Science: Trying To Tame H-Bomb Power

Power Researchers rush to check out a possible breakthrough in fusion

The claim was so spectacular that it was difficult to believe. News reports suggested that scientists might have achieved the world's first controlled, energy-yielding nuclear-fusion reaction -- a Holy Grail of physics for nearly 40 years. Moreover, the event had not occurred in one of the great national laboratories; it was the work of a pair of chemists operating on a shoestring budget and using little more than a test tube, a pencil-thin strip of metal and a car battery. Even more incredible was the assertion that this humble apparatus, fueled with a form of hydrogen found in ordinary seawater, had...

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