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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke

Fusion Power  
  Creating energy from nuclear fusion reactions.  

As far as I know, the first reference to "fusion power" in science fiction.

There was a murmur of sound in the briefing room. Wayne felt his heart starting to pound; D-N beryllium was big. So big that a whole fleet of IES ships did nothing but search the galaxy for it, full time.

“Naturally,” the general continued, “we don’t want any of this information to leak out, just in case it should prove false. The prospect of enough D-N beryllium to make fusion power really cheap could cause a panic if we didn’t handle it properly. The Economics Board has warned us that we’ll have to proceed carefully if there actually is a big deposit on this planet.”

Technovelgy from The Judas Valley, by Gerald Vance.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1956
Additional resources -

Physicists like Hans Bethe discovered in the 1930's that fusion power was possible, and that it likely powered the sun. The first successful man-made fusion device was the boosted fission weapon tested in 1951 in the Greenhouse Item test. The first true fusion weapon was 1952's Ivy Mike, and the first practical example was 1954's Castle Bravo. In these devices, the energy released by a fission explosion compresses and heats the fuel, starting a fusion reaction.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Judas Valley
  More Ideas and Technology by Gerald Vance
  Tech news articles related to The Judas Valley
  Tech news articles related to works by Gerald Vance

Fusion Power-related news articles:
  - Fusion Power Breakthrough?

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