A NUCLEAR fusion laboratory designed to recreate the temperatures and pressures inside the sun could be built in Oxfordshire under plans being drawn up by British scientists The aim is to build the world’s most powerful lasers and use them to blast tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel to create energy.

The process could, say the researchers, be a partial solution to the world’s energy crisis, offering a source of safe, carbon-free power with a minimum of radio-active waste.

“The aim is to destroy matter by turning it into pure energy,” said Dr John Collier, head of the high power laser programme (HiPER) at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which was launched last week. “This is the same process that powers the stars. Our task is to find how to control it to offer humanity a new source of energy.”

HiPER, would place Britain at the forefront of research on nuclear fusion, now enjoying a global revival after decades of neglect. The Rutherford laboratory, in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is seen as the most likely site.

In France construction work has begun on a separate experiment, the £8 billion Iter fusion project that uses magnetic fields, not lasers, to create the conditions for fusion. The first “burn” at Iter is expected around 2022.

It also coincides with the start-up of America’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, which is shortly expected to achieve a limited form of controllable nuclear fusion. Success there would prove that laser fusion has real potential for power generation.

The NIF will use 192 laser beams, each more powerful than any currently in operation, to trigger nuclear fusion in a tiny pellet of frozen hydrogen.

Professor Ed Moses, director of the NIF, said: “Our goal is to achieve a form of nuclear fusion where we get more energy out of the system than we put in. That would show it is possible to get a continuous reaction going – and that fusion could be used to generate a flow of energy.”

HiPER is being designed to build on the American work but with the ability to maintain a steady flow of fusion blasts – taking it closer to the system needed for power generation.

In laser-based fusion, the laser beams would be used to heat fuel pellets to 100m degrees Celsius in just a fraction of a second – about 10 times hotter than the middle of the sun.

The pressures generated by atoms exploding from its surface would then crush the 2mm pellet to a hundredth of its size in a bil-lionth of a second. Moses said: “At one point the surface of the fuel will be moving inwards at 1m miles per hour until it is 100 times denser than lead.”

Under such conditions the hydrogen atoms that make up the fuel are ripped apart, creating a plasma of electrons and hydrogen nuclei. As they interact and fuse into helium some of their mass is destroyed, releasing energy in the form of heat, light and radiation.

Both the HiPER and NIF projects will harness techniques first tested by the American military in the 1980s. Then, researchers detonated an atomic bomb in an underground bunker to generate the x-rays needed to start a fusion reaction. Professor Mike Dunne, director of the central laser facility at Rutherford, and head of the HiPER scheme, said: “Our project has no military link. It is designed purely to demonstrate the potential for power generation.”

Soaring energy prices and fears about the security of fossil fuels are driving a renewed interest in fusion technology However, Peter Smith, author of Doomsday Men, which analyses the social and cultural impacts of 20th-century breakthroughs in nuclear science, warned that scientists have for decades hyped nuclear fusion.

He said: “Today’s scientists are making the same claims as their predecessors, offering us the ‘dawn of a new era’ and ‘unlimited cheap power’.

“When the NIF begins its experiment to create a miniature star on earth we should try not to get blinded by their utopian rhetoric. After all this is also the technology that lies at the heart of the H-bomb.”

Collier said: “Fusion power is not a panacea to energy shortages but the benefits could be huge and if there is a chance of making it work we should not risk missing out.”

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