Home made nuclear fusion reactor in his basement

[Anti Federalist]

Too bad, he might have gotten somewhere with this.

Not any more though. I suspect by the end of this week, swarms of tax feeders and "regulators" will swoop down, shut the whole thing down and probably arrest him for making "terrorist materials" or some such nonsense.



Gucci web designer Mark Suppes builds homemade nuclear reactor in Brooklyn warehouse

BY Rich Schapiro
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, June 23rd 2010, 3:53 PM
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/06/23/2010-06-23_gucci_web_designer_mark_suppes_builds_homemade_ nuclear_reactor_in_brooklyn_wareh.html
Suppes began constructing his device two years ago, using $35,000 worth of parts he purchased on eBay. He bought an additional $4,000 worth of parts with money he raised on a Web site that connects investors to inventors.

The reactor is designed to forcibly join atoms, releasing energy.

It requires no nuclear material and poses no threat to neighbors, Suppes says.

But some Brooklynites told the BBC they'd prefer Suppes to take his device elsewhere.

"A homemade nuclear fusion reactor being built in Brooklyn? I would have thought there would be some sort of rules and laws about messing around with nuclear fusion in your apartment," Stephen Davis said.

"I'm not sure I'd like that living right next to me."

[Austrian Econ Disciple]

Oh man this is awesome, but sadly I need more than an article for proof. Leave it to New Yorkers to be so goddamn dimwitted with their comments. Yeah, ok, you can have your wind turbines which chop up your precious birds, I'll take the nearly unlimited potential energy source -- Nuclear Fusion. (Though I'm sure the writer meant Fission...)

[Sentient Void]

hrmmmm... interesting... did he do it for novelty reasons or actually plans on using it for power?

[Dr.3D]

Since it requires no nuclear material, I doubt anybody will be able to stop him in his endeavors. Then again, politicians can always come up with something to condemn it.

[Cowlesy]

whaaaaaaaaat?

Awesome if this is true.

[CaseyJones]

http://www.lenr-canr.org/

[Live_Free_Or_Die]

BBC interview here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10385853.stm

[Vessol]

Since it requires no nuclear material, I doubt anybody will be able to stop him in his endeavors. Then again, politicians can always come up with something to condemn it.

It's time to pre-emptive invade New York!

[chadhb]

Oh shit if this is green energy, we must kill him, we only want to adopt the policies to tax you to death, not really implament them.

[noxagol]

Fusion is done with hydrogen, fission is done with uranium, plutonium, etc.

Fusion is a hell of a lot more potent than fission, and so far there is only one fusion plant we can utilize, and it is 1 AU away from us.

[Vessol]

Oh shit if this is green energy, we must kill him, we only want to adopt the policies to tax you to death, not really implament them.

Can't have people living off the grid now, can we?

[erowe1]

The article doesn't say the thing actually works. I assume it doesn't (I mean it works to do something, such as make lights and noises, but not nuclear fusion). But if I'm right about that, then it's not newsworthy. And if I'm wrong, then it's a pretty important detail to leave out of the story.

[idirtify]

The article doesn't say the thing actually works. I assume it doesn't (I mean it works to do something, such as make lights and noises, but not nuclear fusion). But if I'm right about that, then it's not newsworthy. And if I'm wrong, then it's a pretty important detail to leave out of the story.

Nor did I see anything about it “working” (making more energy than it consumes). So that leaves the question: Why is this news? There has got to be thousands of people working on this same thing. The only possible thing newsworthy about fusion would be if someone made it WORK.

[fatjohn]

It also proves how stupid it is to try and control a nation of 150 million people from developping such a technology, when 1 person can do it with 35000 bucks

[jmdrake]

http://www.lenr-canr.org/

Yep. Cold fusion is real. Also Bill Gates and Toshiba are working on a fission reactor based on depleted uranium. (So much for the theory that DU is safe to use as weapons.)

[Anti Federalist]

Nor did I see anything about it “working” (making more energy than it consumes). So that leaves the question: Why is this news? There has got to be thousands of people working on this same thing. The only possible thing newsworthy about fusion would be if someone made it WORK.

It may not work.

My point is more than likely we'll probably never know, now.

The point of running the story is to do just what is going to happen: shut this guy down.

[jmdrake]

It may not work.

My point is more than likely we'll probably never know, now.

The point of running the story is to do just what is going to happen: shut this guy down.

Nah. They can't shut him done just based on some random comments by some stupid neighbors reacting to a story. And there are cold fusion experimenters doing work around the world. And you can set one up for much cheaper than this. Getting more energy out than in isn't the hard part. Effectively harnessing it is.

http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/html/cfrdatas.htm

[Danke]

I already got one.

[Icymudpuppy]

When it overloaded, did the mechanical arms that he used to control it take over his brain?

Is he now keeping it in a warehouse near the east river and robbing banks to pay for its development?

Is he being hounded in his efforts by a masked vigilante?

These questions need answers.

[Elwar]

It's already been done by a boy in his garage...

http://www.wesjones.com/silverstein1.htm

As Auito's wife and troop treasurer, Barbara, recalls: "The typical kid [working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor's office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor."

