Your own nuclear reactor. Is it possible to create a nuclear reactor at home? What You Will Need

after reading one specialized blog, talking with the author and his cellmates users ... what can I say - aggressive comrades. Behind the aggression, I see a 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 a binding energy, i.e. bound state energy i.e. if something whole is broken, then in the broken state it weighs more heavily than as a whole. since Uncle Albert established the relationship between mass and energy, you can estimate how much effort you need to spend on scrapping, simply by weighing the "fragments" and comparing it with the weight of the connected state.

it must be said that this value is vanishingly small and there is no special meaning in everyday life to burn about the energy of communication, say, a broken and whole brick.

As for nuclear energy, two types of reactions with the release of energy can be named - this is the "collapse" of heavy nuclei into lighter ones and vice versa, the fusion of light nuclei into something heavy. we are of course interested in the reactions going with the release of energy.

Let's remember our recent past.

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

After all, a gas can be ionized in a whole bunch of ways. the simplest is to create the necessary electric field strength. I will not describe the design in detail here, and there is nothing special to describe - these are, in general, two balls one inside the other, the inner one is made of refractory wire. between the balls create a large potential difference - that's all. if in a ball (external) for example, a pair of deterium, everything will go like clockwork. those. Heavy water appears to be the main component. 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 just by evaporating and freezing water, you can "get some deuterium". other faster separation options may be possible.

By the way, the voltage you need is quite large - tens of kilovolts, I heard about the values \u200b\u200bof 40 kV. everything is simple and elementary. you can push Google with a key like "do-it-yourself fusion reactor", you can go to YouTube and type in the word fusor into a local search engine.

everything is simple and elementary.

the question arises why no one develops this type of reactor? the world behind the scenes interferes with Ali or what else?

the answer is simple - 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 about it. modern reactors work differently - they are a trap in which the plasma is located, the plasma must be ignited, and then the reaction goes on self-sustaining without supplying energy from outside. By the way, you still need to hold the plasma :)

this "lure" has been dragging humanity by the nose for more than a decade, promising it a solution to many energy problems, but plasma retention is a painstaking and creative process, and not fully resolved. God forbid, ITER will be completed and a demonstration of thermonuclear energy will be shown to the world. There are some grounds for optimism, but personally I am skeptical. even if everything works out and everything works, building such an installation in "one person" will not work out in a row. Accordingly, this is a search for new plasma regimes, new confinement methods, etc., all that will reduce the cost of the installation.

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

if you can't live without a neutron flux, then you just need to collect fusor, but if you are looking for some practical use, then you do not need to do this.

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

Here is a good video (in English). It turns out that it's not so difficult))

Some have almost succeeded. One of these craftsmen is David Hahn, an American schoolboy. It's really cool!

Reactor in the shed

AT early childhood David Khan was the most an ordinary child. The blond and clumsy boy played baseball and kicked a soccer ball, and at some point joined the Boy Scouts. His parents, Ken and Patty, divorced and David lived with his father and stepmother, who was called Kathy, in the town of 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 was ten. Then Katya's father gave David the book The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments ("The Golden Book of Chemistry 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 14, he made nitroglycerin.

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

Cathy forbade him to experiment at her place, 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 up to their own limited education.
Michael, however, recalled David once telling him, "We'll run out of oil someday."

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 the Atomic Energy Science Badge in May 1991, five months after his 15th birthday. But now he had stronger ambitions.

Invented personality

He decided that he would be engaged in the translucence of everything that he could, and for this he needed to build a neutron "gun". To gain access to the radioactive materials, David decided to use tricks from various high-profile magazine articles. He came up with a fictitious person.

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 director of the agency for the production and distribution of isotopes, 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 ones, when irradiated with neutrons, can support a nuclear chain reaction.

When David inquired about the risks of such work, Erb assured him "that the danger is negligible" because "possession of any radioactive material in quantities and forms capable of presenting a threat requires a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or an equivalent organization."

