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.
Nazoordeen says he was able to build the reactor with “zero hardware experience.” To get started, he spent one week sourcing and figuring out all of the different components he would need to create the reactor. During the second week, he assembled the main chamber and the rectifier circuit. Once week three arrived, he was ready to set the entire thing up in his bedroom and then start tinkering with integrating the neon transformer that was meant to power it.
in a couple weeks, i built a nuclear fusor in my bedroom – with zero hardware experience the secret? Claude sonnet 3.5 + projects a glimpse into the process below pic.twitter.com/H4261f5bCy
Halfway through that third week, though, Nazoordeen says he struggled to figure out how to crack the vacuum system needed for the entire system to work. He says that was the most annoying part of the project, and he eventually achieved it. The result of all that hard work was a homemade fusion reactor actually capable of creating plasma.
