In a word: no. It would be impossible to destroy the Red Planet with any device scientists can build, let alone finance. Planets can survive enormous assaults; the Hellas Basin, a Martian crater about 1,300 miles wide, testifies to the planet having once collided with an asteroid so massive that the impact generated well over a hundred million megatons of energy. If a meteoroid that size were to hit Earth, it could wipe out life on an entire continent.

It's a slow-motion horror movie: Nuclear waste leaks from underground storage shafts and seeps toward a river, where it contaminates drinking water used by millions of people. That's exactly the scenario unfolding at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in rural Washington State.

The solution, too, sounds like a page ripped from a Hollywood screenplay: Insert two industrial-strength electrodes deep into the ground, and melt the soil—along with everything around it—into solid glass, trapping the toxic waste for thousands of years.

The U.S.