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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (10075)	12/21/1999 8:55:00 AM
From: JPR	Respond to of 12475

Dipy: CAG drops a bombshell on DRDO December 17, 1999 Josy Joseph in New Delhi Finally, it is the turn of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, the cash-rich developer of military technology and weapon systems, to answer some embarrassing questions. search.nytimes.com Since late August, an effort to build the world's largest laser has suffered a series of embarrassments that have tarnished the project's reputation and undermined its role as a leading justification for a ban on nuclear tests. Now Energy Secretary Bill Richardson says the entire project and its management may have to be restructured, amid soaring cost overruns. And at least one senator has raised questions about whether tiny nuclear explosions to be triggered by the lasers would violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., as the project is known, powerful lasers would be used to create conditions similar to those in nuclear weapons, allowing scientists to study the reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile without tests. The lasers, under construction at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, would crush and heat pellets of nuclear fuel with 192 converging beams, generating a rapid release of fusion energy. That release would create conditions similar to those created by nuclear weapons, allowing scientists to study their properties. Government scientists say that the laser project is a crucial component of the nation's effort to ensure the safety and reliability of its aging nuclear stockpile without actually testing the weapons in nuclear explosions. Beyond its applications to weapons, moreover, physicists hope that the project will help them understand the behavior of materials under extreme conditions and explore the possibility that nuclear fusion could be used for the peaceful generation of power.