Is it possible to create a microatomic reactor for domestic needs? DIY thermonuclear reactor How to make a mini nuclear reactor.

Why pay so much money to some hydroelectric power plant or thermal power plant when you can supply electricity to yourself? I think it’s no secret to anyone that uranium is mined in our country. Uranium is the fuel for a nuclear reactor. In general, if you are a little more persistent, you can buy a uranium tablet without much difficulty.

What you will need:

Tablet of uranium isotope 235 and 233 1 cm thick
Capacitor
Lead
Zirconium
Turbine
Electricity generator
Graphite rods
5-7 liter saucepan
Geiger counter
Light protective suit L-1 and gas mask IP-4MK with cartridge RP-7B It is also advisable to purchase a self-rescuer UDS-15

The circuit that I will describe was used on Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Nowadays the atom is used in lighthouses, submarines, and space stations. The reactor operates due to the massive release of steam. The isotope of uranium 235 releases an incredible amount of heat thanks to which we get steam from water. The reactor also releases large doses of radiation. The reactor is not difficult to assemble; even a teenager can do it. I immediately warn you about the chances of getting radiation sickness or getting radioactive burns when self-assembly reactor are very high. Therefore, the instructions are for informational purposes only.

1) First you need to find a place to assemble the reactor. A dacha would be best. It is advisable to assemble the reactor in the basement so that it can be buried later. First you need to make a furnace for melting lead and zirconium.

Then we take a saucepan and make 3 holes in its lid with a diameter of 2x0.6 and 1x5 cm, and make one 5-centimeter hole in the bottom of the saucepan. Then pour hot lead over the saucepan so that the layer of lead on the saucepan is at least 1 cm (do not touch the lid yet).

2) Next we need zirconium. We melt four tubes from it with a diameter of 2×0.55 and 2×4.95 cm and a height of 5-10 cm. We insert three tubes into the lid of the saucepan, and one large one into the bottom. Into the 0.55 cm tubes we insert graphite rods long enough to reach the bottom of the saucepan.

3) Now let’s connect: our saucepan (now a reactor) - turbine - generator - DC adapter.

The turbine has 2 outputs, one goes to the condenser (which is connected to the reactor)

Now we put on a protective suit. We throw the uranium tablet into the pan, close it and fill the outside of the pan with lead so that there are no cracks left.

We lower the graphite rods to the end and pour water into the reactor.

4) Now very slowly pull the rods out before the water boils. The water temperature should be no higher than 180 degrees. In the reactor, uranium neutrons multiply, which is why water boils. The steam turns our turbine, which in turn turns the generator.

The essence of the reactor is not to allow it to change the multiplication factor. If the number of free neutrons produced is equal to the number of neutrons that caused nuclear fission, then K = 1 and each unit of time the same amount of energy is released, if K<1 то выделение энергии будет уменьшатся, а если К>1 energy will increase and what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant will happen - your reactor will simply explode due to pressure. This parameter can be adjusted using graphite rods and monitored using special instruments.

5) The reactor can operate continuously for 7-8 years. Upon expiration of its useful life, it can be disposed of in a chemical waste dump.

Here good video(in English). It turns out that it’s not so complicated after all))

Some were almost successful. One of these craftsmen is David Hahn, an American schoolboy. This is really cool!

Reactor in the barn

In his early childhood, David Khan was a very ordinary child. The blond and awkward boy played baseball and kicked a soccer ball, and at some point joined the Boy Scouts. His parents, Ken and Patty, were divorced and David lived with his father and stepmother, Kathy, in Clinton. He usually spent his weekends at Golf Manor with his mother and her friend, whose name was Michael Polasek.

Dramatic changes occurred when he turned ten. Then Katya’s father gave David the book The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (“ golden book chemical experiments"). He read it enthusiastically. At the age of 12, he was already making extracts from his father’s institute textbooks on chemistry, and at the age of 14, he made nitroglycerin.

One night, their Clinton home was rocked by a massive explosion in the basement. Ken and Kathy found David, semi-conscious, lying on the floor. It turned out that he was crushing some substance with a screwdriver, and it caught fire. He was rushed to the hospital, where his eyes were washed out.

Katie forbade him to experiment in her home, so he moved his research to his mother's barn at Golf Manor. Neither Patty nor Michael had the slightest idea what this shy teenager was doing in the barn, although it was strange that he often wore a protective mask in the barn, and sometimes took off his clothes only around two in the morning, working late. They chalked it all up to their own limited education.
Michael, however, recalled David once telling him, "Someday we'll run out of oil."

Convinced that his son needed discipline, David's father Ken believed that the solution to the problem lay in the goal that he could not achieve - the Scout Eagle, which required 21 Scout badges. David earned his Atomic Energy Certificate in May 1991, five months after his fifteenth birthday. But now he had stronger ambitions.

