fusor

We don't know, because the article is a lot more interested in bureaucratic trivia rather than the fusor itself.

So, they've come up with a way to make a fusor that produces more energy than it consumes?

Interesting that fusion is dismissed so quickly - the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor is probably the most common DIY nuclear reactor.

This was also the opinion of the late Robert Bussard, inventor of the Bussard ramjet and the polywell fusor.

The fusor design is surprisingly simple; small versions can be (and have been) constructed by hobbyists that will successfully fuse hydrogen.

If you have unlimited money, you can build a fusor straight from a Cole-Parmer catalog.

I don't think there's any licensing requirement at all for a small fusion reactor like a Farnsworth fusor.

Unlike the fusor, there don't seem to thus far be any significant theoretical barriers to net energy gain from the polywell design.

Personally, I'm looking forward to building a farnsworth fusor with my daughter when it comes science fair time.

It's a fusor - which does (as its name suggests) do fusion - which is why they are used as neutron sources.

To be fair, he did a lot more than build the fusor.

PS: If you are interested in fusion I would suggest you look at fusor.net.

His machine, a Farnsworth fusor, should more appropriately be called a "reactor", because it can only sustain a fusion reaction, but it cannot generate power.

PS: It would be nice to get a post with a more accurate technical description, that avoid all the claims about " unlimited energy " that are not in the future path of a fusor.

For those not familiar with the Polywell design, it's a refinement of the slightly more well-known Farnsworth Fusor.

You can do that with a tabletop device like a Farnsworth Fusor.

If there had been neutrons, people would have assumed there was an obscure sort of inertial confinement fusion going on at some particular kind of defect in the crystal structure, perhaps a microscopic Farnsworth Fusor.