Building a Nuclear Reactor
Star in a Bottle | This is not just any reactor but a cold fusion a Farnsworth-Hirsch fuser.
Have you ever built something closely related to the fusion reactor?
I have now built a Nuclear Reactor. A star in a bottle. This is not just any reactor but a cold fusion reactor, a Farnsworth-Hirsch fuser. A Reactor at Home.
Now many people would be thinking; how can I build a reactor at home, this is the story of how I did it and how I did it.
A Tokamak Fusion Reactor ????
Although the geometry of the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusers (what I am building) is not the same as the Tokamak, the approach of inertial electrostatic confinement is still promising for future experiments and very similar to how the Tokamak works.
How the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor is relevant to the Tokamak. Let’s first go over the basics of the Tokamak as the Farnsworth-Hirsch are closely related.
The most common reactor and most advanced is called the Tokamak which looks like a doughnut and inside that doughnut is where the reactants are placed and are heated to millions of Degrease and turn into plasma this is called Magnetic confinement (strong magnetic fields to contain hot plasma). Scientists needed to find a metal that is strong enough to withstand these high temperatures. This metal is Tungsten which is considered the most promising material for plasma-facing components because it has high melting temperature, high thermal conductivity and it is low in swelling. There is more than one method to create nuclear fusion that scientists are working on. The other reactor that they are working on is an inertial confinement reactor where they are compressing a small pellet which contains fusion fuel, using strong lasers.
In the experiment that I have built, I have used high voltage that will be heating plasma with an electric field. This type of reactor is called the Farnsworth-Hirsch fuser which is Hot Fusion. This is the easiest type of reactor to make at home and is the true basis of The Tokamak Nuclear Reactor.
What Happens in the Farnsworth-Hirsch fuser:
NuClEaR FuSiOn!
Nuclear Fusion is when you squeeze 2 atoms together to a point that they fuse. At the point of fusing it creates a huge amount of energy which can be collected and used.
In this process, Nuclear Fusers create sufficiently hot temperatures for fusion to take place, but they are inefficient devices for power generation because the reactor takes more energy to create the hot plasma than what is being collected. This is because most of the ions fall into the cathode instead of colliding with other ions. In simple terms, the plasma hit the side of the reactor and then cools off which means they cannot create fusion as they are not hot enough. This problem prevents fusers from achieving the breakeven point where the amount of energy produced equals the energy input. Other factors that come into play which are still being tested are the type of fuel, the plasma density and the amount of magnets that are being used. These factors are still being tested to see if they help or don’t help if they are changed to try and reach the break-even point.
There is a way that we can prevent the plasma from falling into the cathode: To help keep the plasma at high temperatures there are many magnets coiled around the reactor to keep the plasma central inside of the doughnut-shaped reactor, there is 0 atmosphere in the reactor as the air is vacuumed out, this makes it easier for the plasma to float in the centre. The magnets are carefully put around the doughnut to keep the plasma in the centre, without this the plasma will go out of control hitting the sides causing the plasma to cool down and the fusion can not take place. So why is the Tokamak not running? Well, the magnets are just not strong enough to keep all the plasma from hitting the sides of the reactor, the magnets do work but also take huge amounts of electricity to run which makes it more difficult to reach the breakeven point. If you do add more magnets this will course a problem with the structure because of the weight. The magnets are already currently more than 1m thick wrapping around and around the reactor.
PLASMA!
Plasma — What is this? Let me explain: We know about solids, liquids, and gases which are the 3 states of matter, who would have guessed that you could get a fourth one called plasma. When water changes to gas this is a change of state. When gas is heated up to high temperatures it changes state to plasma. Like gasses, plasmas have no fixed shape or volume and are less dense than solids or liquids. Solids Liquids and gases all are atoms placed together whereas plasma is atoms broken up into their elements of the atoms. This is the only way you can get atoms to join is by breaking them up. When they join this is when they create the energy.
