Yeah, the cost of capsules for NIF is something like 4 orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be for commercialization, though admittedly it's not like the

Yeah, the cost of capsules for NIF is something like 4 orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be for commercialization, though admittedly it's not like they've industrialized the process yet. The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric. (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF is so far behind their promised schedule.)