It has to be a typo, because you don't pile up radioactive material from smoke detectors for fusion. Fusion doesn't require radioactive material, it requires smaller atoms like Hydrogen smashed together into Helium which releases energy because when protons and neutrons are bound together they have less mass than when they are free floating and that mass has to go somewhere (it turns into energy).

However if you try to use fusion of heavy elements it doesn't work because past a certain point you get less binding energy per nucleon instead of more due to all of the electrostatic forces of the positively charged protons trying to repel them away from the nucleus.

Who is that :whistling:

If he succeeded it would have been awesome, just stick a finger up at the goverment and tell them to hire you and stop wasting money on multi-million pound factories

Edited article quote for correction, thanks!

He was pulling Americium. Half-Life of 432 years. Its commonly found in Ionization Smoke detectors. If over exposed to Americium it will remain in the liver for 50 years, 20 years in the bones and whatever is left in your system is excreted naturally (bowel). There has been no cases of death from exposure to Americium. Having said that exposure of Americium to the ovaries or testicles is permanent and is where Cancer cells will form. So, unless this guy was rubbing It directly on his nuts I'm sure he'll live a long while.

The odds of his fission reactor even working on Americium would have been slim. Americium is a synthetic element created in 1944 and is a by-product of Plutonium or Uranium being bombarded by Alpha Waves in nuclear reactors. Due to the elements scarcity in large quantities and its high price tag its use in nuclear power generation and weaponization make it completely impractical even to a hobbyist building a small reactor in his kitchen. This guy would have had to take apart a lot of ion smoke detectors to get enough material. And given the amount of Americium in an ion detector it would have raised a lot of questions to the authorities when a home owner was placing large orders.

I work in the life safety business on fire alarms, so I handle ion detectors daily and I can tell you, having been doing this for 11 years if I had started collecting detectors to build a fission reactor the day I was hired, I still wouldn't have enough raw material to even get it working once.

A bit more information on Ion Smoke Detectors and Americium. There is 0.28 micrograms of Americium in a smoke detector when its new, as in the day it rolls off the assembly line. At that moment the Americium states to decay. Within 19 years it contains 3% Neptunium and after 32 years it contains 5% Neptunium. So he'd have to have the ability to of processed the Neptunium out of the already deteriorated Americium. An ion detector generally gets replaced on a real fire alarm system after 15 years because the frequency of false alarms due to the decaying Americium goes up. Which is why your ion detector in your home gets replaced at 7 years because it spends half of the 15 years on a shelf in a warehouse and then in a store before making it to your home.

big deal, I create nuclear fusion in the bedroom all the time.. B)





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnOl4VcV5ng&NR=1

It's technically not "illegal" here in the US from what i've read however the cops can probably thrown you in jail for any other reason then trump up charges later. Getting the nuclear materials to achieve fusion isn't that hard since smoke detectors contain small trace amounts of radioactive material. You get enough smoke detectors and you'll have enough material to start the reaction.

I've contemplated this myself however the mathematical equations involved, materials, resources, etc... to get this thing running keep me from doing it. I bet you could easily spend $15k if you got all new materials probably $1 to $5k if you hit up junkyards for smoke detectors.

See my post above. You'd need a lot and I mean a lot of ion smoke detectors and a way to process the neptunium from the americium to get enough material. You'd be arrested before you'd have enough. Its not illegal in America to build the reactor but it is illegal to have a lot of radioactive material. You'd soon realize the detectors you pulled fro
a landfill don't contain enough americium and you'd end up placing orders for new detectors which would raise the flag. BTW, disposal of ion detectors is supposed to be handled by licensed contractors and supervised by the DEP and EPA. You are not supposed to just throw your detectors in the trash.

That reporter has an interesting name..

Coming soon to an IKEA near you