Invented personality

He decided that he would do X-raying everything he could, and for this he needed to build a neutron “gun”. To gain access to radioactive materials, David decided to use techniques from various high-profile magazine articles. He invented a fictitious identity.

He wrote a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in which he claimed to be a high school physics teacher at Chippewa Valley High School. The agency's director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, described to him in detail the isolation and production of radioactive elements, and also explained the characteristics of some of them, in particular which of them, when irradiated with neutrons, could support a nuclear chain reaction.

When David inquired about the risks of such work, Erb assured him “that the danger can be neglected,” since “possession of any radioactive materials in quantities and forms that could pose a threat requires obtaining a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or equivalent organization.”

David had read that tiny amounts of the radioactive isotope americium-241 can be found in smoke detectors. He contacted detector companies and told them that he needed a large number of these devices to complete one school project. One of the companies sold him about a hundred faulty detectors for a dollar apiece.

He did not know exactly where the americium was located in the detector, so he wrote to an electronics company in Illinois. The company's customer service representative told him that they would be happy to help him. Thanks to her help, David was able to extract the material. He placed americium inside a hollow piece of lead with a very small hole on one side from which he hoped alpha rays would emerge. He placed a sheet of aluminum in front of the hole so that its atoms absorbed alpha particles and emitted neutrons. The neutron gun was ready.

The glow grid in a gas lantern is a small divider through which the flame passes. It was coated with a composition that included thorium-232. When bombarded with neutrons, it would produce the fissile isotope uranium - 233. David purchased several thousand incandescent grids from various surplus stores and burned them with a blowtorch into a pile of ash.

To separate the thorium from the ash, he purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and cut them all into pieces with tin snips. He wrapped the lithium scraps and thorium ash in a ball of aluminum foil and heated it in the flame of a Bunsen burner. He isolated pure thorium in quantities 9,000 times higher than what occurs naturally and 170 times higher than the level required by the NRC license. But David's americium-based neutron gun was not powerful enough to turn thorium into uranium.

More help from NRC

David worked diligently after school in various diners, grocery stores and furniture warehouses, but these jobs were simply a source of money for his experiments. He didn't study hard at school, never stood out, and scored poorly on the GCSE math and reading tests (but excelled in science).

He wanted to find radium for a new cannon. David began scouring local junkyards and antique shops in search of watches that used radium in the luminous paint on the dial. If he came across such a watch, he would scrape off the paint from it and put it in a bottle.

One day he was slowly walking along the street of the town of Clinton, and as he said, in one of the windows of an antique store, he caught his eye on an old table clock that interested him. While hacking the watch closely, he discovered that it was possible to scrape together a whole bottle of radium paint. He bought a watch for $10.

Then he took up radium and converted it into salt form. Whether he realized it or not, at that moment he was putting himself in danger.

NRC's Erb informed him that " best material from which alpha particles can produce neutrons is beryllium.” David asked his friend to steal beryllium for him from the chemistry laboratory, and then placed it in front of a lead box containing radium. His amusing americium cannon was replaced by a more powerful radium cannon.

David managed to find some pitch (uranium) blende, an ore that contains uranium in small quantities, and crushed it into dust with a sledgehammer. He directed the beams from his cannon at the powder, in the hope that he would be able to obtain at least some amount of the fissile isotope. He didn't succeed. The neutrons that represented the projectiles in his gun were moving too fast.

"Imminent Danger"

After he turned 17, David became obsessed with the idea of building a model of a breeder reactor, that is, a nuclear reactor that not only generated electricity, but also produced new fuel. His model would use real radioactive elements and involve real nuclear reactions. As a working drawing, he was going to use a diagram that he found in one of his father's textbooks.

Neglecting safety precautions in every possible way, David mixed radium and americium, which were in his hands along with beryllium and aluminum. The mixture was wrapped in aluminum foil, from which he made a semblance of a nuclear reactor work area. The radioactive ball was surrounded by small, foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, tied together with a plumber's bandage.

“It was radioactive as hell,” said David, “much more than when disassembled.” Then he began to realize that he was exposing himself and those around him to serious danger.

When David's Geiger counter began recording radiation five houses away from his mother's home, he decided that he had "too much radioactive material in one place," after which he decided to dismantle the reactor. He hid some of the materials in his mother's house, left some in the barn, and put the rest in the trunk of his Pontiac.

At 2:40 a.m. on August 31, 1994, Clinton police received a call from an unknown person who reported that a young man appeared to be trying to steal tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them that he was going to meet his friend. The police found this unconvincing and decided to inspect the car.