Unlike the Tokamak the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fuser uses strong electric fields to contain the fusion plasma, instead of using magnetic fields. This is also similar to the Tokamak because it contains plasma using a field which only the Tokamak reactor does whether it be using magnets or electricity.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch fuser uses inertial electrostatic confinement to create the plasm. Like the Tokamak the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fuser also has a vacuum chamber where the plasma is kept. If you add an electric field to a plasma, the positively-charged ions in the plasma will be attracted by the electric field, and the ions will all group together around the region with the lowest electrical potential. By arranging wires into a spherical shape and then applying a high electric charge in the vacuum chamber, the Farnsworth fuser attracts the ions into the centre of the sphere. If the voltage is high enough, the electrical attraction will cause the ions to race through the centre of the sphere at high speed; the ions then collide with other ions also moving through the hollow, inducing nuclear fusion.
The FUEL?
What fuel do I use? The Farnsworth-Hirsch Fuser does not use any fuel. When the reaction takes place it is only using the small amounts of air molecules that are left in the chamber after the vacuum pump has taken most of the air out. If we did not have a vacuum then the irons would not be drawn to the centre as they would just move around each other and will not be drawn to the centre of the spherical shape. The chamber of the fuser is also vacuumed to help the atoms move more freely and not be affected by gravitational force. Vacuum pumping is required before starting the fusion reaction to eliminate all sources of organic molecules that would otherwise be broken up in the hot plasma. If we were to add fuel it would take things to a new level of complication and cost. We will have to have a metal box around it because of radiation and it will also be very costly to get the injectors and try to get the correct things to stop radiation, so that is why we just stuck to the air molecules left inside.
So why don’t we use the Farnsworth-Hirsch fuser to create energy? The home-built fusers can’t be used as power sources because of the low number of fusion reactions. If we were to add a fuel we will get so many more reactions and then we have to capture the heat from these reactions. My device just shows us what happens and is not expected to have the heat taken to create electricity. This is such a simple devise but is so closely related to the tokamak as I have shown, all that you need is deuterium or tritium and a system to collect the energy and you will have your own fusion reactor in your house.
The Tokamak uses fuel for Fusion. The fuel is Deuterium and Tritium to make fusion happen.
Deuterium and Tritium are heated to millions of degrease. In this transformation, the negatively charged electrons are separated from positively charged atomic nuclei. Fusion is prevented under normal situations as strong repulsive electrostatic forces between the positively charged nuclei do not allow them to collide to enable fusion to happen. Although, if the conditions are right, the electrostatic forces can be overcome and enable nuclei to get close enough together then the attractive nuclei force will take over, and allow the nuclei to fuse. The correct conditions for this to happen are either high gravitational forces which happen on the sun and are not possible to do on Earth, or it must be heated to ±400–500 million degrees Kelvin which with new technology we can do this.
By increasing the temperature it causes the fuel which is Deuterium and Tritium atoms to increase the speed of movement of the ions. They start moving so quickly at such high temperatures that the nuclei fuse and energy is released.
Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. In the simple hydrogen molecule, there is one proton, one electron, and no neutrons. Protons, electrons, and neutrons are the elementary particles that make up the atom. Deuterium, on the other hand, is composed of one proton, one electron, and one neutron. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, the lightest element. Tritium has one proton and two neutrons. It is heavier than ordinary hydrogen or its isotope deuterium. They are both found in salt water and Lithium.
So what does this ↑ mean:
Deuterium and Lithium are isotopes of Hydrogen. If you combine them you get Hydrogen. When hydrogen nuclei fuse to produce helium and give off energy, the remaining potential energy is lower than it was when they were separate. Add another proton (so combine it again), and two or three neutrons, and you get lithium, so it does not stop there more energy emitted. This process continues as you add protons and neutrons until you reach iron.
