I think the confusion here is at least partially due to most articles obscuring the primary purpose of the NIF. Its not supposed to support commercial energy d

I think the confusion here is at least partially due to most articles obscuring the primary purpose of the NIF. Its not supposed to support commercial energy development, its supposed to support nuclear weapons development under the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, where testing bombs via setting them off is banned. So the NIF is supposed to give a testbed to study implosion created fusion reactions that produce enough energy to "ignite", that is, propegate the reaction to the rest of a hypothetical bomb. In that case, the amount of energy needed for the infrastructure to produce the initial implosion doesn't matter, what matters is that the energy coming out is more then the actual energy that triggered the reaction, so that the hypothetical bomb would blow up and not fizzle.