Amateur has his own fusion reactor

BROOKLYN, N.Y., June 23 (UPI) -- A New York Web developer sheds his Clark Kent-type persona at night to become a Superman-type tinkerer on his own nuclear fusion reactor, observers say.

When Mark Suppes finishes work at Gucci, he cycles to his lab in a Brooklyn borough warehouse on a tree-lined street to continue his work to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, the BBC reported Wednesday.

Suppes, 32, is one of an allegedly growing community of amateur scientists working on the "holy grail" of producing clean and cheap energy: a way of making fusion reactors produce more energy than they take to run.

"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 said.

"I'm not sure I'd like that living right next to me," said Brooklyn resident Stephen Davis.

Neighbors might be put off by the thought of a nuclear reactor next door, but: "As long as they [private citizens] obtain that material [the components of the reactor] legally, they could do whatever they want," said Anne Stark, senior public information officer for California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"There is no chance of any kind of accident with fusion," said Neil Calder, communications chief for Iter, a multinational project demonstrating the feasibility of fusion power.

"There's no CO2 pollution, there's no greenhouse gases, you can't use it for proliferation [the spread of nuclear weapons] -- it has so many advantages," he said.