Energy from a mminiature Sun?

You may be interested in this because it involves big money, and it's kind of interesting.
Mark Levinson and David Kaplan have produced a movie concerning the European Union's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC, which is located near Geneva, Switzerland, is said to be the biggest machine ever built by human beings.
The movie, which is entitled "Particle Fever" opens this month in selected theaters across the US and Canada. It is reviewed by Mitch Jacoby in the March 17 issue of Chemical and Engineering News.
The Hadron Collider cost $6.4 billion to build plus another $2 billion in extras. Operating cost is $26 million per year. For the initial cost, US taxpayers put up $531 million through the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The UK puts up a little more than the annual operating costs, but most of the initial cost went to the member countries of the EU.
The basic purpose for building the collider was to obtain information which hopefully could be used to develop fusion energy. The operation primarily involves sending various particles around a 17 mile track, where they collide with other particles moving in the opposite direction. The particles are mostly nuclei of atoms and the known sub-particles, such as protons, neutrons, positrons, etc.. The search has been for a theoretical Higgs boson, which presumably would result from the collision of the other larger particles. The team operating the collider announced in July 2012 that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. It's now your best guess as to how confirmation of the Higgs boson leads to the development of fusion energy.
Perhaps a little discussion of atomic energy would be appropriate to determine the validity of a program of this magnitude.
Most of man's produced energy comes from chemical reactions, which involve only the electron portions of an atom. The central nuclear portion of the item remains unaffected. However, it was discovered that if a large enough quantity of certain atomic nuclei, such as uranium 235 were bombarded with electrons, the nuclei could be made to break into portions with elimination of a huge amount of heat. This is the basis of the atomic bomb and subsequent development of electricity production by use of atomic energy.
The thought was then generated as to whether a fusion of two nuclei to form a third type of nucleus would also liberate a tremendous amount of energy. This thought had some basis by considering the mechanism by which our sun and various other suns operate to continue delivering heat to their various planets. It has been postulated that the sun is composed primarily of hydrogen, which has a single proton as the nucleus. Because of the sun's tremendous size, a huge gravitational pressure develops at the core. The pressure forces the protons of two hydrogen atoms into a nucleus of helium, which consists of two protons. In the process, significant heat is liberated.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could harness that reaction and obtain huge quantities of heat for conversion to electricity? That really was the basis of the Hadron collider. The bad news is that the world is no closer to atomic fusion than it was before the expenditure of about $9 billion. The good news is that even though the US has dumped $531 million into a project from which there have been no results, at least it was smart enough to not go into this project on its own. However, it was close. An even larger collider than the Hadron was proposed near Waxahachie, Texas. Fortunately, Congress in its wisdom, decided not to fund it.
Does this mean it's not possible to develop a controllable atomic fusion process? Not necessarily, but highly improbable to the extent that the spending of billions of dollars on colliders appears unjustified. It is apparent that atomic fusion is a way of life from our sun in our solar system and presumably other suns in other solar systems. However, we also know that all those suns, which are presumably operating on the basis of atomic fusion are huge in size with tremendous gravitational forces. No one has ever seen a small sun operating on atomic fusion.
The development of an controllable atomic fusion process is conceptually feasible. However, it is more in the category of the search for the Holy Grail, which is likely more imaginary than factual.