ammonium persulphate to expose the surface then cleaned under DI water and installed as one of the plates.

    unfortunately scratch building a turbopump is *not* an option, the tolerances are in the microns and even if somehow you managed to get that part working the vibrations at 90,000 rpm would surely tear it apart.

    try local neon sign shops, sometimes you can salvage a “broken” pump which is no good for neon sign work but can be rebuild or repurposed.

  • pookey says:

    @JJ

    I really don’t want to step into what is becoming a fight amongst the tinfoil hat brigade, but your statements with regard to stirling (not “sterling”) motors betray a certain ignorance of the subject, despite you having “built” one.

    Like any heat engine, the efficiency of the stirling is proportional to the temperature differential applied to the motor. You are correct that those cute little stirlings that are claimed to run off the heat from a cup of coffee are no more than curiosities, and barely turn themselves. But that is true of *any* heat engine trying to operate from a poor-quality (low delta T) heat source.

    When stirlings are run on high-quality heat (high delta T) they are very efficient (I’ve seen claims of 40%). The best stirling motors are hermetically sealed and even pressurized. Motors of this type were used to great success in experimental postal fleet vehicles under a NASA study. These motors provided adequate power and torque, and as external-combustion engines, were capable of running on a wide variety of fuels. The downside? It is difficult to “throttle” a stirling motor.

    Of course, if the stirling is powering a generator to produce electricity, this is far less an issue. In fact, another study I read just a few years ago stated that if you compare a reflective parabolic dish with a stirling motor/generator at its focal point to a photovoltaic array of equal capture area, the stirling generator produces *much more* electricity, despite losses implicit in a mechanical system.

    No single energy production/conversion/usage technology is going to solve all of our problems. If there is one, it will likely be Bussard’s inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. Stirling motors will provide an excellent way for making productive use of the heat produced.

    Bottom line, there *will* be more stirling engines in your future.

  • TheFish says:

    @DUH
    ““nuclear power is the future of energy production. get used to it, kids.”
    – I pray not… have you heard of the Sterling Motor? There is enough sunlight ALONE to power all of Humankind’s needs… but there’s no one to pay for it, so it is kind of confusing, huh?

    “but it is not that large amounts, and the wast is buried deep under ground.”
    – haha, ok… because things we do deep under ground NEVEEEEEERRRR backfire …
    (http://www.google.com/search?q=oil+spill)
    but seriously, are you kidding me?? What kind of awful world would it be if everyone was so short-sighted?? o yea… :(

    PEACE AND PROSPERITY,
    DUH!”

    “There is enough sunlight ALONE to power all of Humankind’s needs”

    there is a problem with what you just said, yes there is enough energy form sun light to power our needs, but the problem is the sunlight they are talking about is EVEY SINGLE BIT OF SUNLIGHT THAT HITS THE EARTH. Imagen if there were solar plants on every bit of land of the earth, that would cause more environmental damage then most other sources of energy because you would have to cut down all of the rain forests to make room. now if the modern day solar plants were at least 85% efficient then that would be a different story all together, but the truth is that modern day solar plants are only about 9% – 35% efficient.

  • Steve says:

    Cmon people, a fashion designer ist tryin to raise millions to built a *fusion* reactor? Hmm, wait a minute. So a guy with no profound experience in the field is trying to do, what is done by the best physicists in the country? And even they have problems doing it, despite billions of research spending on this world wide?
    You know what? I think I know his brother. He is always writing emails to me, which begin with something like:

    Hello Mr. Smith,

    My name is barrister John Doe from Nigeria and I ask you to help me transfer 6 million dollars from my country to the US. For you service, you can keep 3 million bla bla bla

  • snowdruid says:

    wow this was fun reading i just realized how sad it is that so many morons believe all they see and hear. ever heard of critical thinking?? overunity devices are fake and (at least in my book ) open system devices are not overunity. back emp LOL get a electrical engineering handbook and read it voltage means nothing. some magnet based devices may seem to work but all they do is “run down” the magnet yes magnetisme is also a form of energy.now invent a device that taps real vacum energy now that would be a real breakthrough. @all the fission ppl PLZ get a life there are so many unsolved problems with waste managment and secrity concerns that you can hardly call it a technology for the future. even assuming you can use all decay products to power smaller reactor until the waist is non radioactive the biggest problem remains: there is only so much radioactive material you can use. but in the end its like oil ist a fossile fuel.
    another thing is tesla was a brilliant man i his time he was a visionary. some of his work turned out to be wrong some to be true but im sure he would turn in his grave if he saw all the bs featured under his name by the “free energy community”.
    as about the matter at hand nice project we need more of those “energy hacker” but i wish ppl were trying harder to think out of the box since its clear to everyone building a fusor that it wil never reach net energy production….

