“‘This is something you’re going to tell your grandchildren about,’ the spokeswoman said on a recent tour of the lab. “You were here when they were about to get fusion ignition. ‘It’s like standing on the hill watching the Wright brothers’ plane go by.’” CNN’s John Sutter checks in with Livermore Labs’s National Ignition Facility, a few months shy of a long-awaited experiment in nuclear fusion.
If it works, it’ll be big doings, obviously, although we’re still several decades away from a miracle energy source even by the most optimistic predictions. “‘One gallon of seawater would provide the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline; fuel from 50 cups of water contains the energy equivalent of two tons of coal,’ the Livermore project’s website says.“