On December 13, 2022, Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, announced a historic scientific achievement; President Biden would call it a “BFD” she said. Eight days before, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had aimed its 192 lasers at a single tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium and achieved “ignition”; that meant the nuclear fusion reactions had released more energy than was in the lasers that “ignited” the pellet. Net positive energy from fusion reactions has never before been accomplished in a laboratory. The explosion at Livermore on December 5, 2022 was 3.15 megajoules, equivalent to about three sticks of dynamite. Several details in this blog are from the December 13, 2022 Livermore technical panel video. Thermonuclear fusion, which powers the sun and stars, was first accomplished on Earth on November 1, 1952, when the United States exploded a 10.5-megaton thermonuclear blast, code named “Mike”; it was about 14 billion times greater than the laboratory explosion at Livermore. The Mike explosion evaporated the island of Elugelab (part of Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands) where the test was done. The 2022 Livermore experiment would have shattered the pencil-eraser-sized gold cavity called a “hohlraum”; inside it was a little diamond shell containing the deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel. Science magazine noted that the “diamond capsule turned out to be the key.” The laser fusion dream was born at Livermore 60 years ago. The 1954 multi-megaton BRAVO test at Bikini Atoll had made nuclear weapons testing infamous, raining intense radioactive fallout on Rongelap Atoll (among others) and on a Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru – the Lucky Dragon No. 5. Global calls for an end to nuclear testing, and even nuclear disarmament, became loud and insistent. A U.S.-Soviet nuclear test moratorium followed in the late 1950s. Laser fusion raised the possibility of smaller, “clean” bombs without...