How to build a fusion

reactor in 6 steps! (With diagrams)

By kit
Requirements:
 A vacuum chamber, preferably in a spherical shape
 A roughing vacuum pump capable of reaching at least 75 microns vacuum
 A secondary high vacuum pump, either turbo pump or oil diffusion pump
 A high voltage supply preferably capable of at least 40Kv 10ma – must be negative polarity
 A high voltage divider probe for use with a digital multimeter
 A thermocouple or barutron (of appropriate scale) vacuum gauge
 A neuron radiation detector, either a portable He-3 or BF3 tube with counting instrumentation or a bubble dosimeter
 A Geiger counter, preferably in scintillator size for x-ray detection and safety
 Deuterium gas (can be purchased as a gas or extracted from D20 through electrolysis – it is much easier and more effective to use
compressed gas
 A large ballast resistor in the range of 50 – 100k and at least a foot long
 A camera and TV display for viewing the inside of the reactor
 Lead to shield the camera viewpoint
 General engineering tools, a machine shop if at all possible (although 90% of mine was built with a Dremel and a cordless drill, the only
thing you really cant build without a shop is scratch building the vacuum chamber)
Step 1 – Assemble vacuum chamber
 A quality high vacuum chamber is required for the fusor to operate, sometimes an appropriate chamber can be found
on eBay, but generally, it is best to make one. Parts can be scavenged or borrowed, or purchased anew for £500+
 Get two stainless steel hemispheres, purchase two corresponding conflat-flanges (8” flanges in my case), bore out
holes for accessory flanges, and then TIG weld it all together. Flanges are typically either of the KF or the conflat
style. Conflat can be seen in the image --
as the flanges with bolts, and KF (quick flange) are seen as those with only clamps holding an O-ring on the
mating surface. Only weld on the inside, never on the outside, trust me (since virtual leaks can be formed is both inside
and outside are welded). If you’ve never TIG before, it would be wise to have someone with experience do it as the welds
must be flawless with no pin-sized holes or porous areas to hold a vacuum.
After machining, thoroughly clean the chamber and avoid getting fingerprints in it since these will outgas, which means
at vacuum pressure molecules in the oil of fingerprints or machining oil will become vapour and make it hard to maintain
plasma stability or reach a good ultimate vacuum level.

Don’t use this

Step 2 – prepare the high vacuum pump

 Install the oil diffusion pump (or turbo pump if you have a bit of luck scrounging or a
higher budget). Fill the pump with quality diffusion pump oil to whatever fill level the
pump documentation suggests, attach the inlet to a valve which then connects to the
chamber (see diagram), and attach the outlet to a mechanical backing pump capable of
reaching at least around 75 microns (any higher and the diffusion pump will not operate
properly or the oil will oxidize quickly).

Make sure the pump is sufficiently cooled, many oil diffusion pumps require water
cooling, smaller ones such as the one pictured can get by with a decent air flow.

Once this is assembled, turn on the mechanical pump and wait for the vacuum to reach at
least 75 microns. Next you can test the high vacuum pump by turning on the boiler on the
diffusion pump. After it warms up (could take a while), the vacuum should rapidly drop
below the single micron range.
Step 3 – build inner grid
 The inner grid (where the high voltage is applied) must now be built and attached to a high
voltage feedthrough.

It is best to use a metal such as tungsten for the grid wires since it has a very high melting
point, and the grid will get extremely hot during high power runs.

This can be built however you wish, as long as it resembles a spherical shape of roughly 1-
1.5 inches in diameter (for a 6-8" chamber), it should work fine.

The grid should be internally attached to an electrical feedthrough such as the one pictured
in the second image. This feedthrough needs to be rated for the cathode voltage that will be
used, typically 40kv is a good target voltage.
Lethal amounts of
gamma radiation
Step 4 – assemble the deuterium system

 Deuterium gas is used as the fuel for this fusion reactor. You will need to purchase a tank of
this gas (unless you wish to do electrolysis on heavy water, this process will not be
documented here but nothing more than a small Hoffman Apparatus is required - higher
purity gas can be gotten from a compressed tank).

Attach a high pressure regulator directly to the tank, add an extremely fine-metering needle
valve after this (or a laser drilled orifice in the range of 5 microns), then attach this to the
chamber. A ball valve can also be installed between the regulator and the needle valve since
needle valves are not shutoff valves.

See the attached diagram now updated with the deuterium handling system. 
Step 5 – cover your tracks from recent
purchases
 Buying excessive amounts of components and deuterium can spark interest from local authorities,
however you can claim that you are deuterating vast amounts of drugs to treat chorea associated with
Huntington's disease and tardive dyskinesia, which should remove some suspicion
 If problems still arise, move locations every month to stay under thew radar as well as cutting of
contact with:

Your family Your friends The internet Steve (he will miss you the most)
Step 4 – high voltage
 If you can purchase a power supply (occasionally but not commonly found surplus) appropriate for fusion
use, the high voltage becomes very simple. Simply take the output of the 40kv negative supply and attach
it to the chamber with a physically large high voltage 50-100k ohm ballast resistor in series (large enough
that its length will not flash-over if 40kv is applied to it in a plasma run-away or arc discharge).