Why do we use Deuterium and Lithium? Deuterium and Lithium have the lowest electric charge out of all atoms. When an atom has an electric charge they repel each other and so this makes it more difficult for the atoms to fuse, so having the 2 atoms with the lowest electric charge makes the process easier.
While the sun’s massive gravitational force naturally makes fusion, without that force a higher temperature is needed for the reaction to take place. On earth, we need temperatures exceeding ±400–500 million degrees Kelvin and intense pressure to make deuterium and tritium fuse, and sufficient confinement to hold the plasma and maintain the fusion reaction long enough for a net power gain. Net power gain is when the ratio of the fusion power produced needs to be higher than the power used to heat the plasma. If the net power gain does not happen then there is no reason in doing it.
The breakeven point has not been exceeded before but the longest time that plasma has been held in a fusion reactor is for the most of 17 minutes, 36 seconds but they cannot maintain this for longer which will be necessary for commercial power generation.
What happens in the experiment:
This experiment was lots of fun. It was not complicated to make, you just needed the parts which you could get off the internet.
It took me 5 months to plan, order and make this reactor. Like most experiments, it did not go according to plan in the first attempt to turn it on. It is a science investigation so it also allowed us to try and figure out how we can create the reaction if it is not working and how to create better, brighter and more reactions when it does work. It felt like I was actually working with the future of electricity in a lab (my garage). This was an amazing experience and just made me want to go even deeper into it.
This is what happened:
When we turned it on for the first time it did not go according to plan, Instead of this:
We got nothing, there was a flash of light going from the spherical wire shape to the bottom of the reactor. The reaction would strike the bottom of the chamber and cause the device to trip because of the overload of electricity.
So our scientist headset stepped in:
After looking at it and assessing the problem we concluded that the insulator inside the vacuum chamber might not be big enough, using 10 000V of electricity we need quite big insulators to prevent this, so we changed it. It still did not work. Then we looked at it the device closely and thought that there might have been metal filings on the outside of the insulator which causes the electricity to run down the insulator going from metal filing to metal filing, so we used a magnet to remove the filings and alcohol to clean the insulator and remove any other particles that might have been on it. It still did not work. When testing it out we realised that there was an air leak. Like I said above if there is too much air in the chamber then there won’t be a reaction and so that was what was happening so we found the hole and stopped the problem.
Then it worked. Yay!
We fixed all of these problems and then there was the product and the outcome that we were looking for.
What Parts did I use in this amazing Experiment?
What did I experience in the experiment:
This was an amazing experiment to learn first-hand what happens within a fusion tokamak rector just on a different scale. There best way to learn from the steps you take and this little device has inspired me to set huge high goals. This goal is to build the first Tokamak in South Africa which will provide the whole of South Africa with electricity.
This experiment showed me how much electricity is needed to do this experiment which shows how much the Tokamak will create and why it is so hard to get a net gain. It also was awesome to see how it needs a vacuum and how much better it works with a vacuum and with the different vacuums.
It also made me look deeper into things that I did not understand, which were happening informant of me and one of those things was why the reaction colour was purple in colour then I looked at what colour the colour inside of the Tokamak was, they were the same colour. This is the colour because of the high temperatures inside of the tokamak.
Check out my video:
Closing Off:
Why does this topic catch my eye and make me want to learn so much about it? Does it catch your eye? I am so interested in this topic because this could be the turning point to save the earth. At the rate we are travelling, with regards to pollution, we will all be dead by 2100s and that is potentially in my lifetime, scientists are predicting that we will live until 150 years of age. I am also incredibly sorry to all those creatures out there who also have thoughts and emotions that have to suffer from human pollution. We need to act fast, we need to do something about our pollution and this is a perfect opportunity to try and learn about ideas to try and help the earth. Something that I keep on thinking in the back of my head is, am I going to die a natural death or will it be something that we can prevent from happening?
“Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented. If we don’t kill (stop) pollution, it will kill us.”
Check out my Website and some more sources that are related to the Farnsworth-Hirsch fuser.
Thank you for reading!
