But it’s always good to keep your wits about you when it comes to fusion promises. Whenever both paradise and vast riches are at hand, fraudsters make their move. On March 23, 1989, before an audience of feather-haired University of Utah students and at least one member of the presiding bishopric of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann declared—no peer-reviewed nothing in sight—that they had “established a sustained nuclear fusion reaction.” Holding up something that looked like a baby’s bottle with a pen in it, Pons told the room that they had driven deuterium into a metal rod at room temperature using garden-variety electrochemical techniques. Presto, they’d formed a new atom. “There is a considerable release of energy,” Pons said. “We’ve demonstrated that this could be sustained. In other words, much more energy is coming out than we’re putting in.”

OK, then.

Lest anyone doubt that these chemists (curious: not nuclear physicists) had really made their own atom, Pons assured the audience that he and Fleischmann had found nuclear reaction byproducts: evidence of fusion. What’s more, the heat generated by their tabletop experiment was attributable to those byproducts alone. It “cannot be explained by any chemical process that is known,” he said, with a note of irritation.

Almost immediately, other electrochemists aimed to replicate the results. They failed. Other (known) chemical processes seemed to be generating the heat. When Pons and Fleischmann published a paper at last, their work was savaged as a sham. They’d misrepresented their byproducts. The two men fled for France, where they worked for a Toyota research lab; they were never fined or even sidelined from science. But the abracadabra hypothesis of “cold fusion” came under a pall. Today, those who keep faith in it have formed a kind of aggrieved mini-cult. In the curious state of mind that anti-vax doctors are known for, the cold-fusion crew dug in, and its members now grouse about having been blackballed from elite journals and reputable conferences.

The latest Livermore discoveries are carefully described as hot fusion.

To those in whose dreams fused nuclei dance, the cold-hot distinction is consoling. The lukewarm nothingburger of the George H. W. Bush era seems worlds away from real fusion, the white-hot variety produced by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s avant-garde DOE. What’s a homemade sun without otherworldly heat?

The National Ignition Facility is a 10-story laser complex the width of three football fields, and its imposing size makes the Pons-Fleischmann tabletop charade even more laughable. And this time with fusion, the renowned physicists—including Tammy Ma, a plasma physicist; Annie Kritcher, an experimental physicist; and Kim Budil, a laser physicist and the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—did not jump the gun with a prepublication press conference and set off a failed replication jam among peer scientists. Instead, for decades, scientists at the National Ignition Facility have been piling up papers, detailing most recently how ignition via fusion was possible (in August 2021) and then how it happened (in December 2022).