This Man Built A Fusion Reactor In His Basement

To those not in the know, Douglas Coulter might look like he’s right out of Deliverance, but the truth is, he’s a former member of the US Government Intelligence community who is an accomplished engineer, gunsmith and racecar driver.

Deep in rural Virginia, Coulter lives in his solar powered house from where he runs an open-source engineering consulting firm. What’s that? Well here’s how he described it:

We essentially exist to reveal trade secrets. Secrets allow the electrical plating company to sell you three gallons of copper plating solution, which is $6 worth of chemicals, for $500. What I’ve managed to do is collect a bunch of other guys like me and get them to tell their secrets.

When he’s not working as a highly respected gunsmith, his big project is cracking the puzzle that is Nuclear Fusion.

“Big science has been failing at this miserably. They aren’t able to do anything quickly. It’s always meetings and bureaucracy, and here it’s just ‘can I make fusion work? We’re no longer talking decades now, we’re talking years. We put in heavy water or protons and lithium, and we’re going to come out with more power than what we put in.

If this works, I’m about to anger several trillion-dollar-a-year businesses.

The best part is that he’s doing the entire thing open-sourced so that the knowledge will be public and it can’t be hoarded by any of the power companies or governments.

Source: Motherboard