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Brooklyn Guy Builds Homemade Nuclear Reactor
By
John Del Signore
Published Jun 23, 2010
Modified Jun 24, 2010
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By
John Del Signore
Published Jun 23, 2010
Modified Jun 24, 2010
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So you think you're DIYer than thou just because you make smoothies with a bike-powered blender and keep an apiary on your roof? Meet Mark Suppes. The dude built a homemade nuclear reactor in a Brooklyn warehouse. The only way you're going to top this is to grow your beard down to your waist and rig up a flux capacitor to your fixie.
By day, Suppes toils as a lowly web designer for Gucci. But at night he's Fusion Man, working to create the "holy grail" of energy production in a lab tucked away on a tree-lined street... across from residential apartments. But don't panic, as one fusion egghead tells BBC, "There is no chance of any kind of accident with fusion." And it's perfectly legal, too! "As long as they [private citizens] obtain that material [the components of the reactor] legally, they could do whatever they want," says Anne Stark at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In fact, Suppes is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to Fusor.net. Even a 15-year-old from Michigan has done it! Who knows, the next Manhattan Project could be going on right next door to your apartment. Again, no reason to be alarmed, but we're going to think twice before banging on the wall next time the neighbors are blasting Insane Clown Posse. [BBC]
Tagged
artisanal
brooklyn
fusion
nuclear reactor
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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