They opened the trunk and found a toolbox in it, which was locked and wrapped with a plumber's bandage. There were also cubes wrapped in foil with some mysterious gray powder, small disks, cylindrical metal objects, and mercury relays. The police were very alarmed by the tool box, which David told them was radioactive, and they were afraid of it like an atomic bomb.

A federal plan to counter the radioactive threat was put into effect, and officials states began consulting with the EPA and NRC.

In the barn, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a Pyrex fire glass cup, a milk bottle crate, and a host of other items that were contaminated with radiation levels a thousand times higher than natural levels. Because it could have been blown around by wind and rain, as well as the lack of security in the barn itself, according to the EPA memo, “it posed an imminent threat to public health.”

After workers in protective suits dismantled the barn, they put everything that was left into 39 barrels, which were loaded onto trucks and taken to a burial ground in the Great Salt Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were buried along with other radioactive debris.

"This was a situation that regulation failed to anticipate," said Dave Minaar, a radiologist with the Michigan Department of Quality. Environment, - “It was believed that the average person would not be able to get his hands on the technology or materials that are required to engage in experiments in this field.”

David Hahn is now in the Navy, where he reads about steroids, melanin, the genetic code, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. “I wanted to have something noticeable in my life,” he explains now. "I still have time". Regarding his exposure to radiation, he said, “I don’t think I took more than five years off my life.”

After reading one specialized blog, talking with the author and his fellow users... what can I say - aggressive comrades. behind the aggression I see poor knowledge of elementary physical processes, but God bless them.

I would like to talk a little about thermonuclear fusion, as I already noted, there is communication energy, i.e. energy of the bound state i.e. If something whole is broken, then in the broken state it weighs heavier than the whole. since Uncle Albert established the connection between mass and energy, you can estimate how much effort needs to be spent on scrapping, simply by weighing the “fragments” and comparing them with the weight of the connected state.

it must be said that this value is vanishingly small and burns about the connection energy of, say, a broken and whole brick of special meaning in Everyday life No.

As for nuclear energy, we can name two types of reactions with the release of energy - the “breakup” of heavy nuclei into lighter ones and, conversely, the fusion of light nuclei into something heavy. Of course, we are interested in reactions that release energy.

Let's remember our recent past.

how to start a thermonuclear reaction on the knee? Yes, it’s elementary. we only need reaction components, deep vacuum and high voltage.

After all, gas can be ionized in a whole bunch of ways. The simplest way is to create the necessary electric field strength. I won’t describe the design in detail here, fortunately, there’s nothing special to describe - it’s basically two balls, one inside the other, the inner one is made of refractory wire. between the balls they create a large potential difference - that's it. if in a ball (external), for example, a pair of deuterium, everything will go like clockwork. those. The main component seems to be heavy water. it is easily obtained. the process is not fast. the bottom line is that deuterium isotopes have slightly different physical properties compared to ordinary hydrogen. and simply by evaporating and freezing water you can “get some deuterium.” maybe other more are possible quick options separation.

By the way, the voltage needed is quite high - tens of kilovolts, I heard about values of 40 kV. everything is simple and elementary. you can push Google a key like “thermo” nuclear reactor do it yourself,” you can go to YouTube and type the word fusor into the local search engine.

everything is simple and elementary.

The question arises: why is no one developing this type of reactor? is the world behind the scenes interfering or what else?

The answer is simple - the plasma is not retained. those. even if the ions managed to overcome the Coulomb barrier and the reaction occurred, which, by the way, can be seen from the neutron detector, then that’s basically it. modern reactors work differently - they are a trap in which there is plasma, the plasma must be ignited, and then the reaction becomes self-sustaining without supplying energy from the outside. By the way, you still need to hold the plasma :)

this “deception” has been dragging humanity by the nose for decades, promising it the solution to many energy problems, but plasma confinement is a painstaking and creative process, and not fully resolved. God forbid ITER will be completed and show the world a demonstration of thermonuclear energy. There are some reasons for optimism, but personally I am skeptical. even if everything works out and everything works, it is unlikely to be possible to build such an installation as a “one person”. Accordingly, this is a search for new plasma modes, new confinement methods, etc., everything that will reduce the cost of the installation.

Now they are talking again about open-type traps - this is a cheaper option, and new knowledge has made it possible to retain plasma much longer than before, but there is no need to talk about the practical suitability of the experimental results.

if you cannot live without a flow of neutrons, then you simply need to collect fusor, but if you are looking for some practical benefit, then you do not need to do this.

besides, I think the development of alternative energy cannot be discounted either. There are very cheap and effective methods for constructing ultra-long-distance power transmission lines, about one such method, increasing efficiency solar modules, which I also wrote about, the development of energy conservation systems. I don’t know, the world is ruled by money, of course the idea of “thermonuclear” is so romantic, exotic, and futuristic, but in life, as a rule, rationalism takes over.