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

He didn't know exactly where the americium was in the detector, so he wrote to an electronics firm in Illinois. An employee from the company's customer service told him that they would be happy to help him. Thanks to her help, David was able to extract the material. He placed the americium inside a hollow piece of lead with a very small hole on one side, from which he expected the alpha rays to come out. In front of the hole, he placed a sheet of aluminum so that its atoms would absorb alpha particles and emit neutrons. The neutron gun was ready.

The heating grid in a gas lantern is a small divider through which the flame passes. It is coated with a compound that included thorium-232. When bombarded with neutrons, the fissionable isotope uranium - 233 should have been obtained from it. David purchased several thousand heating grids from various stores selling surplus warehouses and burned them with a blowtorch into a pile of ash.

To isolate the thorium from the ashes, he purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and cut them all to pieces with metal shears. He wrapped lithium scraps and thorium ash in a ball of aluminum foil and heated it in the flame of a Bunsen torch. He isolated pure thorium at 9,000 times the amount found in nature and 170 times 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 diligently worked after school in all sorts of eateries, grocers and furniture stores, but this work was just a source of money for his experiments. At school, he studied without much diligence, never excelled in anything, received poor marks in the general exam in mathematics and reading tests (but at the same time showed excellent results in science).

For a new gun, he wanted to find radium. David began to scour the surrounding junkyards and antique shops looking for watches that used radium in the glowing dial paint. If such a watch came across to him, then he scraped off the paint from them and put it in a vial.

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 the eye of an old table clock that interested him. With a close "hack" of the watch, he found that he could scrape together a whole vial of radium paint. He bought a watch for $10.

Then he turned to radium and converted it into the form of salt. Whether he knew it or not, he was in danger at this moment.

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

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

"Imminent Danger"

After he was 17 years old, David got 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 had to use real radioactive elements and real nuclear reactions take place. As a working drawing, he was going to use a diagram that he found in one of his father's textbooks.

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

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

When the Geiger counter that David had started registering radiation five houses away from his mother's residence, 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 at his mother's house, left some in the shed, and put the rest in the trunk of his Pontiac.

At 2:40 am on August 31, 1994, the Clinton police received a call from an unknown person who said 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. This seemed unconvincing to the police, and they decided to inspect the car.

They opened the trunk and found a tool box in it, which was locked and wrapped with a sanitary bandage. There were also cubes wrapped in foil with some mysterious gray powder, small disks, cylindrical metal objects, and mercury relays. The cops were greatly 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 in place, and state officials began consulting with the EPA and NRC.

In the barn, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a fireproof glass Pyrex cup, a milk bottle crate, and a host of other things that were contaminated with radiation levels that were a thousand times higher than natural. Since it could have been blown around the area by wind and rain, as well as the lack of preservation in the barn itself, according to the EPA memo, "this represented an imminent threat to public health."

After the workers in hazmat suits dismantled the barn, they piled what was left into 39 barrels, which were loaded onto trucks and transported to a burial site in the Great Salt Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were buried along with other radioactive debris.

“This was a situation that the regulation could not have foreseen,” said Dave Minaar, a radiological expert with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. in this region".

David Hahn is now in the Navy where he reads about steroids, melanin, the genetic code, reactor prototypes, 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've taken more than five years of my life."

I present to you an article on how to make a thermonuclear reactor their hands!

But first a few warnings:

This homemade uses life-threatening voltage during its work. To get started, make sure you are familiar with high voltage safety regulations or have a qualified electrician friend as an advisor.

The operation of the reactor will emit potentially dangerous levels of X-rays. Lead shielding of viewing windows is a must!

Deuterium that will be used in handicraft- explosive gas. That's why Special attention should be given to checking the tightness of the fuel compartment.

When working, follow the safety rules, do not forget to wear overalls and personal protective equipment.

List of required materials:

vacuum chamber;
forevacuum pump;
Diffusion pump;
High voltage power supply capable of delivering 40kV 10mA. Negative polarity must be present;
High-voltage divider - probe, with the ability to connect to a digital multimeter;
Thermocouple or baratron;
Neutron radiation detector;
Geiger counter;
Deuterium gas;
Large ballast resistor in the range of 50-100 kOhm and a length of about 30 cm;
Camera and television display to monitor the situation inside the reactor;
Lead coated glass;
General tools (, etc.).