  • shazzner says:

    What is it with “free energy” buzzwords that draw out the crazies? There is no such thing as free energy, period.

  • macona says:

    You should check out http://fusor.net , it is the main forum for fusor enthusiasts.

    I am eventually going to build one. I have one vacuum system with a 6″ cryo-trapped diff pump with a 18 x 18″ bell jar. I also have a smaller turbo pumped system. Both systems have residual gas analyzers installed on them. Picked up a 50kv @ 5ma power supply the other day.

  • Drew says:

    @DUH

    Orgone energy is garbage.

  • D_ says:

    @Bjonnh while the Sun provides a free source of energy, you are correct their is no free energy.

    In regard to on site nuclear reactors providing energy. The heat can be used for space heating simply , but it would be too expensive for that. At the moment to use the reactor to produce electricity the heat from the reactor would have to produce steam. While steam is simple, but using it safely complicates the process. Face it if fusion ever becomes practical it will be used mostly to power the grid, as most of the public want electrical power to be plug and play.

    I see the Tesla cult, with their conspiracy theories. found this post. In the event Tesla was really on to something the power companies would have developed to increase the profit for the for profit companies, or reduce operating expense for the co-ops. Respectfully return to the real world we all live in.

  • AeroEngineer says:

    Hey just want to point out that the fusion specialists working at ITER in Europe, what will be the world’s leading research facility for fusion technologies, says fusion is at least 75 years off. This comes from not only a lack of funding, its something much more difficult to deal with. They don’t have the theory fully established to handle it. So this isn’t even something you can throw money at and itll help. Yes more money means more researchers working there, but many of these people would be working in academia on the same theories so the help there is debatable. Even with all the funding they ask for, by the time fusion energy produces positive output, all the ecological climate problems and resource problems from fossil fuels will have likely run their course. (Fossil fuels are predicted to run out in ~35 years)

  • zool says:

    tony stark was able to build this in a cave, with a box of scraps

  • AeroEngineer says:

    Also, to the guy mentioning sterling engines, yes tehy are a great way to harness solar power. A couple companies are currently working on getting them mass produced for grid production (Stirling Energy Systems) and are test running a facility in the Mojave desert. If a market develops for a product, and the tech is proven, a company will take it up and develop it. It just hasn’t been economically feasible in the past. Those stirling engines have high maintenance costs. Yes solar is cheap, but until the California govt posted a contract to pay for the stirling engines if they could pass the proving stage (which its in now), they would never have been economical. It will cost more to generate a single watt from the stirling engines than it would from coal, at least thats the way the economics of it seems to be working. As economies of scale come into paly, who knows. But no startups would touch the engines for grid production cuz until ecological factors came into play, no govt would pay more money for the green source than for the coal source. Also keep in mind politicians like tried and true solutions (coal) since theres less risk and they can run better cahnce of reelection compared to more risky new techs (stirling).

  • DUH! says:

    “There is no such thing as free energy, period.”
    – Agreed, but using the phrase “free energy” is easier than explaining how everything within the Earth system is powered by the sun… I use the phrase “free energy” when speaking of solar or wind powered devices, which are also called “renewable resources”… the “free” means that I don’t have to do anything for the sun to keep filling our environment with the energy that I convert to electricity…

    “Orgone energy is garbage.”
    – haha, LITERALLY can’t argue with that, so thx for sharing…

    “I see the Tesla cult, with their conspiracy theories. found this post.”
    – You should investigate who created the phrase “conspiracy theories”, to use the people’s fears and ignorance against themselves…

    @whoever

    The sun really fills every inch of the Earth with an abundance of energy, it’s in the grass, it’s in the wind, in the oceans, and in all of us.
    Think hard on how to gently tap nature’s resources in new and innovative ways, consider ways to turn our garbage into cheap, clean energy, while creating NO negative externalities…

    I mean this IS HACKADAY RIGHT>>>??? Aren’t we supposed to be the MOST free thinking and LEAST bound by mainstream ideas?? More willing to color outside the lines and excited by doing new and different things? Let’s see some pants that charge my phone and ipod while I walk! Let’s see some roads that absorb turbulance from traffic to power street lights! Let’s make tomorrow better, together!

