Press

6 07 2010

Wow. Last wednesday I woke up to a new world when the BBC and Gizmodo articles dropped.

Read all about it:

The definitive piece is by Quinn Norton – No Sleep ‘Til Fusion. This article is amazing – heartfelt and accurate. Quinn was there the night of the definitive fusion run. She even helped run the reactor. It was a night on the cusp. So exciting.

The same day Matthew Danzico from the BBC published Extreme DIY: Building a homemade nuclear reactor in NYC. This article took the story viral… it’s all over now!

CNN did a web writeup: Man builds web pages by day and nuclear fusion reactors by night.

CNN TV: Nuclear fusion the ‘Holy Grail’ of green energy?

CNN live interview.

My friend Olivia Koski was on this story from the start: Amateur Fusioneer Dreams of Clean Energy.

Discovery News: HOMEMADE NUCLEAR REACTOR BUILT IN NYC.

Gawker wins best of snark: The Gucci Employee Who Built a Nuclear Reactor in Brooklyn. “Artisanal nuclear fusion”. Pretty funny comments too.

Best comical artwork goes to racked.com: Gucci Web Developer Building a Nuclear Reactor in Brooklyn.

Most ridiculous headline goes to NYPOST: New Yorker found with nuclear reactor in Brooklyn warehouse. NYPOST also wins worst gross factual error: They state that I am building a fission reactor, which is incorrect… it’s fusion.

Worst comments go to Fox News: Gucci Designer Builds Nuclear Reactor in Brooklyn Warehouse.

We were covered by AOL, Yahoo! News, AP, France 5, Inside Edition, Huffington Post, Reddit, Digg, Hacker News, Slashdot, and a bazillion other outlets. I had reporters camping out at old apartments, calling my relatives, showing up at the lab. We got a visit from the NYFD and NYPD. Absolutely fucking nutz. The world went bonkers for this story.

Just as I planned…. mwahahahahaha!

Now everybody forget all about this so I can get back to work!  ;)


Comments : 9 Comments »

Categories : FUCK YEA!, Press

QUADRUPLE BUBBLE!!!!

6 06 2010

All photos.

With the vacuum pump working again, I assembled the fusor and attempted a fusion run last night. It was a day frought with challenges, but in the end the bubble meter saw 4 bubbles in 2 hours and 40 minutes:

This shows beyond a doubt that we have fused the atom. During previous attempts we only produced a single bubble… which suggests fusion, but does not rule out a cosmic ray.

Science Journalist Quinn Norton was at the lab writing a story for Gizmodo. She witnessed and documented the fusion run:

Previously we were having problems with transient voltages spikes or EMFs crashing the data acquisition (DAQ) card. Today was a big test for the new transient voltage suppression system . It FAILED big time. But I learned something in the process.

I began by intentionally creating an unstable plasma to test the transient voltage system.  This crashed the DAQ every time.

Next I disconnected all wires to the DAQ to determine if the interference is coming through the wires or the air:

Without computer control I needed some way to manually adjust  the MFC. I hacked together a quick voltage divider using a 2KΩ potentiometer and a 9V battery:

This proved to work very well.

To control the high voltage from a distance I used the emergency stop button:

This also worked very well. At this point the reactor is completely under manual control. No computer necessary. Which will turn out to be a good thing.

So now we can test the DAQ with no physical connection to the reactor.

Surprisingly, I was able to crash the DAQ every time, even with no wires connected to it!

Quinn noticed the USB hub flickering during the plasma sparks and suggested it may be the failure point. I removed it, and indeed the system seemed less vulnerable to crashing:

At this point the DAQ seems to remain running in the face of sparking plasmas. Good.

Next I tried connecting one channel to the DAQ… a digital output channel to turn the high voltage on and off. I created a duty cycle function in labview to make it easy to bake out the chamber without melting the fusor grid. This is what it looks like running:

Next I bake out the chamber for an hour using a deuterium atmosphere @ 10 mtorr. The high voltage power supply is set to it’s maximum: 30Kv @ 10mA and the duty cycle is set to 75% @ ~ 0.09 hertz.

At first the computer controlled bake out was running smoothly. About 15 minutes in I get a computer crash. Restart. It runs for about 7 minutes and crashes. Try again. 5 minutes and it crashes. The crashes in increase frequency until I am getting nowhere.

At the point I switch the system over to full manual control and begin the metered fusion run. A fresh bubble detector was unboxed and activated.

(so fresh and so clean)

For the main fusion trial the deuterium atmosphere was at 10 mtorr, high voltage set to it’s maximum: 30Kv @ 10mA. The procedure was to run the system at full power until the plamsa became unstable and started sparking. This instability seems to correspond to the grid becoming red hot, so the plasma instability may be due to thermionic emission.

The bubble detector was activated for 2 hours and 40 minutes. The plasma was running for some unknown fraction of that time. 4 bubbles were detected.

