News In Brief

European fusion lab is opened in Britain

Queen Elizabeth II presided over the opening of the Joint European Torus laboratory Monday, which has been established to harness nuclear fusion. The project brings together scientists and funding from the 10 European Community countries and two partner nations, Sweden and Switzerland.

Multimillion-dollar research projects are under way in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Japan, testing the theory and developing fusion technology.

The scientists at Culham, west of London, hope to achieve fusion by 1988, by which time the research bill is expected to have reached $1.5 billion. Fusion taps the energy generated when atoms of a particular kind are forced together. Nuclear fission, used in today's nuclear power plants, smashes atoms.