    Peace and Prosperity

  • DUH! says:

    “tony stark was able to build this in a cave, with a box of scraps”!!!

    HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA, awesome

  • greycode says:

    @HaD You guys know that when you post stuff like this, every coke snorkin’, tinfoil hat wearing, hemp clothed, Marty Feldman eyed, stark raving mad, lunatic fringe to post whatever websites they use as their bibles. Then as if what they say is not scary enough, THEY CAPS EVERY SINGLE WORD, which really does not do much to either promote their arguments, nor convince us that they are not coke snorkin’, tinfoil hat wearing, hemp clothed, Marty Feldman eyed, stark raving mad, lunatic fringed MORONS. Keep it up! Not only does it drive them loony mad, but it amuses me greatly, thinking they are about to suffer an aneurysm because no one will believe them and take them seriously.

    @ Coke snorkin’, tinfoil hat wearing, hemp clothed, Marty Feldman eyed, stark raving mad, lunatic fringed morons, please note that those ideas you got when smoking weed, probably are not going to work. Unfortunately for you, and fortunately for me, the Internet gives you guys as much a forum as Stephen Hawkings. The difference of course being that Mr. Hawkings actually knows of what he talks about. The fun part about this is that when you guys get into a corner and talk and the air gets heavy with aromatic herbs of the mind altering types. Then one of you apparently writes this stuff down and puts it on the Internet, which the rest of you then take as gospel and inarguable. However, you must know this, something for nothing and your chicks for free, is only a song lyric. While I dig the rock music, I know that is not truth.

    Every bit of energy is accountable from something else, the law is immutable. Please take a look at Conservation of Energy, and Newton’s Three Laws. If you can understand them, then try and break them. Bring us a working demonstration model. Trust me, if you can, you will become mad wealthy, and scary powerful.

  • Jake says:

    Wow, this post sure seems to have attracted a lot of anti-nuclear hippies…

    Anyway, the statement “free energy” seems wrong, since the net energy produced would be zero, so there isn’t really any energy at all…

  • Jake says:

    @greycode

    Well spoken, man. I lol’d.

  • octel says:

    @DUH
    “Orgone”…you mean the 19th century crackpot idea known as the “aether”?
    lmao

    @Jake
    Don’t worry, there are a lot more pro-nuclear-energy hippies to balance them out (myself included)

  • octel says:

    @DUH
    “Aren’t we supposed to be the MOST free thinking and LEAST bound by mainstream ideas??”

    The laws of physics aren’t just “mainstream ideas”.
    F equals MA anywhere on the planet.

    You opened your mind so much your brain fell out :P

  • TJ says:

    Was Marty Feldman resurrected recently?

  • snowdruid says:

    lol stirling engines powering the net imagine that…. a bunch of low efficiency high maintenance devices producing meager amounts of electricity/mechanic work? what a waist of resources…..ive read an article (cant remember where tought) about using sunlight to turn water to steam an use the steam to run a turbine like in any big power plant that sound more plausible to me than using stirling engines….

  • Ben says:

    @TheFish

    Far more solar energy reaches the earth in a year than the human race uses in that year. Even with 5% efficient solar panels it would only take a few hundred thousand square kilometers of land. Compared to the 5 million sq km used for permanent crops, this isn’t really all that much land. The problem with solar is the extremely high cost.

  • BruceJ says:

    Why of COURSE allla them dumb eggheads at MIT and Princeton couldn’t design their way outta paper bag. We have a web designer who’s gonna solve the problems!

    Gee, if we’d only thunka that before, we’da had free energy since, like, forever!

    Note: It’s easy, after stuffing enough energy in, to produce a fusion reaction.

    Breaking even is NOT a matter of “getting some people to pony up some money to build a bigger one.”

