By day, Mark Suppes is a web developer for fashion giant Gucci. By night, he cycles to a New York warehouse and tinkers with his own nuclear fusion reactor.
The warehouse is a non-descript building on a tree-lined Brooklyn street, across the road from blocks of apartments, with a grocery store on one corner. But in reality, it is a lab.
In a hired workshop on the third floor, a high-pitched buzz emanates from a corner dotted with metal scraps and ominous-looking machinery, as Mr Suppes fires up his device and searches for the answer to a question that has eluded some of the finest scientific minds on the planet.
In nuclear fusion, atoms are forcibly joined, releasing energy. It is, say scientists, the "holy grail" of energy production - completely clean and cheap.
The problem is, no-one has found a way of making fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume to run.
'I was inspired'
Mr Suppes, 32, is part of a growing community of "fusioneers" - amateur science junkies who are building homemade fusion reactors, for fun and with an eye to being part of the solution to that problem.
He is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net. Others on the list include a 15-year-old from Michigan and a doctoral student in Ohio.
"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," Mr Suppes told the BBC.
While they might un-nerve the neighbours, fusion reactors of this kind are perfectly legal in the US.
"Real researchers that are working at Los Alamos [US Department of Energy National Laboratory] and are working at Lawrence Livermore are following this and commenting on it, even though it's not an officially sanctioned project," he says.
Tricky situation
Mr Suppes sees his work in nuclear fusion as more than just a hobby, and he intends to try to build one of the world's first break-even reactors - a facility producing as much energy as it uses to operate.
"He now has to go out and do what everybody else has to do, which is to convince people to invest in his project - whether its government funding or private funding to carry him through," said Mr Calder.
Mr Suppes is hoping to build a break-even reactor from plans created by the late Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist who drew up plans for a fusion reactor that could convert hydrogen and boron into electricity.
Work on a scaled up version of a Bussard reactor, funded by the US Navy, has already been taking place in California.
But Mr Suppes believes he will be able to raise the millions of dollars it takes to build a Bussard reactor because he feels someone with enough money "will feel they cannot pass up the opportunity" to find out if it will work.
Iter said it would be wrong to dismiss out of hand the notion that an amateur could make a difference.
"I won't say something that puts these guys down, but it's a tricky situation because there is a great deal of money and time and a lot of very experienced scientists working on fusion at the moment," said Mr Calder.
"But that does not eliminate other ideas coming from a different group of people."
What neighbours say
For Mr Suppes, convincing the experts is one thing. Convincing the locals is another problem entirely.
"A homemade nuclear fusion reactor being built in Brooklyn - I would have thought there would be some sort of rules and laws about messing around with nuclear fusion in your apartment," said Brooklyn resident Stephen Davis. "I'm not sure I'd like that living right next to me."
"The fact that he's trying to form a new kind of energy is all well and good," said another local, Christopher Wright. "But without the proper scientific work behind it, I don't know if it's too good of an idea."
But others had a more positive outlook on Mr Suppes' reactor.
"I think it's a good idea. If a guy can make an invention like that, it should definitely be spread around so we don't need to depend on oil," Brooklynite Chris Stephens told the BBC.
"We need to do something that's new and more creative for society."
source : BBC news
