The energy released was orders of magnitudes greater than that which would have been released by only fusing two atoms, so I strongly suspect that this is just poor wording and/or misunderstanding by the news agency and that what was really meant was that the lasers fused pairs of atoms.
And even being understaffed and underfunded would at least be understandable, but some of these problems have been caused by the completely unnecessary upgrade of Lemmy to a non-stable branch.