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Staffers at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) had more than the holidays to celebrate this past Christmas Eve. The date marked the 30th anniversary of a scientific milestone that saw the Laboratory's Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) produce its first plasma—the superhot, electrically charged gas that fuels fusion reactions as a potential source of clean and abundant energy. The dramatic 1982 event climaxed months of furious preparation to meet a year-end deadline and ushered in more than a decade of record-setting experiments on the big PPPL machine. But that first step was hardly easy.