A 20 year-old built a nuclear fusion prototype in his home for $2,000. Here’s how he did it.

Hudhayfa Nazoordeen had never worked with electronics before he took on the task of building a nuclear fusion prototype from scratch.

Hudhayfa Nazoordeen has worked on commercial-sized greenhouses and A-frame homes, but the 20-year-old’s latest construction is much smaller: a nuclear fusion prototype that’s about the size of a hand.

When turned on, the device generates a hot, gaseous orb of glowing plasma — the same state of matter that makes up our sun. It looks like it belongs in a high-tech lab, not a student’s bedroom.

The nuclear fusion prototype generates a glowing orb of plasma. 

Nazoordeen, a mathematics student at the University of Waterloo, built the device in four weeks over the summer with parts he mostly ordered online. He said he spent about $2,000 from start to finish.

“This is something out of the ordinary for me,” Nazoordeen told B-17.

He’d never worked on electrical projects before and isn’t looking to start a career in nuclear physics. He said he built the device because it was fun.

“I can prove it to myself at least that I can make it. And I think that’s a fun part about it,” he said.

Nuclear fusion reactors that can generate fusion are usually much larger, like this now-retired Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at PPPL. 

Nuclear fusion is what powers our sun and thermonuclear weapons. It occurs when atomic nuclei merge, or fuse, together, producing a great deal of energy.

If we could harness fusion power, it would generate nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal. That’s why scientists worldwide have been trying for decades to build a device that can sustain nuclear fusion for long periods of time.

Nazoordeen’s nuclear device is a prototype. It can’t produce nuclear fusion, but it can achieve plasma, which is where nuclear fusion takes place and is a major step in the overall process. To get that plasma to reach a state where it’s fusing atoms would require a more powerful device and a larger budget.

How Nazoordeen made his nuclear fusion prototype from scratch

Nazoordeen wasn’t afraid to ask for help.

He got instructions from online forums like Fusor.net, and asked friends and roommates for their assistance. He took Ubers to talk in person with experts. He also used the AI assistant Claude, which was especially helpful in keeping him alive.

Nazoordeen said his friends and roommates were extremely helpful in getting the project to the finish line. 

“I’d ask Claude, ‘Should I do this dumb thing where I put this inside the plug point?’ And it’d be like absolutely not,” he said, adding that the project had the potential to be dangerous.

“If something wasn’t grounded properly and you mess it up, you would die,” he said. “So even when we were building it, we were always just standing back and using a stick to make sure things were completely grounded.”

Everything you need to make a nuclear fusion prototype can probably fit on your desk (banana included).

He couldn’t find the right transformer online after ordering a few and discovering they didn’t work. “Eventually, what I did was I just called every single neon sign store in the city because they sell this certain type of transformer called a neon sign transformer, which is very high voltage,” he said.

He took an Uber to a supplier an hour away and the device worked the same day. “It was a great feeling, albeit very hard to find,” he said.

Building prototypes like this isn’t easy, said Carlos Paz-Soldan, an associate professor of applied physics at Columbia University who wasn’t involved with Nazoordeen’s project.

“That student is very capable,” Paz-Soldan told B-17, adding that, “You wouldn’t find your average student being able to do this.”

While these devices don’t have much real-world value, they’re excellent learning tools. “The students who are doing this learn a lot of relevant skills. They learn about high voltage, they learn about vacuum, and those are the ingredients for fusion systems at larger scale,” Paz-Soldan said.

Nazoordeen’s next goal is to build another device that can actually generate nuclear fusion. He predicts it’ll cost about $10,000.

Between being a student, having a job, and interning at the language model provider Cohere, he’s not sure where he’ll find the time, but he’s excited to get started.