Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world's largest laser - it's the size of three football fields - to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's formula for cooking up a sun on the ground may sound like it's stolen from the plot of an "Austin Powers" movie. But it's no Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time, late this summer.

If they're successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy generated by the mini-star.

The lab's venture has doubters, to be sure. Nuclear fusion, the type of high-energy reaction the California researchers hope to produce, has been a scientific pipe dream for at least a half-century. It's been pitched as a miracle power source. But it hasn't yielded many results.

To make matters worse, the U.S. Government Accountability Office this month released an audit of the lab's work that cites delays and mismanagement as reasons it's unlikely the scientists will create a fusion reaction this year.

But researchers in Livermore, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco, say it's not a matter of if but when their laser-saves-the-Earth experiment will be proved successful.

"We have a very high confidence that we will be able to ignite the target within the next two years," thus proving that controlled fusion is possible, said Bruno Van Wonterghem, a manager of the project, which is called the National Ignition Facility.

That would put the lab a step closer to "our big dream," he said, which is "to solve the energy problems of the world."

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