[White Tiger]

Quote

Reports that the bubble had burst for a form of cheap, table-top nuclear fusion may have been premature. Rusi Taleyarkhan, the physicist at the centre of a furore surrounding so-called bubble fusion, was last week cleared of scientific misconduct.

In 2002, Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and now at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, published a paper in Science claiming that bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sound waves produced tiny bubbles that triggered nuclear fusion reactions. Then in March 2006, Purdue began investigating allegations of misconduct against Taleyarkhan, amid accusations that the evidence of fusion he reported was actually caused by a radioactive isotope of californium.

http://www.newscient...with-a-pop.html

[Woodmansee]

I'm a bit skeptical. What they don't know is whether there is really a little fusion going on or not - I suspect it is not. What I think is that the sonic energy prompts a small hydrogen oxygen burning reaction - just chemistry. Fusion, especially if it is just ordinary hydrogen not duterium or tritium, is harder to achieve.

Here is the key quotation of the story, emphasis mine, "Dr. Putterman of U.C.L.A. and Mr. Tessien of Impulse Devices are perhaps furthest from success. They have yet to show fusion occurring. The phenomenon of glowing light as the sound-driven bubbles expand and collapse has been known since the 1930s, leading to speculation, but not proof, that the bubbles would perhaps be compressed so violently that trapped atoms might fuse."

There are lots of ideas for fusion and maybe I'm wrong and there is some fusion going on here. But the energy to create the sonic bubbles is more than the energy released. Proponents claim that if they could just spend a hundred million or so on research they could show positive energy output on a full scale model. Other nuclear physicist are doubtful and no one is willing to spend that kind of money to take a long shot chance.

So the short answer is no one knows exactly what is happening here, but I doubt it is fusion. It should be easy to prove fusion by capturing the bubbles and seeing if there is helium in them. Hydrogen fusion will generate helium, and only fusion will generate the helium - a chemical reaction of H2 and O2 just generates more water. Since they haven't been able to prove fusion, and I suspect that they have looked for helium, then I think it isn't fusion. Put proponents will say that the amount of fusion is so small that it is below the level of detection (which is probably true as the resulting energy is obviously very small). So who knows.

Paul