This is one the best anecdotes about the way that the Department of Energy labs, used to BIG SCIENCE, responded to the Carter Administration’s late 70s attempts to get them to research renewable energy. It’s from the MIT-published History and Overview of Solar Heat Technologies, edited by Donald Beattie.

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory [home of The Bomb] was one of those labs where strong ambivalent feelings about the solar research program were most conspicuous. The laboratory’s director in 1978, Harold Agnew, was a supporter of the LASL solar energy research program, but Associate Director Richard F. Taschek considered the program “low technology”… At one time, the director of the Energy Division of LASL actually called in the group’s leader and asked him to consider more esoteric approaches to solar energy utilization. “Couldn’t you do it with lasers?” he asked.

The Big Science approach to renewable energy: do solar with lasers. Right.

Image: flickr/silvery