Did Hudhayfa Nazoordeen build a fusion reactor?

Question

A BGR article (and others) claims A student built a fusion reactor at home in just 4 weeks using $2,000 and AI.

A math student has achieved the unthinkable. In just four weeks, Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, a math student at the University of Waterloo, has created a small homemade fusion reactor using parts he bought for $2,000, with the help of Claude—Anthropic’s AI chatbot.

But their evidence is scant.

The result of all that hard work was a homemade fusion reactor actually capable of creating plasma.

Neon signs make plasma, they're not fusion reactors.

Later, the article seems to contradict their own headline.

Of course, it isn’t actually capable of inducing fusion at this time, as it doesn’t technically emit neutrons.

If it isn't capable of inducing fusion, in what way is it a fusion reactor?

Answer 1

TL;DR

The articles are a somewhat confused description of what's happened. The short version is that Nazordeen claims to have built a device called a "fusor", which can cause nuclear fusion if powerful enough, but he specifically says he hasn't gotten fusion yet. It's pretty likely he did actually build one, from the evidence on his twitter account and the general plausibility of building a fusor.

Fusors

Fusors have existed for a long time. There's a patent published in 1968, and prototypes were built around the same time. The wikipedia page for them is pretty good. The short version is that they use a large electric field to accelerate ions into each other in a vacuum. If you have a good enough vacuum and a large enough electric field, the ions will collide and fuse. If you don't, you'll just get a plasma. This looks pretty cool; see this photo from Nazordeen's twitter:

Fusors are not currently believed to be a plausible way of generating energy. No design has ever demonstrated more energy from nuclear fusion than it takes to keep the plasma trapped; they typically have low fusion rates. But they are surprisingly easy to construct at home so there's an amateur community dedicated to constructing them. Here are some examples.

Nazordeen's Device

Nazordeen has several photos of something that looks a lot like a fusor making plasma on his twitter thread:

Building a fusor isn't trivial but it's not groundbreaking. As demonstrated in previous links, they've been built by high school students before. I can't 100% guarantee that Nazordeen has a fusor based on the pictures he's put up, but there's enough documentation that I think it's unlikely it's fake.

It's worth noting that Nazordeen had help; it sounds like he has several friends with electronics experience who assisted.

Nazordeen also explicitly says it's not doing nuclear fusion: .