In a major policy change, the Department of Energy announced last December that it will gradually declassify information related to its inertial-confinement fusion program.
The discovery that has fired rocketeers' interest comes from Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory, where researchers have been trying to develop new targets for inertial-confinement fusion. In the course of that work, they found surges of heat within frozen hydrogen targets that they had hoped to use as fusion fuel sources.