  • AeroEngineer says:

    @snowdruid Ah now you’re thinking. That’s exactly what a company by the name of Brightsource Energy is looking to do. Others as well, but they’re my particular favorite for that market. Stirling energy probly won’t be competing there. Let Brightsource control the solar thermal for grid production. Stirling Energy engines are very efficient, just s you know, key is the lower power procduction and their ability to use low quality sunlight. IE brightsource needs highintensity solar to produce their high efficiency grid power, stirling energy can produce less energy but with lower quality stuff. So you can take 1 or 2 of their engines (they are very scaleable) and power an industrial park or a residential neighborhood. Thus they can supplement power in areas of high demand where it makes no sense to put a largescale Brightsource power plant nearby. As Opening the mind to the possibilities, different markets for each device, and we’re all one step closer to the way things should be done.

  • greycode says:

    @TJ The Feldman never died, he merely became carbon neutral.

  • MouseKelly says:

    You guys do realize that the neutrons hit the walls of this reactor and heat them up, right? So, put a few pelter effect thingson the outside and up the voltage and size and try to reach over unity. Read upon the cryogenics of the tokamak reactor, but that is magnetic confinement, this is different and it does fuse, and it lasts, the grids start to decay, but that’s not the big of a prob, the tokamak is mag confinement, and that is why they are having so much trouble, they have to slowly heat this D-T mix to millions of degrees, so they move as fast as this electrostatic reactor does, but the voltage basically decides the amount of fusion,so you might need to getinto MVor GV ranges before it starts to get more energy out that in (over unity) I am gonna smoke so much cannabis the day we reach just simple stable unity, and the thing basically powers itself, next after that, the machine that runs on water, and electroizes the water and burns it. better hope more helium in the atmosphere won’t become another bad thing, read up on helium, it was very hard to find and concentrate. I can see it now, “The Helium Problem…”

  • octel says:

    @Ben
    The other big problem with solar is power delivery. The best places to put solar panels just happen to be in the middle of nowhere! Running super-long power lines will quickly eat up whatever efficiency you gain from mass solar.

    @greycode
    excellent

  • Patrick says:

    The future is wind, water and sun. Anything else is unsustainable and environmentally unsound.

  • --j says:

    Article states that “He is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor[...]”

    Not the 32nd.

    Maybe somebody did some sloppy reading and pulled the “32″ from the paragraph above? “Mr Suppes, 32, is part of a growing community [...]”

    As for some commenters use of caps-lock; I find it remarkably thoughtful of them since it instantly tells me I don’t have to read them and the subsequent comments on that post. Thank you.

    (But it begs the question; who — since time immemorial, i.e., before CompuServe — reaches out and teaches all these crackpots the proper use of caps-lock? Or is it a co-marker for crackpotism?)

  • EE says:

    The comments on here have gone crazy. People are talking about nuclear waste (um, this is a fusor… so what waste are we discussing?). Others about free energy.

    Does anyone else think this is a pretty sweet build? May not be the most practical, but its awesome.

  • Digital says:

    I think that HAD should kill the caps again, I think I liked this place better when we couldn’t cap our words.

  • isama says:

    @greycode:

    What ideas whould Stephen Hawking come up with after smoking weed? :P

  • cipher says:

    and the answer is:
    J. P. Morgan, who pulled to plug on Nikolai Tesla’s funds after learning about his plan to distribute energy wireless and realising that he would have a hard time putting a meter on it and profit from it.

  • octel says:

    @Patrick
    Nuclear is perfectly sustainable, and with new reactor designs it’s completely safe.

    The problem with nuclear right now is threefold:
    a) the public fears it due to accidents such as Chernobyl and TMI (very old reactor designs)

    b) the approval process for new reactor construction has gigantic roadblocks built into it due to public fears. this is why the new reactors being built right now are mostly old and dangerous 1970s-era designs, furthering public fear

    c) the USA has an oppressive and unfair foreign policy regarding reactor construction in other countries.
    funny — the US government doesn’t want anyone to have the ability to refine fissionable materials, other than themselves :)

  • GIBurrito says:

    I’m wondering how many people realize the difference between fusion and fission. I’m willing to bet that most of the fears are coming from thinking of fission any time the word “nuclear” comes into play.

  • greycode says:

    @isama I can’t understand half of what Mr. Hawkings says when I am sober. For all I know, he was on drugs, problem is, I would never know it.

