Shiva Star (fusion) experiment almost went off without a hitch, but don't count

[HysteryDiagnosis]

them out just yet.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/07-dark-horse-fusion-lab-might-win-race




Everything was ready. The lab’s blast walls were up; sheets of Kevlar hung to catch shrapnel; banks of capacitors on the co-opted Air Force experiment primed to unleash 12 million amps of current; X-ray detectors set to snag bursts of photons; bottles of celebratory champagne chilled. If all went as planned, Glen Wurden would be a very happy man, and one experiment closer in his long-shot effort to exploit a nearly limitless source of energy.

The champagne had to wait, though, because something went wrong. Not a glitch, not a minor mishap. An explosion. “The floor shook; the walls shook; there was a hell of a boom,” says Wurden, a sandy-haired, 54-year-old physicist and fusion program manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “An Air Force guy with us said, ‘Damn, that was loud!’ One of the Kevlar blankets was tossed 40 feet. A piece of shrapnel went through one of the air-conditioning ducts. The experiment was a spectacular failure.”

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Well, at least it was a SPECTACULAR failure.

They got a pretty good show for their money, and that's a lot more gratifying than when you set something like that up and nothing at all happens.