Physicists Have Created an Artificial Gamma Ray Burst in the Lab

What you're referring to is called inertial confinement fusion. It uses high energy lasers to compress a pellet of hydrogen (technically deuterium and tritium) to the point where fusion occurs. The higher energy laser the better, but also the more difficult to achieve. I don't think we even have gamma ray lasers yet. Remember the higher the frequency of light, the higher the energy, and gamma rays are at the extreme upper end of the EM spectrum. Fusion produces gamma rays because it's a very high energy reaction. Things like ordinary fire produce visible light as the highest frequency. Typically wavelength is determined by temperature, following the blackbody curve given by Wien's law. What temperature does fusion produce? Millions of degrees?

The reason I ask the question is that perhaps the single most important technology needed to make the 21st century successful is one that collapses the cost of energy to a fraction of current costs in the way steam did for the 19th century and internal combustion and electric generators did for the 20th century.

so my thought was that perhaps less energy might be needed to produce gama rays to produce inertial confinement fusion than current lasers. Guess not.

Part the great excitement of the 1950’s-1960’s was that fission based nuclear power was dropping so fast that scientists thought that one day in the not distant future-—energy would be too cheap to meter. Three Mile Island in 1979 killed that idea because of redundant safety features required of new reactors jacked up their prices and kept them there.

Part of the excitement of the 4g nuclear community today is that thorium reactor designs present the possibility of the dropping electricity costs to below .01@kw/hr.
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I’ve just noticed a design I’ve not seen before. NASA is testing a mini nuclear reactor with the acronym KRUSTY (kilowatt reactor using stirling engine).
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nasa-kilopower-nuclear-reactor-test/

Is there anything in that design that you could see that would significantly drop the price of nuclear power.

(Part of the game of killing costs is to be able to mass produce a reactor. But safety issues may well kill any idea of mass producing mini nukes that are not walk away safe like the thorium reactors.)

Therefor can refrigerator sized thorium reactors be produced and mass produced?

The promise of dirt-cheap energy through fusion has been like a carrot that keeps moving farther away as we reach toward it. Fission has inherent problems. Its fuel is by nature radioactive and its byproducts even more so. Loss of containment is a constant threat. Fusion eliminates both of these problems (or most of it, since tritium is mildly radioactive). Progress is being made, though. We could build a large fusion reactor today that would run on deuterium you can get from sea water, but it would cost $$$ that apparently no one is willing to invest in. But once we have it, it will be virtually free energy (since sea water doesn’t cost that much), and pollution free as well.

Terrestial gamma ray flash (TGF) produced in thunder storms were originally detected during experimental observations from aircraft targeting sprite and jet formation. Observations and data gathering continue in order to determine if any hazard exists for commercial air passengers.

http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2009/12/lightning-produced-radiation-a-potential-health-concern-for-air-travelers.html

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.00997.pdf

I think I’ve heard of this before. There seems to be some consensus that they’re caused by what they call a “relativistic runaway electron avalanche”. Electrons can gain enough momentum to strike atomic nuclei, producing a sort of nuclear reaction. And there’s cosmic rays that also spawn antimatter particles, which annihilate to produce gamma rays.

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