Will
It Save Or Destroy The Earth?
Scientists At
Government Lab To Find Out By
Setting Off
Nuclear Reaction So Intense It Will
Make A
Star Bloom On Surface Of The Earth
The Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory's
formula for cooking up a sun on the
ground
may sound like it's stolen from the
plot of
an "Austin Powers" movie. But it's
no Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious
experiment will be tried for real,
and for
the first time, late this summer. If
they're
successful, the scientists hope to
solve the
global energy crisis by harnessing
the
energy generated by the mini-star.
The lab's
venture has doubters, to be sure.
Nuclear
fusion, the type of high-energy
reaction the
California researchers hope to
produce, has
been a scientific pipe dream for at
least a
half-century. It's been pitched as a
miracle
power source. But it hasn't yielded
many
results. To make matters worse, the
U.S.
Government Accountability Office
this month
released an audit of the lab's work
that
cites delays and mismanagement as
reasons
it's unlikely the scientists will
create a
fusion reaction this year. But
researchers
in Livermore, about an hour's drive
east of
San Francisco, say it's not a matter
of if
but when their laser-saves-the-Earth
experiment will be proved
successful.