MAKE ELECTRICITY, NOT WAR

A decidedly different kind of nuclear power

Ralph Moir, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has spent
the past three decades trying to harness nuclear fusion--the energy of the
stars--for electric power generation. Moir has explored the two leading
approaches: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Sadly, achieving
fusion has proved elusive.

Moir wondered whether there might be an easier route to fusion. He teamed up
with Livermore's Abraham Szoke to investigate a radical proposition: setting off
thermonuclear bombs in a steel-lined underground cavity and using the heat from
the blast to create steam that would drive a turbine generator. Moir and Szoke
figure they'd have to set off a three-kiloton explosion--less than a quarter of
the yield of the Hiroshima bomb--every hour to match the electricity produced by
a large power plant. Moir doesn't yet advocate the concept because he still
lacks safety and economic analyses. ``But this is something we can do today,
unlike other fusion strategies, which is why we ought to think about it.''

Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion expert Martin Greenwald is
skeptical. ``It's hard enough to find sites for toxic-waste dumps,'' he says.
``Who's going to want nuclear explosives going off every hour on the hour?''

Moir admits he hasn't found a groundswell of support. ``If there is an active
constituency out there, I still haven't heard from it.''