    @–j The problem is that we have made computer usage so easy, and that started with Compuserve as far as I care, that we have taken an elite club, and let anyone in. Personally I am all for it. But when you let everyone in, then expect everyone to come in. Right now the people in are the coke snorkin’, tinfoil hat wearing, hemp clothed, Marty Feldman eyed, stark raving mad, lunatic fringed morons, to be exact, the energy for nothing and your chicks for free group. Also known as the tinfoil brigade.

    @Digital I am against removing caps, as I feel like –j, in that it allows me to ignore whatever they say instantly.

  • D_ says:

    After some thought I’d feel more comfortable with someone experimenting with this next door than I would with someone experimenting with “hydroxy”. Your average Joe isn’t going to be experimenting with fusion, primarily be cause it it doesn’t have an immediate direct application for him. Not to mention the cost, availability of pats and material, along with the knowledge required. Joe an the other hand can see himself using hydroxy in the family vehicles. Materials are readily available inexpensively, and while not exactly Heathkit in scope step by step instructions are to be found.

  • Aleks Clark says:

    I really expected more HaD readers (and general public, really) to know the difference between fusion and fission…lulz

    I’d also expect the hippies to at least realize that equating oil and fission is pretty stupid as well, as you get a lot more energy per pound of fissionable material than you do from oil. e=mc^2 and all that. Of course, some people say the speed of light is changing so maybe we’ll run out faster than I think…

    Shoutout to all my pro-fission homies! Bring on the neighborhood pebble-bed reactors!

    Interesting point about high-efficiency stirling engines, I wonder if they could miniaturize them so I can charge my UPS off them. We get a lot of heat here, but not much direct sunlight. I could probably get a good delta with an in-ground radiator tho. Just need someone to ship me some freon…

    Most Ironic Image Ever: stirling engine powered aircon :D

  • Jimbo says:

    Those who are arguing over waste and stuff of fusion power, I’d like to point you to this excellent BBC Horizon show on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXcyH7QE7rU

    I just watched it last night, and I have to say, I think the energy crisis will end with either nuclear fusion, or, if the technology catces up fast, solar.

  • Anarc says:

    Insolation is roughly 1KW/m^2.

    Enough with the anti-science tinfoil-hatted paranoid drivel already.

  • Paul Daniels says:

    Missed this until now. So a late posting.

    Read up about bussard, and the farnsworth fusor. Would be really interesting. However a Navy guy, forget who proved that it will not be able to generate energy. Even if the grids where infentesimal in size.

    Mind you I would love to know if you could use a plasmid, ie one of the microwave created gasballs to generate enough of a virtual cathode for it to build from there…

  • ThreeM says:

    So, I was reading through here and due to my general liking of HaD and all the misnomers in this thread regarding energy i though I might make a Post to help clear this up.

    First for the guy who cant figure out how to turn off Caps Lock regarding the USNRC.

    http://www.nrc.gov

    The NRC is the premier gold standard for regulatory bodies where nuclear forms of power are concerned in the world. It is the only one that is backed up by force of law. If ANY safety or safety related violation occurs that could in anyway affect the public health, safety, or good then they will shutdown your build, force reactor shutdown, etc etc. Plus american reactor designs are fail-safe and do not have the ability to turn off safe-guards. (Three Mile Island actually is an example of perfect containment of an american designed reactor even when the operators did essentially everything wrong. [funny thing is the indicator that would have told them there was a problem so they could mitigate the issue was blocked by a new OSHA requirement called lock out tag out... the tag being like 4"x10" was big enough that it blocked the indicator] but still perfect containment)
    As for Chernobyl that was a whole other folly. First Russian designs are not necessarily fail-safe plus due to their belief system where human life is an acceptable loss when it comes to progress the reactor operator turned off all of the safety systems in order to conduct an unimportant test that led to the catastrophe. The design is still in use in Russia today.

    As for waste – America only uses one fuel cycle currently which is the low speed interactions found inside of boiling water and pressurized water reactors. The left over fuel rods go through a ‘cooling off’ period then are put into a repository that by NRC requirements must be retrievable.
    Later the high speed interaction reactor designs is done using liquid metal (usually sodium) cooled reactors such as breeder reactors. The only country that currently develops or uses this type of reactor for commercial power is Russia. Current American designs that use this type are the Toshiba 4S – PRISM – and to a lesser degree Hyperion Power Module
    http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/advanced.html
    This is done through a form of recycling when dealing with nuclear materials. Look closely at the PRISM design the plant has an onsite nuclear fuel recycling center. This fulfills the second fuel cycle. Then it must be stored again until a traveling wave reactor can be designed and tested (There is a design featured in i want to say scientific American about 2 years ago funded by Bill Gates but will not be available for use for at least another 75 years due to new technology having to be proven safe).

