I know you're acknowledging you're joking. For those who do find themselves bothered by this kind of thing, these projects are almost always a few layers deep

I know you're acknowledging you're joking. For those who do find themselves bothered by this kind of thing, these projects are almost always a few layers deep on what they're actually researching. I would assume this is more fun demo with a potential economic application in large scale roasting but that the research value (and intern training value) are in the general research area of broad solar concentrator R&D. If you look at the publication history for the folks involved you'll see a lot of papers on molten salt solar concentrators (materials, plant design, physics of etc). Sandia does a lot of really interesting and valuable research (across all the sites but NM and CA in particular).