Step 1: Assembly of the vacuum chamber

The project will require the manufacture of a high quality vacuum chamber.

Purchase two stainless steel hemispheres, flanges for vacuum systems. Drill holes for the auxiliary flanges and then weld it all together. O-rings made of soft metal are located between the flanges. If you have never brewed before, it would be wise to have someone with experience do the job for you. Because the welds must be flawless and free from defects. Then carefully clean the camera of fingerprints. Because they will pollute the vacuum and it will be difficult to keep the plasma stable.

Step 2: Preparing the High Vacuum Pump

Install a diffusion pump. Fill it with high-quality oil to the required level (the oil level is indicated in the documentation), fix the outlet valve, which is then connected to the chamber (see diagram). Attach the foreline pump. High vacuum pumps are not capable of operating from the atmosphere.

Connect the water to cool the oil in the working chamber of the diffusion pump.

Once everything is assembled, turn on the foreline pump and wait until the volume is pumped out to the preliminary vacuum. Next, we prepare the high vacuum pump for launch by turning on the “boiler”. After it warms up (may take a while), the vacuum will drop rapidly.

Step 3: Whisk

The whisk will be connected to high voltage wires, which will enter the working volume through the bellows. It is best to use a tungsten filament, as it has a very high temperature melting, and will remain intact for many cycles.

From a tungsten filament, it is necessary to form a "spherical whisk" approximately 25-38 mm in diameter (for a working chamber with a diameter of 15-20 cm) for the normal operation of the system.

The electrodes to which the tungsten wire is attached must be rated for a voltage of about 40 kV.

Step 4: Installing the gas system

Deuterium is used as fuel for a fusion reactor. You will need to purchase a tank for this gas. The gas is extracted from heavy water by electrolysis using a small Hoffmann apparatus.

Attach the high pressure regulator directly to the tank, add the micrometering needle valve, and then attach it to the chamber. The ball valve should be installed between the regulator and the needle valve.

Step 5: High Voltage

If you can purchase a power supply suitable for use in a fusion reactor, then there should be no problem. Simply take the 40 kV negative output electrode and attach it to the chamber with a large 50-100 kΩ high voltage ballast resistor.

The problem is that it is often difficult (if not impossible) to find a suitable DC source with a current-voltage characteristic that fully meets the stated requirements of an amateur scientist.

The photo shows a pair of high-frequency ferrite transformers, with a 4-stage multiplier (located behind them).

Step 6: Installing the Neutron Detector

Neutron radiation is a by-product of the fusion reaction. It can be fixed with three different devices.

bubble dosimeter a small gel device in which bubbles form during neutron ionization. The disadvantage is that it is an integrative detector that reports the total number of neutron emissions over the time that it was used (it is not possible to obtain data on the instantaneous neutron velocity). In addition, such detectors are quite difficult to buy.

active silver moderator [paraffin, water, etc.] located near the reactor becomes radioactive, emitting decent neutron fluxes. The process has a short half-life (only a few minutes), but if you put a Geiger counter next to silver, the result can be documented. The disadvantage of this method is that silver requires a fairly large neutron flux. In addition, the system is quite difficult to calibrate.

GammaMETER. The pipes can be filled with helium-3. They are like a Geiger counter. When neutrons pass through the tube, electrical impulses are registered. The tube is surrounded by 5 cm of "retardant material". This is the most accurate and useful neutron detection device, however, the cost of a new tube is outrageous for most people, and they are extremely rare on the market.

Step 7: Start the Reactor

It's time to turn on the reactor (don't forget to install the lead-coated sight glasses!). Turn on the foreline pump and wait until the chamber volume has been pumped out to prevacuum. Start the diffusion pump and wait for it to fully warm up and reach operating mode.

Shut off access of the vacuum system to the working volume of the chamber.