    Currently there are three new reactor Designs that will compete for near term future power generation to meet the DOE’s goal of 80% smaller carbon foot print by 2050. these reactor designs are termed “Generation III++” reactors that include the B&W mPower, NuScale Power Module, and the Westinghouse AP300 (there is word behind the scenes of this design coming out based on another DOE project called IRIS that Westinghouse helped fund).

    The DOE and similar governing systems internationally are working towards the Gen IV reactor: http://www.ne.doe.gov/geniv/neGenIV1.html
    Currently the only design that fits all of the GenIV reactor requirements and is technically viable with proper funding is the PBMR. However last check this project will not be completed and actually constructed. Not sure what killed it other than it is finding a hard time getting an American company to agree to build one in the US so that the NRC will evaluate it. (the local regulatory body bases their decision on our regulatory body (USNRC) approving the design.)

    The NuScale design can be retrofitted later for Thorium and sealed CV (Containment Vessel) to fit the GEN IV Reactor design criteria. B&W and AP300 can be close but since they still require a containment building and/or are not passively safe (no pumps/active mechanisms for safe shutdown/operation required). Without these features they do not qualify as Gen IV reactors. The Hyperion Power Module, PRISM, and 4S are also considered Gen IV reactors however due to their use of liquid metal cooling and the lack of historical data to test against they will be in development for a long time.

    It’s not public fear from Chernobyl and TMI that holds up nuclear builds in the US it’s the high upfront costs to achieve economy of scale. That’s why smaller modular designs are ideal since they can be built off site and setup modularly. The savings of building this way instead of the old way and the fact that they are orders of magnitude safer to run, offset the pricing enough to achieve the same or lower cost per kilowatt hour as current large reactors.

    Now specific list of energy sources and why they are and are not viable:
    First the big ones
    Fusion: the ITER was the first major project towards a fusion reactor using a Tokomak design. It is very viable however due to budget overruns it is not clear as to whether or not it will ever be completed in the near future (basically suspended indefinitely at the moment). But this will be the proving grounds for creating a regulatory guidance for the development of commercial fusion reactors. Until this is done no regulatory body, especially the NRC, will approve this to be built commercially.
    Other Fusion designs include the Laser initiated fusion systems such as those down in California.
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/28/national-ignition-facility-fusion-energy
    Also there is the Z-Pinch Method that is used in the Z-Machine (this project is my dream job i hope to one day be here) This uses a small coil that you dump a bunch of energy into causing an implosion which then explodes however the trick is that a magnetic field is used to contain the explosion and further compress the system causing a very large energetic fusion reaction. (actually many orders of magnitude greater than originally estimated). The Z-Machine is a Sandia National Labs project: http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/

    A pdf describing the system can be found here
    http://dorland.pp.ph.ic.ac.uk/magpie/research/PWMAY00.pdf

    FYI neat fun filled fact about the Z-Machine is that it is the machine to win as the power source capable of powering a theoretical hyper-drive design. (this is actually real, however until some kinks in the design of the Z-Machine can be worked out there is no point in developing something that wont work w/o it… The problem is that the Z-Machine can only be fired once per day but needs to be able to fire successively over and over again like say once every 10 minutes to supply constant power at high utilization.)

    Next Fission: This is the only viable alternative to destroying the ozone layer. Fission produces zero ozone gas emissions and with a pellet the size of an erasure at the end of a wooden pencil can produce as much power as burning over 1200 lbs (1 Ton) of Coal. So which is better burning 1200 lbs of coal releasing gases that destroy our atmosphere then having to store the ash in a pile outside the plant changing the landscape forever, or a small 1cm long x 0.5cm dia (approx) pellet that to produce energy, produces zero emissions so our atmosphere is in tact, and is stored away until it is safer to recycle the uranium. Also another neat fact is that we using uranium now that has the expended fuel waste however once testing is complete and the regulatory bodies approve it Thorium will be used to fuel these reactors with a small retrofit. Thorium cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons (no proliferation threat), is highly abundant in the world, and produces less dangerous radiation. (better all around)… http://www.thorenergy.no/

    Coal: is bad for the environment in every way and is a dieing area of energy production.

