If a high school student can do it, why can't we? Mad Scientist Fechter, building a fusion reactor to power our server should be right up your alley :-)
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061119/NEWS03/611190639
...to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist."
In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion -- when atoms are combined to create energy -- is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," he said.
In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion. So, how does he do it?...
Too bad it still requires more energy than it extracts. Fix Fechter, Fix!
I've looked at the Farnsworth Fusor before. The x-radiation that thing would create sort of scares me. Lots of lead would be the answer. Hey, wait a minute, we're trying to get rid of the lead (I guess I have enough old dead batteries lying around my garage to build a nice shield).
There's a few other promising "Mr. Fusion" ideas out there. One is based upon a spark gap under water that supposedly could create steam to drive a turbine. I actually did some testing on that. Kinda cool but dangerous at the same time. No real promising results in my garage, but lots of improvements in the power supply were needed.
Dang pesky day job has me busy for now. I need to hit the lottery.
I need to hit the lottery.
Or find a big risk-taking VC :-)
Thank you for the info btw. There's so many new technologies designed to create electricity coming on line, I find this is a very exciting time.
--xyster
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Hey, I resemble that comment.
Hey I built a fusor when I was in high school ... well almost. Power supply was a 12kv neon sign transformer, but I dared to push the input voltage higher, and ended up with over 14kv and more current than my old analog ammeter could read. My poorly budgeted school didn't have a vacuum pump strong enough to make it work, so we tried freezing the air in liquid nitrogen. This actually worked out well, and the reactor soon filled with lots of bright, streaming plasma. But we still couldn't lower the pressure enough to create a poissor pattern. And then a chemistry teacher barged in and pulled the plug, yelling at us about the dangerous levels of x-rays lol (I didn't want to spend money on shielding unless it actually started working). I think we spent the rest of the day hooking up the power supply to various items from someone's backpack/lunch, to see which ones would explode after suffering massive dielectric breakdown. Spent about $12 total on the project :)