Slightly open the needle valve in the deuterium tank.

Raise the high voltage until you see plasma (it will form at 40 kV). Remember electrical safety rules.

If all goes well, you'll detect a burst of neutrons.

It takes a lot of patience to get the pressure up to the proper level, but once you get it right, it's pretty easy to manage.

Thank you for your attention!

Do-it-yourself nuclear power is possible. The Swedish police detained a 31-year-old resident of the city of Angelholm on charges of self-assembly of a nuclear reactor. The man was detained after he checked with local authorities whether the law forbids Swedish citizens to build nuclear reactors in the kitchen of their apartment. As the detainee explained, his interest in nuclear physics woke up in him in his teenage years.

A resident of Sweden began his experiment on building a nuclear reactor with his own hands at home half a year ago. The man received radioactive substances from abroad. Other necessary materials he extracted from the dismantled fire detector.

The man did not hide his intentions to build a nuclear reactor at home at all and even kept a blog about how he creates it.

Despite the complete openness of the experiment, the authorities learned about the activity of the Swede only a few weeks later - when he turned to the Swedish State Office for Nuclear Safety. At the office, the man hoped to find out if it was legal to build a nuclear reactor at home.

To this, the man was told that specialists would come to his house to measure the level of radiation. However, the police came along with them.

“When they arrived, the police were with them. I had a Geiger counter, I did not notice any problems with radiation, ”the detainee told the local newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad.

Police detained the man for questioning, where he later told law enforcement about his plans and was released.

The man told the newspaper that he managed to assemble an operating nuclear reactor at home with his own hands.

“To start generating electricity, you need a turbine and a generator, and it is very difficult to assemble it yourself,” the detainee said in an interview with a local newspaper.

Reportedly, the man spent about six thousand crowns on his project, which is approximately equal to $950.

After the police incident, he promised to focus on the "theoretical" aspects of nuclear physics.

Source: Gazeta.Ru

This is not the first case of building a nuclear reactor with your own hands at home.

Golf Manor, in Commerce, Michigan, which is 25 miles from Detroit, is one of those places where nothing out of the ordinary can happen. The only highlight during the day is the ice cream truck that comes around the corner. But June 26, 1995 was remembered by everyone for a long time.

Ask Dottie Pease about it. Walking down Pinto Drive, Pease saw about half a dozen people scurrying across the neighbor's lawn. Three of them, who were in respirators and "moon suits", dismantled the neighbor's barn with electric saws, put the pieces in large steel containers, on which there were signs of radioactive danger.

Having joined a bunch of other neighbors, Pease was seized by a feeling of anxiety: “I became very uncomfortable,” she later recalled. On that day, employees of the Environmental Protection Agency ( environmental protection Agency (EPA)) has publicly stated that there is nothing to worry about. But the truth was much more serious: the barn emitted dangerous amounts of radiation, and according to the EPA, about 40,000 residents in this town were at risk.

The sweep was instigated by a neighbor boy named David Hahn. At one time, he was engaged in a Boy Scout project, and then tried to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's barn.

great ambition

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

One night, their house in Clinton shook from a powerful explosion in the basement. Ken and Kathy found the little boy half-conscious, lying on the floor. It turned out that he was crushing some substance with a screwdriver, and it caught fire in him. He was rushed to the hospital where his eyes were washed.

Michael, however, recalled Dev once telling him, "We'll run out of oil someday."

Convinced that his son needed discipline, his 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 the Atomic Energy Science Badge in May 1991, five months after his 15th birthday. But now he had stronger ambitions.

Invented personality

He decided that he would be engaged in the translucence of everything that he could, and for this he needed to build a neutron "gun". To gain access to the radioactive materials needed to build and operate a nuclear reactor at home, the young nuclear scientist decided to use tricks from various high-profile magazine articles. He came up with a fictitious person.

When Samodelkin inquired about the risks of such work, Erb assured him "that the danger is negligible" because "possession of any radioactive material in quantities and forms capable of presenting a threat requires a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or an equivalent organization."