    Solar: first the production of solar panels creates about as many greenhouse gases as it saves so it is essentially break even. They are easily broken and must be kept up, energy output is variable, they are expensive, only really useful in areas with high amounts of sun exposure, and many other issues prevent them from becoming a main form of commercial power, however does create a nice supporting power source. (not to mention there isn’t enough usable surface area in the world to power our current power demands which have dropped but are still increasing)

    Wind: Here is a cool one, although not enough area in the world to use them everywhere, and the wind must consistently be blowing in one direction or another. Plus it takes about 5 years of testing to approve a spot for them to construct the system. Now that said there are some new designs in the works, one was just featured in Scientific America this month, that will make these systems more efficient and may help to bring them in to regular use. basically not enough area to make this viable for powering everyone but it is a good supporting power supply that should be fostered and continued. Basically another supporting power source.

    Geothermal: If you live somewhere with a dormant volcano or a place that has volcanic activity great… but remember every time you drill down into this you risk seismic activity and i have yet to see a study done to see what the ramifications are if you were to pull too much power from a single source area… (using this to generate steam for powering a system will cause the temperature down in the lava tubes slowing the velocity of the liquid rock as it becomes more “coagulated” then solid. This could cause a previously dormant volcano to go active if the flow is changed. think two resistors in parallel and a charge going through them that is greater than one can handle and you remove one… the resister that is left blows… think of this as the volcano). So long as we don’t push our luck by placing high demands on a single source without fully understanding the risks, this is a great way to produce power. I would just be hesitant to using as more than a supporting source until more understanding can be performed.

    Theoretical Power Sources:
    Vacuum energy: this is a form of energy that shows up in spaces where there is a complete vacuum, and also the basis for the source of Hawking’s Radiation at the event horizon of a black hole. basically as a consiquence in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) when a space is voided of everything else (a vacuum) virtual pairs of quantum particles will come in to existence and then destroy themselves. Currently we can only prove that energy is there, however no way to extract it in a usable way. They are only in existence for a very short time as new energy can not be created nor destroyed (conservation of energy) unless this new energy is only in existence for a short enough time to fulfill the requirements of the uncertainty principle. In Hawking’s Radiation what happens is the virtual pair are created at the event horizon and occasionally before they can annihilate one another one of the pairs is sucked into the black hole and the other virtual particle then radiates off into space… as far as i know this can only happen naturally, so applying this in a usable way is still outside of our abilities. But it is a very interesting area of study as it would seem since we can interact with these particle we should be able to harness them somehow.

    as for “DUH!” – stop posting please, thank you.

    Your inability to properly use caps-lock makes your post sound like the rants of a lunatic and the “alternative energy” or “free energy” forms you are posting about have been debunked many times over and are just myths.

    Also, Orgone energy is a theory produced by a crazy person who was a psychologist (psychology and physics are not the same in any respect) he was more talking about something similar to Chi that you find in Asian cultures. So your not even talking about the same type of energy so whether or not it is theoretically viable is irrelevant, because it is talking about more spiritual energy which falls under areas of faith not science.

    As for America being a nuclear dump, every repository is throughly tracked and accounted for because of the fact that it is required by the NRC and because one the requirements is that all nuclear waste MUST BE RETRIEVABLE because the future intent is to recycle the waste for use in other types of reactors. Remember that only about 5-10% of fissile materials are used in their first run… we can still use this so why throw it away.

    The reason we don’t recycle today in the U.S. is that bi-products of recycling uranium is weapons grade plutonium and uranium. (This information was from my boss who previously worked for the NRC as a Regulator)

    There is much more i could post on the subject but i got to get to work sometime. If you are one of those people who need to know why you should believe any of the above, well I Currently work for NuScale Power, Inc. in the Safety Analysis Group as a Code Developer. That said:
    The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of NuScale Power, Inc.

    And Finally don’t be a dope go check out my information for yourself and confirm/disprove it. I don’t respond to trolls so don’t bother, this was just an informational post take it as such or ignore just as easily.

    Thank You,
    ThreeM

  • ZeUs says:

    @ThreeM
    So did HAD offer you a job yet? You wrote an immense post you know that? I think if it would be posted as main article it would be the longest to date :O!

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