TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home

[YankeyMCC]

(snip)
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.
(snip)

(snip)
Then, deuterium gas -- a form of hydrogen -- is injected into the vacuum. About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine. As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon -- ta da -- nuclear fusion.
(snip)

(snip)
Now, in a small room in the basement, Thiago has set up a science lab -- where bottles marked "potassium hydroxide" and "methanol" sit on shelves and a worn, old book, titled "The Atomic Fingerprint: Neutron Activation Analysis" piled among others in the empty sink.

Thiago's mom, Natalice Olson, initially was leery of the project, even though the only real danger from the fusion machine is the high voltage and small amount of X-rays emitted through a glass window in the vacuum chamber -- through which Olson videotapes the fusion in action..
(snip)


http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061119/NEWS03/611190639

As someone with a degree in Electrical Engineering I should probably understand this better but..whoa this seems a little more risky as a basement experiment than is implied here. But maybe I'm just being a little silly due to ignorance of details.

[drm604]

1. A number of amateurs have built these things.

They're called fusors. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

They do not produce a net energy gain or even break-even, but apparently they have commercial value as a neutron source.

[NNadir]

2. Wow that's cool.

It's better than a tiny piece of Californium, for which you need a license.

[Canuckistanian]

3. (sniff, sniff) I smell Disney movie.....

Apparently, he's not the only one to have done it. 18 others have also achieved fusion.

Remember, this is not sustained fusion like they're trying on Tokamaks. Fusion is not hard to do (relatively speaking), just hard to maintain.