Home-made nuclear reactor

A Gucci web designer has built his own homemade nuclear fusion reactor in a New York warehouse.

Mark Suppes, 32, hired a workshop on the third floor of the warehouse, in Brooklyn, for his project, reports the BBC.

He is part of a growing community of amateur 'fusioneers' who are building homemade fusion reactors to search for the holy grail of energy production.

Nuclear fusion, in which energy is created by forcibly joining atoms, is completely clean and cheap.

The only problem is that - so far - nobody has built a reactor which produces more energy than it consumes to run.

Mr Suppes is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net.

"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," he said.

While they might un-nerve the neighbours, fusion reactors of this kind are perfectly legal in the US.

"As long as they obtain that material legally, they could do whatever they want," says Anne Stark, senior public information officer for California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Scientists say devices like Mr Suppes' pose no real threat to neighbouring communities or the environment because they contain no nuclear materials, such as uranium or plutonium.