A home-made "working nuclear fusion reactor" has generated interest on TradeMe, but with no auction bids yet made.
"Forged from the depths of physics," the device was made in 2018 for a school science fair by former Marlborough Boys College student Samuel Lee, now selling it to pay for university.
"A mighty machine arose from a seemingly normal garage in suburban Blenheim," reads the post, which 644 people had added to their wish-list.
"After a year of working two part-time jobs, researching, and building, the science fair project was complete."
The post read that the machine currently works as a working plasma generator, and its purpose is currently "just to make nice purple light."
"The next step is for a very brave person to start a nuclear reaction with the deuterium and some silver ... the potential for the reactor is to produce neutrons for other projects."
Massey University Professor of Theoretical Physics Joachim Brand said the device was "pretty impressive" and creating nuclear reactors had become a popular hobby project for some.
They were originally invented in the 1930s for research, around the same time New Zealander Ernest Rutherford discovered nuclear fusion.
"It tries to reproduce in very small amounts the process that powers the sun," Brand said.
"Where hydrogen fuses together to become helium - that is a nuclear process in which mass is converted to energy and quite a lot of energy is produced.
"People hope that nuclear reactors may one day be used for energy production on earth as a clean energy source but this has not been achieved."
The purple glow created by the device, while not yet a nuclear reaction, was the result of plasma, he said.
"In fact, it's very similar to how fluorescent lights operate," he said.
"To generate a plasma that just means that atoms are ionised and nuclear ion electrons are separated, are very hot and in re-combining they produce light that you can see."
With the addition of deuterium, the reactor could produce helium and neutrons, but this kind of reaction was hard to detect.
Brand said the device would be most likely to generate interest among visitors, and be bought by someone with a similar fascination for physics. At the least, the purple light could be used as a very impressive decoration.
Lee told The Marlborough Express last year he had a fascination for carbon neutral power generation, and had won the school science fair in 2018 for his device.
He is also a talented violinist, winning a Queen Elizabeth II Award in Music and selected for New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's national youth orchestra last year.