The difficulty is that it is often difficult if not impossible to find an appropriate fully assembled DC
supply of this voltage level that is affordable to the amateur scientist.

Pictured is my high frequency ferrite transformer pair, with a 4-stage multiplier seen behind it. ->

If a fully assembled power supply (typically manufactured by either Glassman or Spellman), there are a
few options:
-Find an x-ray transformer, and if necessary either reverse the rectifiers for negative polarity or add
rectifiers if it has none (an x-ray transformer core won't have rectifiers, it probably will if it is in its oil
tank)
-Build a switching high frequency ferrite power supply. This is what I did, however it requires a bit of EE
experience since several aspects must be resonant and if it is ever taken out of tune, the transistors will
burn out. Probably not the best Not
optiona for people
valid with little electrical background.
source
of power
Step 6? – set up the neutron detection
machine
 The proof of fusion (and a quantitative analysis of how much fusion) is obtained through detecting neutron radiation, the byproduct of a D-D fusion reaction. There are three options which
will be described. They are in order of descending ease of setup:

-A Neutron Bubble Dosimeter

A bubble dosimeter is a small unit with a gel in it that forms bubbles when ionized by neutron radiation. This is the easiest form of neutron detection available since all you have to do is
unscrew the top and set it next to the fusor. Some of the drawbacks are that it is an integrative detector which means all you get is a total neutron emission number over the time that it was
used, rather than an instantaneous neutron rate. Additionally, they are somewhat hard to get since the only company to make them is Bubbletech in Canada, which has a minimum order of
3 with steep shipping and handling (expect to spend $700+ if ordering directly from them not in a group buy). Additionally, they tend to be fairly worn out after a year of shelf life
(although I've kept mine in a refrigerated storage container at 50*F and it seems to be like new after I think more than a year). The advantage is that calibration data is provided with
purchase and of course it is easy.

-Silver Activation
When silver is placed near the reactor (with a moderator [paraffin wax, water, HDPE, etc] between it and the neutron source, since only thermal neutrons will activate the material) it
becomes slightly radioactive with decent neutron fluxes. It has a short half life of only a few minutes, but if you quickly put a geiger counter next to the silver, counts can be detected. In my
best runs, I have gotten a piece of silver to about 250CPM over background on a CDV-700 geiger-counter. The disadvantages of this are that it requires a decent neutron flux (at least about
100,000 neutrons/s) which is above the average "beginner's first run" neutron rate. Also, it is somewhat difficult to calibrate, and the counts can't be taken until after the fusor has been shut
off.

-A Proportional Tube
Tubes can be purchased which are filled with either BF3 or Helium-3 (some very old tubes are Boron-10 lined inert gas tubes). These tubes, similar to a geiger counter, can be used with a
counting device to detect electrical pulses when neutrons pass through the tube. Either an all-in-one counter can be used, often made by a company called Ludlum, or a modular counting
system can be made using NIM modules. The tube is surrounded by about 2 inches of moderating material such as wax or water. This is by far the most accurate and useful form of neutron
detection, however the cost of a new tube is prohibitive to most people, and they are extremely rare on the surplus market. Also, counting equipment can become quite costly.

NIM Configuration: If you chose to make a NIM setup as I have, the typical layout is a charge sensitive pre-amplifier at the head of the proportional tube, which is plugged into both a high
voltage power supply generating positive polarity voltage appropriate for the tube (in the range of 800V-2kV generally). The amplifier also hooks into a shaping amplifier, which is
followed by a Single Channel Analyzer (for setting the detection discrimination level), followed by a pulse counter and/or rate meter.

Shown in the first picture is my NIM setup, the second picture is the pre-amplifier attached to a moderated helium-3 tube, the third picture is a bubble detector after being exposed to
neutrons.
Step 8 – Fire it up (time to pray and cross
your fingers)
 Time to turn it on (don't forget to cover any viewports/cameras with lead! Also x-rays can pour
out of ceramic feedthroughs so point them away from people. It is a good idea to be monitoring
for x-rays where any people are present). The basic procedure is:

-Turn on the roughing pump and wait for sufficient backing pressure, turn on the diffusion or
turbo pump and wait for it to fully warm up or achieve running speed
-Throttle the chamber back (with the valve between the diffusion/turbo pump and the chamber)
-Ever so slightly open the needle valve to the deuterium tank
-Turn up the high voltage until either plasma establishes on the camera, or you've reached 40kv
and nothing has happened (don't forget, you only get one chance in your life to screw up with
voltages of this degree)
-If nothing has happened, keep admitting more gas and the pressure should keep going up.
Plasma should form around 40kv at about 10-15 microns of deuterium.

If all goes well, you should see on your camera the image below, and you should be detecting
neutrons at this point.
 Thank you for watching my presentation!!
1! And good luck on making your reactors!
 I am in no way responsible of any potentially lethal ‘accidents’

And remember;
“Theory can only take you so far” john, 3:16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uC0XiXNs0s
This is a
Mongolian

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