Is it possible to build an atom smasher in your backyard? Michio Kaku once said that He build an atom smasher in his garage as a science fair project in high school. He said he used 400 pounds of transformer steel and 22 miles of copper wire. But I would like to know how he did it exactly?  Can you give me more details about it ?
Not : Kaku said he built a betatronic accelerator. How is that possible at home ?
 A: The device is hyped up a bit by articles such as Astounding School project.  It's more like a super Cathode Ray Tube than any sort of mini  LHC.

Image source: above link.
To quote the man himself:

And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”

So the magic words "atom smasher" were used by Kaku himself, in his book on String theory "Hyperphysics" (and possibly that is an apt description).
But when it was plugged in, it knocked out many domestic fuses  in the surrounding neighborhood. 
I think Kaku is slightly tongue in cheek / self disparaging when he calls it an atom smasher, and this, allied with the complaining neighbors, makes me  doubt if he got the chance to run it very often to smash atoms.
A: I do imagine he is exaggerating this claim however on the same note I have built a betatron from a plain incandescent light bulb using the driver from a plasma globe and two speaker magnets. That is a cakewalk. I also attempted to build a ten thousand volt transformer as a driver to a tesla coil. That failed as I had not enough iron for the magnetic flux. I caused a brown out every time I ran it. It did produce enough voltage to break two inches of air though. That kind of set up though is expensive. About the miles of copper. Yeah I can relate took me eight hours to wind one by hand for the secondary for my tesla coil I used 38 guage about as fine a thread as my hair for perspective.
