DailyDirt: Making Fusion Reactors For Fun...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Mar 13th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Amateur fusion isn't quite a new fad. Online resources have been available since the early 2000s, and plenty of people have learned about or built a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor for themselves. Philo T. Farnsworth (perhaps more famous for inventing TV) designed equipment that could fusion atoms together. Before anyone gets too excited, though, none of these designs look like they could ever produce any excess energy. It would be nice if fusion generators actually did exist, but we're probably not going to see any in the near future. In the meantime, playing with fusion reactors might inspire a really clever design, so here are a few links on DIY fusion.

Making your own fusion reactor is a reasonable project for someone with a lot of spare time and a few thousand bucks to buy various obscure supplies. There's at least one open source group that's been working on various fusor improvements for over a decade. [url]
Building a nuclear fusion reactor as a 13yo kid must be some kind of a new world record. However, other teenagers have done it (e.g. Taylor Wilson), so aspiring 9 year olds have a science project to work on now. [url]
Doug Coulter runs an online DIY engineering forum, and he's built his own nuclear fusion reactor in his free time. He might be a crackpot, but if he can actually create an open source fusion generator, the whole world would certainly change very quickly. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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Filed Under: diy, doug coulter, energy, farnsworth-hirsch fusor, fusion, philo farnsworth, taylor wilson

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Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 13 Mar 2014 @ 5:09pm

I Didn�t Believe It Myself, But...
...it turns out a Farnsworth Fusor is an actual real thing you can build at home, without a military-level budget. Heating a few ions to temperatures of millions of degrees is not that hard to do, it just requires an electrical potential of a few thousand volts, which any hobbyist can manage.

However, the current feeling is that such a device will never get close to giving back as much energy as you have to put into it...
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- John Fenderson (profile), 14 Mar 2014 @ 8:48am
  
  Re:
  "the current feeling"
  
  Very punny.
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Anonymous Cory, 14 Mar 2014 @ 7:44am

I believe you mean fission. Viable nuclear fusion is still in the works.
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- Andrew Norton (profile), 14 Mar 2014 @ 10:42am
  
  Re:
  No, Fission.
  
  It's still energy-negative, but it's fissin.
  
  I've played around a little with the current 'pocket generatoin' (a Farnsworth fusor), and while the 13yo is the youngest one now, that one was built on a design a friend (Chad ramey) made when he was 17 from about $5k in recycled gear, and which is the smallest design available at present.
  
  Here's some pics from 6 months ago http://www.flickr.com/photos/ktetch/11918718676/
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottmjones/11780364796 /
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbgIQ8X3uc
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