Sauce: Extreme DIY: Building a homemade nuclear reactor in NYC

This guy is a genius. $40k to create something similar to what governments and scientific organisations spend millions & billions of dollars on.

When I saw the headlines, “New Yorker builds nuclear reactor”, I was expecting to read of a man coming under fire for terrorist like acts… I was surprised to read otherwise.

Of course, this is all around about 2 days old in news terms, and it has allegedly already gone viral, as self proclaimed by the Fusor website here

Reading this got me onto reading up on nuclear fusion, and how it is used to generate power. The concept is simple, create heat, use heat to create steam from water, use steam to propel generator turbine.

I ask, however, is the turbine generator the most efficient method of generating electricity? It got me thinking back to my senior-physics classes. How else can you generate power?

Maybe a dumb idea, maybe the smartest, but what if the reactor produced electromagnetic waves or radiation? Could this be harnessed in some way, in addition to the heat generated by the reactor?

Generator theory is that an electromagnetic force inside of an induction coil (I’m not 100% sure on the terminology, or the theory, this is just off the top of my head), can produce electrons to flow through the induction coil, thus producing electricity. Or thereabouts.

Can this theory be applied to electromagnetic radiation? Would a big a$$ induction coil looped around the reactor produce an electrical current?

If I had the money, and the answers, I’d be testing this for myself…