Desktop fusion is back?

[Meat Face]

this guy won't give up. good for him. I hope he gets it to work eventually.

 

Can the popping of tiny bubbles trigger nuclear fusion, a potential source of almost unlimited energy? This controversial idea is back on the table, because its main proponent has new results that, he claims, will silence critics. But others say that the latest experiment simply comes with its own set of problems.

 

The idea is simple enough. Blast a liquid with waves of ultrasound and tiny bubbles of gas are created, which release a burst of heat and light when they implode. The core of the bubble reaches 15,000 °C, hot enough to wrench molecules apart. Physicists have even suggested that the intense conditions of this sonoluminescence could fuse atomic nuclei together, in the same process that keeps our Sun running.

 

Physicist Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, published the first evidence of this 'sonofusion' in 2002; he has been dogged by sceptics ever since.

 

The underlying physics behind the idea is valid, says Ken Suslick. An expert in sonoluminescence at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Suslick tried and failed to replicate Taleyarkhan's first results. If the bubbles' collapse is sufficiently intense, it should indeed be able to crush atoms together. Taleyarkhan just hasn't done enough to prove it, says Suslick.