Building A Nuclear Star In A Jar (Fusor)

[Music] [Applause] that's damn gorgeous harnessing the power of the sun is what the race for nuclear fusion is all about it's a race to create Limitless energy and Brilliant Minds the world over from USA to France Japan and dozens of other countries are attempting to achieve stable Fusion honestly we're looking for our Tesseract sustained Fusion would provide nearly unlimited power and lead to Industrial Innovation on levels that we've never seen before I mean imagine doping a country's water supply with just a little bit of Adderall so much would get done that's the effect the unlimited

power would have on Innovation being passionate about astronomy pretty much my entire life and having dabbled a bit with high voltages I wanted to make my own star in a jar something to always bring me back to an Innovative center after several weeks of drilling sanding soldering tweaking and gluing plus several setbacks come on I finally see why these finds refusers are kind of a big deal [Applause] [Music] in the news lately nuclear fusion is kind of back on the menu from The Joint European tourists recently doubling its own energy record to the Lawrence Livermore

National Laboratory improving their energy yield by 800 percent to the Max Planck Institute fixing plasma instabilities we're overcoming the wall of hurdles this power source throws at us but it's amazing that we're trending towards sustained Fusion at least you know basically controlling the power of a star and after you've watched me try to build a star in a jar I highly recommend you head on over to brilliant.org to learn how Fusion takes place in our own Sun let's take a look their astrophysics section is on point and involves physics Basics astronomical measuring techniques star life

cycle and nuclear fusion as well as Interstellar travel and exoplanets the energy production and stars course gets right to the point and covers why Atomic nuclei sometimes need a bit of a push in order to fuse and how that spells power output it's full of interactive animations and graphics and it asks thought-provoking multiple choice questions if you get a question it breaks down the correct answer for you so that you walk away learning a thing or two Brilliance honestly an incredible way to learn physics and Science interactively and topics range from mechanics and electronics to

Quantum objects gravitational physics and even Advanced calculus they legit have thousands of lessons with exclusive new content added monthly personally I've been using it to kind of brush up on my understanding of fusion and ultimately it's kind of helped with the science that you're about to see you can get started for free by visiting brilliant.org plasma Channel or click on the link in the description down below the first 200 of you will get 20 off an annual premium subscription so in the middle of The Groovy 1960s one of the inventors of Digital television had a

bright idea for producing sustained nuclear fusion he called that idea the Farnsworth fuser now how Fusion works in the first place is actually pretty remarkable and can be achieved in a couple of different ways you can use intense lasers with a heated inertial confinement such as llnl setup or a ring of plasma with Magnetic confinement as with Idris setup but they both have the same goal to fuse individual deuterium and tritium atoms into one larger mass of helium and when they fuse a small percentage of mass is actually lost in the process it's like this

disgusting tomatoes foreign so where does it go well it's converted into Pure Energy you know the whole E equals MC squared thing the dude with the pipe talked about now there is another way to achieve fusion and it's called inertial electrostatic confinement this is our fuser whereas Fusion normally requires immense pressure and pretty much the power of a sun this method requires an extremely low vacuum and tens of thousands of Juicy volts as the driving force the latter of those two is definitely a bit more within my capabilities so I got to work Gathering supplies

for a star in a jar [Music] thank you now I've never worked with vacuums before so pretty much everything about this project was new to me let alone the fact that I was trying to build a nuclear fuser right regardless I did have a couple of characteristics I wanted this build to have you see this summer I spent some time in Egypt and I found an appreciation for the geometric shapes within the pyramids so I wanted a triangle base and a circular reaction chamber all seeing anybody I also wanted a compact minimalistic design and for

it to be plug and play with minimal setup no loose wires as I was about to begin the build process I learned that one of my patreons had professional Fusion experience and wanted to help meet Chris he worked at Idaho accelerator Center and the Stanford linear accelerator so we sat down for a chat so since you made one back you know a few years ago do you have any recommendations for making a fuser that's going to be successful or isn't going to kill me so successful and not killing you I think kind of following three

different categories here keeping kind of short distances between things with shut off valves is actually really helpful the biggest reason why you need that vacuum is because you need a free mean path for your Ion will collide with enough energy to actually fuse sometimes you can flush your environment uh with a inert gas or your hydrogen for example things are that are dangerous around the the fusars are the vacuum um you can implode things and the the other thing is is of course the high voltage which you're well aware of yeah x-ray production is a

