This time it's fusor.net regular Frank Sans featured featured in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
In the ordinary-looking garage of a home outside Pittsburgh, Frank
Sanns is creating the power of the sun, with his "Pillar of Fire."
Moving between pieces equipment on a work bench and the floor, Sanns adjusts knobs and turns valves, while a vacuum pump hums and sucks air out of his creation: a tabletop nuclear fusion reactor.
"I need to get the air inside the chamber down to outer space conditions," Sanns said. The chemist-turned-banquet hall proprietor always wears a dosimeter, which measures radiation — just in case — he said.
Sanns is among about 100 amateur physicists, inquisitive types and out-of-the-box thinkers, many of which call themselves "fusioneers," who swap stories of where to buy power sources, vacuum chambers and deuterium gas.
They also pass along the results of their experiments in fusing hydrogen atoms. The process, if sustained, generates tremendous energy.
Scientists have chased fusion for about 50 years. The problem is not with creating fusion, the fusing of particles smaller than an atom. The problem is maintaining the process in a controlled way.
Well, yeah, it's a problem, if you're trying to "maintain the process" the wrong way, like, with giant energy-sucking magnets or lasers.
Read the whole article, it's a comprehensive overview of the topic (even if it doesn't have a link anywhere to this site).
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