Challenges remain for controlling this wily beast with a computer.


Comments : 16 Comments »

Categories : FUCK YEA!, Fusor, Neutron Detection, Press

FIRST FUSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

15 11 2009

I’ve been doing trials on the fusor all night. Finally GOT IT. WE HAVE FIRST FUSION. LOOK AT THIS BUBBLE:

I had the Glassman power supply  maxed out, and the deuterium pressure at ~9 millitorr. The plasma was borderline unstable due to low pressure. The focus of the plasma was maximal. There was a sharp uptick in activity from the geiger counter. The limiting factor was the grid kept heating up and glowing red. I had to cool it off to repeat each trial.

IMG_4490IMG_4494IMG_4495
IMG_4493

This is how it makes me feel:

Bokeh_Example


Comments : 18 Comments »

Categories : FIRST FUSION!, FUCK YEA!, Fusor, x-rays

FIRST PLASMA

29 08 2009

YES! Check this business:

IMG_4015

Here it is with the color levels adjusted so you can see more:

IMG_4013

This is really really exciting.

First thing I learned is you need some gas in that chamber to start a plasma. I started at pressures around  1 e-6 torr and got nothing. What you really need is pressures above 1 e-3 torr. My gauge doesn’t work in this range, so I was flying blind.

I had to install a valve to leak air into the chamber to keep the pressure where I needed it:

IMG_4018

Just playing with this device for 10 minutes gave me more of an intuition for plasma than most of the reading I’ve done on the topic.

I’m now one small step away from first fusion. FUCK YEA.


Comments : 6 Comments »

Categories : FUCK YEA!, Fusor, Plasma

Day One

3 06 2009

What a day.

First off, we have achieved FIRST VACUUM. Connected the small chamber to the pump. So far I’ve got it down to 3e-7 torr and dropping steadily, which gives us a green light for the Fusor:

small_chamber_setup

We had an initial false start which was caused by poor connection on the last conflat to be connected. The last flange is always the hardest because there is more weight on the system. The setup is pretty precarious, and only serves to check first vacuum.

Secondly, Deez successfully fabricated the fusor core:fusor_core

Here is a time-lapse of day one:


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : FUCK YEA!, Fabrication, Fusor, Team, Vacuum

Going all the way

24 02 2009

Yesterday, I told my boss at the day job that I’m going fulltime on prometheus fusion perfection starting May 2009. 

Fuck the recession. I’m doing this. 

Man that feels good.


Comments : 2 Comments »

Categories : FUCK YEA!

Fire the Laser!

13 02 2009

Today we will fire the danger laser! I have the plumbing for the water cooling working. For this we take a field trip to my friend Stuart’s shop. He has 240V mains and a variable power supply. Here are the lasers:

img_3205

The labels are a bit ambiguous for the electrical connection. Is the chassis the anode, and both leads on the top the cathode? I think this must be the case. Poking around with an electrical multimeter, I find there is almost no resistance between the two terminals on top. But when you test between the either of the terminals and the chassis you get a different resistance depending on the direction of the test, which is from the diode’s electrical bias.

img_3206

 

We will be testing these current limiting power supplies (originally from NASA)

img_3207

Here is the full setup.

img_3224

Bucket of distilled water for the heat exchanger (we must have run this at too high a voltage, you can see it melted a little):img_3234

And the verdict? Success! Here is a video of the setup, and a video of the trial run.img_3236


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : FUCK YEA!, Laser

Success

9 11 2008

Now we have the completed polywell shape, with connectors:

polywell_with_connectors

Now we can export to an STL file, and produce our first physical object (in plastic to begin with).


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Categories : CAD, FUCK YEA!, polywell

First Success

21 10 2008

Check this out. A truncated dodecahedral Polywell rendered in CAD.

I created this using ruby to pass draw instructions to mged (the main command line tool for BRL-CAD):

require 'matrix'
phi = (1+Math.sqrt(5))/2
icosahedron = Matrix[
[0, +1, +phi],
[0, +1, -phi],
[0, -1, +phi],
[0, -1, -phi],
[+1, +phi, 0],
[+1, -phi, 0],
[-1, +phi, 0],
[-1, -phi, 0],
[+phi, 0, +1],
[+phi, 0, -1],
[-phi, 0, +1],
[-phi, 0, -1]
]

icosahedron.row_vectors().each_with_index do |v,index|
`/usr/brlcad/bin/mged -f -c test3.g 'in torus#{index}.s tor #{v[0]} #{v[1]} #{v[2]} #{v[0]} #{v[1]} #{v[2]} 1.0 0.125'`
end

This basically iterates through the vertices of the icosahedron, and draws a torus normal to the origin. Now we are tantalizingly close to having a CAD file we can render in metal.


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Categories : CAD, FUCK YEA!, Math, geometry, polywell