USA FAST TRACKS NUCLEAR SOLUTION

The United States will spend US$420 million in an all out attempt to fast track nuclear fusion energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

President Bush wants congress to approve spending on what nuclear engineers refer to as the "holy grail" of clean energy technology, as the world's biggest emission producing country comes to grips with global warming and the likely affects of impending climate change.

Nuclear fusion fuses atoms together to produce energy, which unlike conventional nuclear fission reactors, has no radioactive waste nor can the process be used to ignite an atomic bomb.

The sun produces nuclear fusion by fusing hydrogen atoms into a heavier helium atom. The solar phenomenon changes the weight of mass resulting in a super hot energy called plasma - the fourth state of matter.

As well as providing the ultimate solution to global warming by overcoming planet-heating greenhouse gases, a breakthrough in fusion technology would eliminate most of the world's pollution problems and remove one of the main causes of wars - scarcity of fuel.

However, despite the enormous potential of nuclear fusion, plasma technologists caution that nuclear fusion has promised a lot since the 1930's but has delivered very little as a commercially viable energy.

President of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Eric Lerner, who has received financial backing from NASA believes the breakthrough into producing commercially viable nuclear fusion energy will come from technology that uses exceptionally powerful magnetic fields to heat gas to fusion temperatures.

Lerner is confident that his company's "dense fusion focus" approach will - within the next six years - produce the first fusion powered five-megawatt generator. The compact fusion power plant "will be the size of garage," asserts Lerner.