What you will need:

* Tablet of uranium isotope 235 and 233 1 cm thick

* Capacitor

* Zirconium

* Turbine

* Electricity generator

* Graphite rods

* Saucepan 5 - 7 liters

* Geiger counter

* Light protective suit L-1 and protective gas mask IP-4MK with cartridge RP-7B

* It is advisable to also purchase a self-rescuer UDS-15

1. The circuit that I will describe was used at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Nowadays the atom is used in lighthouses, submarines, and space stations. The reactor operates due to the massive release of steam. The isotope of uranium 235 releases an incredible amount of heat thanks to which we get steam from water. The reactor also releases large doses of radiation. The reactor is not difficult to assemble; even a teenager can do it. I warn you right away that the chances of getting radiation sickness or getting radioactive burns when assembling a reactor yourself are very high. Therefore, the instructions are for informational purposes only.

2. First you need to find a place to assemble the reactor. A dacha would be best. It is advisable to assemble the reactor in the basement so that it can be buried later. First you need to make a furnace for melting lead and zirconium.

3. Next we need zirconium. We melt four tubes from it with a diameter of 2x0.55 and 2x4.95 cm and a height of 5-10 cm. We insert three tubes into the lid of the saucepan, and one large one into the bottom. Into the 0.55 cm tubes we insert graphite rods long enough to reach the bottom of the saucepan.

4. Now let’s connect: our saucepan (now the reactor)>turbine>generator>DC adapter.

The turbine has 2 outputs, one goes to the condenser (which is connected to the reactor)

Now we put on a protective suit. We throw the uranium tablet into the pan, close it and fill the outside of the pan with lead so that there are no cracks left.

We lower the graphite rods to the end and pour water into the reactor.

5. Now very slowly pull the rods out before the water boils. The water temperature should be no higher than 180 degrees. In the reactor, uranium neutrons multiply, which is why water boils. The steam turns our turbine, which in turn turns the generator.

6. The essence of the reactor is not to allow it to change the multiplication factor. If the number of free neutrons produced is equal to the number of neutrons that caused nuclear fission, then K = 1 and each unit of time the same amount of energy is released, if K<1 то выделение энергии будет уменьшатся, а если К>1 energy will increase and what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant will happen - your reactor will simply explode due to pressure. This parameter can be adjusted using graphite rods and monitored using special instruments.

7. The reactor can operate continuously for 7-8 years. Upon expiration of its useful life, it can be disposed of in a chemical waste dump.

Warnings:

ATTENTION!!!

This can irreparably affect your health.

* Storage, purchase, sale of enriched uranium is punishable by law!

What you will need:

* Tablet of uranium isotope 235 and 233 1 cm thick

* Capacitor

* Zirconium

* Turbine

* Electricity generator

* Graphite rods

* Saucepan 5 - 7 liters

* Geiger counter

* Light protective suit L-1 and protective gas mask IP-4MK with cartridge RP-7B

* It is advisable to also purchase a self-rescuer UDS-15

1 step

Big uranium

The circuit that I will describe was used at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Nowadays the atom is used in lighthouses, submarines, and space stations. The reactor operates due to the massive release of steam. The isotope of uranium 235 releases an incredible amount of heat thanks to which we get steam from water. The reactor also releases large doses of radiation. The reactor is not difficult to assemble; even a teenager can do it. I warn you right away that the chances of getting radiation sickness or getting radioactive burns when assembling a reactor yourself are very high. Therefore, the instructions are for informational purposes only.

Step 2

First you need to find a place to assemble the reactor. A dacha would be best. It is advisable to assemble the reactor in the basement so that it can be buried later. First you need to make a furnace for melting lead and zirconium.

Step 3

Zirconium

Next we need zirconium. We melt four tubes from it with a diameter of 2x0.55 and 2x4.95 cm and a height of 5-10 cm. We insert three tubes into the lid of the saucepan, and one large one into the bottom. Into the 0.55 cm tubes we insert graphite rods long enough to reach the bottom of the saucepan.

Step 4

Now let’s connect: our saucepan (now a reactor)>turbine>generator>DC adapter.

The turbine has 2 outputs, one goes to the condenser (which is connected to the reactor)

Now we put on a protective suit. We throw the uranium tablet into the pan, close it and fill the outside of the pan with lead so that there are no cracks left.

We lower the graphite rods to the end and pour water into the reactor.

Step 5

Now very slowly pull the rods out before the water boils. The water temperature should be no higher than 180 degrees. In the reactor, uranium neutrons multiply, which is why water boils. The steam turns our turbine, which in turn turns the generator.

Is it possible to create a microatomic reactor for domestic needs? DIY thermonuclear reactor How to make a mini nuclear reactor.

Invented personality

More help from NRC

"Imminent Danger"

What you will need:

1 step

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6