The resourceful inventor had read that tiny amounts of the radioactive isotope americium-241 could be found in smoke detectors. He contacted detector companies and told them that he needed a large number of these devices to complete a school project. One of the companies sold him about a hundred defective detectors for a dollar each.

The heating grid in a gas lantern is a small divider through which the flame passes. It is coated with a compound that included thorium-232. When bombarded with neutrons, the fissile isotope uranium - 233 was supposed to turn out of it. The young physicist purchased several thousand incandescent grids in various stores selling warehouse surpluses and burned them with a blowtorch into a pile of ash.

To isolate the thorium from the ashes, he purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and cut them all to pieces with metal shears. He wrapped lithium scraps and thorium ash in a ball of aluminum foil and heated it in the flame of a Bunsen torch. He isolated pure thorium at 9,000 times the amount found in nature and 170 times the level required by the NRC license. But the americium-based neutron gun was not powerful enough to turn thorium into uranium.

More help from NRC

For a new gun, he wanted to find radium. Dev began to scour the surrounding junkyards and antique shops looking for watches that used radium in the glowing dial paint. If such a watch came across to him, then he scraped off the paint from them and put it in a vial.

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 the eye of an old table clock. With a close "hack" of the watch, he found that he could scrape together a whole vial of radium paint. He bought a watch for $10.

Then he turned to radium and converted it into the form of salt. Whether he knew it or not, he was in danger at this moment.

To build a nuclear reactor at home, the inventor managed to find a certain amount of tar (uranium) blende, an ore in which uranium is contained in small quantities, and crushed it with a sledgehammer into dust. He aimed the beams from his cannon at the powder, in the hope that he would be able to get at least some fissile isotope. He didn't succeed. The neutrons that represented the projectiles in his cannon were moving too fast.

"Imminent Danger"

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

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

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

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

A federal plan to counter the radioactive threat was put in place, and state officials began consulting with the EPA and NRC.

In the barn, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a fireproof glass Pyrex cup, a milk bottle crate, and a host of other things contaminated with radiation levels that were a thousand times higher than natural. Since it could have been blown around the area by wind and rain, as well as the lack of preservation in the barn itself, according to the EPA memo, "this represented an imminent threat to public health."

After the workers in hazmat suits dismantled the barn, they piled what was left into 39 barrels, which were loaded onto trucks and transported to a burial site in the Great Salt Desert. There, the remains of experiments to build a nuclear reactor at home were buried along with other radioactive debris.

“This was a situation that the regulation could not have foreseen,” said Dave Minaar, a radiological expert with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. this area."

David Hahn is now in the Navy where he reads about steroids, melanin, the genetic code, prototype nuclear 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've taken more than five years of my life."

Why pay off so much dough to some hydroelectric power station 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, then without much difficulty you can buy a uranium tablet.

What you will need:

* Uranium 235 and 233 isotope tablet 1 cm thick

* Capacitor

* Zirconium

* Turbine

* Electricity generator

* Graphite rods

* Saucepan 5 - 7 liters

* Geiger counter

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

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

1 step

big uranium

The scheme that I will describe was used at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Now the atom is used in lighthouses, submarines, space stations. The reactor works due to the massive release of steam. The uranium 235 isotope gives off an incredible amount of heat, thanks to which we get steam from water. The reactor also emits large doses of radiation. The reactor is easy to assemble, even a teenager can do it. I immediately warn you that the chances of getting sick with radiation sickness or getting radioactive burns during self-assembly of the reactor are very high. Therefore, the instructions are for reference only.

2 step

First you need to find a place to assemble the reactor. Dacha is 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.

After 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 in the bottom of the saucepan. Then we pour hot lead over the saucepan so that the lead layer on the saucepan is at least 1 cm (do not touch the lid yet).

3 step

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 tube into the bottom. Insert graphite rods into tubes 0.55 cm long so that they reach the bottom of the saucepan.

4 step

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

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

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

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

5 step

Now very slowly pull the rods out until the water boils. The water temperature should not exceed 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 step

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