Consider the semilinear heat equation ∂tu = ∂ xu + λσ(u)ξ on the interval [0 , 1] with Dirichlet zero boundary condition and a nice nonrandom initial function, where the forcing ξ is space-time white noise and λ > 0 denotes the level of the noise. We show that, when the solution is intermittent [that is, when infz |σ(z)/z| > 0], the expected L-energy of the solution grows at least as exp{cλ} an...