Not useful for commercial energy production, but useful if you want to study self-propagating fusion explosions in a bomb, which is the actual purpose of the fa

Not useful for commercial energy production, but useful if you want to study self-propagating fusion explosions in a bomb, which is the actual purpose of the facility. NIF is really confusing the issue (I think this is the first pop-sci article Ive seen that even mentions nuclear weapons, and its relegated to one sentence surrounded by discussion of commercial energy). They're (justifiably) excited because after a decade of trying, they've finally managed to fulfill the facilities primary purpose and recreated an important aspect of the conditions inside a thermonuclear bomb. But they're obviously reluctant to foreground the bomb stuff, so instead they hand-wave in the direction of energy production, which doesnt make a lot of sense, and leads to a lot of folks pointing out that the energy needed to get the reaction going is more then just the laser pulse itself, which would make a big difference for commercial production, but doesn't really matter for the experiment theyre trying to perform