thing here especially since you're uh freeing up these ions and these ions are now having a chance to travel uh the electrons are traveling neutrons are another one that that's dangerous so especially since I'm going to be above 40 or 50 kilovolts in particular uh so higher risk okay above that 40 mark usually is dealing in the x-ray x-ray area a good five six feet away is where I would stand we talked a bit more about using vacuum grease avoiding the use of silicone seals and making sure my wire grid had parallel surfaces I learned

a lot from that conversation and as you'll see coming up it actually influenced my build so that combined with the fact that I now had supplies in hand oh Nuclear Physics was imminent [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] part of the build is complete you can see I used juicy nuclear green and it's pretty minimalistic in design and once I add gaskets this will be all set up for a vacuum so onto the power source next I plan to run my fuser at more than 50 kilovolts DC and to provide that kind of

voltage I'll need to use a voltage multiplier fed by an external high voltage source that is what this space is for so I can build a voltage multiplier right into the base making it more compact foreign [Music] [Applause] so after a few hours of curing look at this sexy meatloaf you gotta love what epoxy does it protects high voltage components but it also looks nice right and the multiplier fits perfectly in the base after adding some connections this little nuclear bundle of joy should be good to go I hope and here it is with all

connections in place [Applause] [Music] okay the way I see it there is three separate tests to run first does the multiplier Produce High Enough voltage second can I pull a strong enough vacuum and third does it even light up in the first place like it's supposed to so on to the multiplier my flyback Supply provided eight kilovolts AC which I just fed directly into the multiplier let's see what you got you sound angry yeah that'll do the multiplier produces well over 40 kilovolts which is a healthy start so check that one and onto the vacuum

busting out the pump I connected the tubing on both ends and hoped for the best let's go baby okay come on come on foreign well I only got down to about a half an inch or 500 microns of mercury which is nowhere near the 30 to 50 I'm supposed to be at for this to work and this pump is rated for 15 microns so something's going on I probably have a leak somewhere considering silicone really isn't the best seal for vacuums that alone could be the problem so I headed to my local mom and pop

store to sort through different types of rubber and find myself some vitron which came highly recommended foreign that really didn't cut it and here's the new vitron seal or vitron have you pronounce it you can see it's a lot stiffer so hopefully that makes a difference oh let this be the day [Applause] uh that looks better so far I'm gonna let that run for a minute and then check on it well I tried everything I even added some vacuum grease and I couldn't get it below about 400 microns so I don't think the gaskets are

the issue they're actually pretty beefy I'm wondering if the leak is coming from the threaded piping that goes into the chamber so I did some research and I found there's actually a product you can buy right off the shelf that's used in industrial vacuum situations for exactly this problem after a quick trip to yet another small mom and pop store entered JB Weld this is the quick solution I chose [Music] he chose to type the hardens in five minutes so I had to work fast I gave it six hours to cure AKA I went to

bed it's the next morning so the JB Weld should be completely dried and if this doesn't solve the vacuum leaks then that means I have a pump problem third time's the charm I'm gonna let that run for a couple minutes come back and check on it you see this that's what I'm looking for the epoxy work thank God because I tried a bunch of other Solutions and nothing was working but now the vacuum was strong enough that meant only one thing it meant busting out my x-ray and radiation detector because I was about to give

this thing some power [Music] ah hello yes [Music] I love how it's lighting up but it's still not working it's supposed to Glow a bright purple or a bright white it's not doing that which tells me that the pressure still isn't low enough and I've checked I don't have any leaks in the whole system that's for sure which tells me that my pump is not cut out for the job so I called in the calvary all 38 pounds of it bought a new pump it's massive compared to the pump I had been using man and

also massively expensive so patreons thank you for supporting my work this is your money at work this pump was complete Overkill but it was my Hail Mary and it came with a touch screen and it was bluetooth enabled so that's actually pretty sick damn [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's damn gorgeous considering that was pretty epic and it was just using atmospheric air I wanted to spice things up a bit by injecting a little bit of helium let's go for helium oh that's more that's way more diffuse dude that's so much brighter that's so much brighter through

all my tests I found zero radiation but that's all Gonna Change in the next video when I inject deuterium and tritium so consider subscribing I did film this video in two different locations while moving to a different cities so that kind of added some complexities to the build but oh well right oh and merch uh the shirts that I've been wearing are available online I'll leave a link down below and I have a bunch of new designs coming down the pipeline a huge thank you to brilliant for sponsoring this video to Chris for his help

and to all of my patreons who patiently support my work let me know your honest thoughts down below and You Stay classy [Music]