New York, NY – Nuclear Reactor Being Built in Brooklyn Warehouse

Brooklyn, NY – A web designer for fashion house Gucci surprised his neighbors by revealing he built a nuclear reactor in a Brooklyn warehouse, the BBC reported today.

Mark Suppes, a 32-year-old amateur physicist with a passion for sustainable energy, constructed the $40,000 homemade fusion reactor in his spare time.

He is the 38th independent physicist in the word to achieve nuclear fusion from a self-built reactor and forms part of a growing community of “fusioneers.” These brainiacs are trying to discover how to produce energy by fusion, a process that currently consumes more energy to run than it creates.

In nuclear fusion, atoms are forcibly joined, releasing energy. It is, say scientists, the holy grail of energy production, being completely clean and cheap. The problem lies in finding a way of making fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume to run, an issue that scientists amateur and professional still haven’t overcome.

“I was inspired because I believed I was looking at a technology that could actually work to solve our energy problems, and I believed it was something that I could at least begin to build,” Suppes told the BBC.

As if the men of this city don’t have to compete enough — or if Williamsburg’s Finest won’t also start trying this, leading their way towards the inevitable Sunday Styles piece about Hipster Nuclear Reactors (and also, Brooklyn’s Chernobyl) — this Suppes guy is apparently the 38th amateur nuclear scientist to achieve nuclear fusion, which he does, by the way, without nuclear material. And what does this nuclear reactor do?

Basically, it smacks energy together to fuse it, and creates more energy by doing so, and this might save the world (or something) without using bad nuclear material and creating bad nuclear waste. To get it going, and to get the reactor pumping out a bunch of energy, it first extracts a bunch of air out of a chamber, pumps a safe gas (that he probably buys in Jersey) into it, and then, uh, runs 10,000 volts of energy into the safe gas (that he probably buys in Jersey). Which he does by standing back and hit a switch — because you don’t want to be near it, because radiation comes from the energy — and then a bubble appears in a tube, and that’s how we know that nuclear energy exists.

Of course, the Brooklynites interviewed are cautious, but mostly curious if not impressed and likely to defend this young man’s unalienable right to conduct scary-sounding science experiments that might save the world down their block. Besides, if you can make nuclear fision here, you can make it anywhere. Or something.

While it may concern those close to his makeshift lab, fusion reactors are perfectly legal in the U.S. and pose no radioactive threat, as unlike nuclear fission reactions, they do not require uranium or plutonium fuel.