Iron Man's Arc Reactor in Real Life

Tony Stark uses Iron Man suit to fight his enemies. The suit gives Tony Stark superhuman strength, repulsors, and flight. It also has an A.I. called Jarvis who helps Tony Stark operating the suit. All of these functionalities need to run on some kind of power source. Preferably a portable and light power source yet capable of producing huge amount of energy. In Iron Man movies the power source called "arc reactor". 

Ever since watching the first iron man live action movie in 2008, i am always interested in this arc reactor technology. I can imagine what it can do for the world if this technology does exist. It has the potential to solve our energy crisis

Scientists in Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim that they have came up with a commercially viable design of fusion reactor.The fusion reactor is donut shaped similar to the arc reactor seen in Tony Stark factory. Named ARC, the planned reactor will be tokamak and would generate as much energy as  larger designs. If the technique is perfected, it would provide an inexhaustible source of energy and solve the world's energy crisis. You can read more about this interesting news here.

How Arc Reactor (Probably) Works

There is never any official "scientific" explanation of how arc reactor works in iron man canon. All we can do is take an educated guess. fortunately there is a guy named Ryan Carlyle  from Gizmodo who gave quite a realistic explanation of how the arc reactor would work in real life. Still he warned us that he might mixed real science with comic book science. His Explanation is based on Iron Man movies in Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Basically the arc reactor is a fusion reactor which generate an electromagnetic field and a clean energy. The lack of cooling loop or turbines suggests that the arc reactor is not  a hot-fusion reactor or a traditional thermal-fusion reactor, instead it's a cold-fusion reactor that generate electricity directly rather than generating heat first. This makes sense since hot-fusion reactor would burn Tony Stark's chest.

The arc reactor uses palladium as its core. Palladium has been  proposed as a substrate for "cold" fusion that does not need hot plasmas and containment toroids, but this concept is widely discredited in the real world. One of palladium's isotopes, Pd-107, produces silver when it undergoes beta decay process. it releases an electron when a neutron becomes a proton. usually there would be no net electrical current when the electron is released, because the released electron balances out the proton count between the palladium and silver. In this situation Carlyle proposed that Howard Stark came up with a way (using comic book physics)  to capture the electron that's released, which would generate an electric current. Carlyle also theorizes how Tony Stark got poisoned by the palladium. The proposed palladium decay reactions produce rhodium and silver. Excess internal silver is known to stain skin blue.Rhodium compounds also stain skin, and are highly toxic. And because most people never really have rhodium poisoning, It is poorly understood and doctors wouldn't know how to deal with it. That's why Tony Stark didn't seek help from any medical establishment. You can read Ryan Carlyle full and detailed explanation about arc reactor here.