Toward Practical Fusion, sonofusion in UCLA

LOS ANGELES — Brian Kappus, a physics graduate student at U.C.L.A., tipped the clear cylinder to trap some air bubbles in the clear liquid inside. He clamped the cylinder, upright, on a small turntable and set it spinning. With the flip of another switch, powerful up-and-down vibrations, 50 a second, started shaking the cylinder.

A bubble floating in the liquid — phosphoric acid — started to shine, brightening into an intense ball of light like a miniature star.

The shining bubble did not produce any significant energy, but perhaps someday it might, just like a star. A few small companies and maverick university laboratories, including this one at U.C.L.A. run by Seth Putterman, a professor of physics, are pursuing quixotic solutions for future energy, trying to tap the power of the Sun — hot nuclear fusion — in devices that fit on a tabletop.

Dr. Putterman’s approach is to use sound waves, called sonofusion or bubble fusion, to expand and collapse tiny bubbles, generating ultrahot temperatures. At temperatures hot enough, atoms can literally fuse and release even more energy than when they split in nuclear fission, now used in nuclear power plants and weapons. Furthermore, fusion is clean in that it does not produce long-lived nuclear waste.

The appeals of fusion are many: no planet- warming gases, no radioactive-waste headache, plentiful fuel. Even though only 1 out of 6,000 hydrogen atoms in sea water molecules is the heavier deuterium, that is enough to last billions of years.

“One bucket of water out of the ocean or a lake or a river has 200 gallons of gasoline worth of energy in it,” Mr. Tessien said. “It’s the holy grail of energy technologies, and everybody has the fuel for free.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/science/27fusion.html?_r=4&ref=science&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Further reading:
(a) http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/03/high_school_stu.html
(b) http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/20/20585/1.html