...
Armed with information from his friends in government and industry, David typed up a list of sources for fourteen radioactive isotopes..Americium-241, he learned from the Boy Scout atomic-energy booklet, could be found in smoke detectors; radium-226, in antique luminous dial clocks; uranium-238 and minute quantities of uranium-235, in a black ore called pitchblende; and thorium-232, in Coleman-style gas lanterns.
...
He scoured hundreds of miles of upper Michigan in his Pontiac looking for "hot rocks" with his Geiger counter, but all he could find was a quarter trunkload of pitchblende on the shores of Lake Huron. Deciding to pursue a more bureaucratic approach, he wrote to a Czechoslovakian firm that sells uranium to commercial and university buyers, whose name was provided, he told me, by the NRC. Claiming to be a professor buying materials for a nuclear-research laboratory, he obtained a few samples of a black ore--either pitchblende or uranium dioxide, both of which contain small amounts of uranium-235 and uranium-238.
...
David knew from his merit-badge pamphlet that the "mantle" used in commercial gas lanterns--the part that looks like a doll's stocking and conducts the flame--is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. He bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of ash.
...
David purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and extracted the element by cutting the batteries in half with a pair of wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium dioxide together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. Eureka! David's method purified thorium to at least 9,000 times the level found in nature and 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.
...
Consulting his list of commercially available radioactive sources, he discovered that tritium, a radioactive material used to boost the power of nuclear weapons, is found in glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights, which David promptly bought from sporting-goods stores and mail-order catalogues.
...
David purchased a set of cobalt drill bits at a local hardware store and inserted them between the thorium and uranium cubes. But the cobalt wasn't sufficient. When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors down from his mom's house, David decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets in a shoebox that he hid in his mother's house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac 6000.

At 2:40 A.M. on August 31, 1994, the Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been spotted in a residential neighborhood, apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was waiting to meet a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car. When they opened the trunk they discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape for good measure. The trunk also contained over fifty foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, lantern mantles, mercury switches, a clock face, ores, fireworks, vacuum tubes, and assorted chemicals and acids. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David warned them was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.
...
David told Minnaar that he had been trying to make thorium in a form he could use to produce energy and that he hoped "his successes would help him earn his Eagle Scout status."

[Dr.3D]

I already got one.

YouTube - monty python and the holy grail french knight (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa0cz2V_VqU)

[Bruno]

It's already been done by a boy in his garage...

http://www.wesjones.com/silverstein1.htm

As Auito's wife and troop treasurer, Barbara, recalls: "The typical kid [working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor's office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor."

...
Armed with information from his friends in government and industry, David typed up a list of sources for fourteen radioactive isotopes..Americium-241, he learned from the Boy Scout atomic-energy booklet, could be found in smoke detectors; radium-226, in antique luminous dial clocks; uranium-238 and minute quantities of uranium-235, in a black ore called pitchblende; and thorium-232, in Coleman-style gas lanterns.
...
He scoured hundreds of miles of upper Michigan in his Pontiac looking for "hot rocks" with his Geiger counter, but all he could find was a quarter trunkload of pitchblende on the shores of Lake Huron. Deciding to pursue a more bureaucratic approach, he wrote to a Czechoslovakian firm that sells uranium to commercial and university buyers, whose name was provided, he told me, by the NRC. Claiming to be a professor buying materials for a nuclear-research laboratory, he obtained a few samples of a black ore--either pitchblende or uranium dioxide, both of which contain small amounts of uranium-235 and uranium-238.
...
David knew from his merit-badge pamphlet that the "mantle" used in commercial gas lanterns--the part that looks like a doll's stocking and conducts the flame--is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. He bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of ash.
...
David purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and extracted the element by cutting the batteries in half with a pair of wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium dioxide together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. Eureka! David's method purified thorium to at least 9,000 times the level found in nature and 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.
...
Consulting his list of commercially available radioactive sources, he discovered that tritium, a radioactive material used to boost the power of nuclear weapons, is found in glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights, which David promptly bought from sporting-goods stores and mail-order catalogues.
...
David purchased a set of cobalt drill bits at a local hardware store and inserted them between the thorium and uranium cubes. But the cobalt wasn't sufficient. When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors down from his mom's house, David decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets in a shoebox that he hid in his mother's house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac 6000.

At 2:40 A.M. on August 31, 1994, the Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been spotted in a residential neighborhood, apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was waiting to meet a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car. When they opened the trunk they discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape for good measure. The trunk also contained over fifty foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, lantern mantles, mercury switches, a clock face, ores, fireworks, vacuum tubes, and assorted chemicals and acids. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David warned them was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.
...
David told Minnaar that he had been trying to make thorium in a form he could use to produce energy and that he hoped "his successes would help him earn his Eagle Scout status."

holy smokes! That's quite a story. I'll have to read the rest

[Live_Free_Or_Die]

holy smokes! That's quite a story. I'll have to read the rest

Most of the ending sucks:



David went into a serious depression after the federal authorities shut down his laboratory. Years of painstaking work had been thrown in the garbage or buried beneath the sands of Utah. Students at Chippewa Valley had taken to calling him "Radioactive Boy," and when his girlfriend, Heather, sent David Valentine's balloons at his high school, they were seized by the principal, who apparently feared they had been inflated with chemical gases David needed to continue his experiments. In a final indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit-badge activities had endangered the community.

In the fall of 1995, Ken and Kathy demanded that David enroll in Macomb Community College. He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his classes and spent much of the day in bed or driving in circles around their block. Finally, Ken and Kathy gave him an ultimatum: Join the armed forces or move out of the house. They called the local recruiting office, which sent a representative to their house or called nearly every day until David finally gave in. After completing boot camp last year, he was stationed on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.

Alas, David's duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, David stays up studying topics that interest him--currently steroids, melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life.

[Bruno]

Most of the ending sucks:

yeah, i was reading off and on throughout the day. Hopefully he didn't expose himself (or his neighbors) to too much radiation. :(