That's not the only big challenge. The fuel pellets are 1mm diameter hollow spheres machined out of diamond to extreme precision and filled with a tiny amount o

That's not the only big challenge. The fuel pellets are 1mm diameter hollow spheres machined out of diamond to extreme precision and filled with a tiny amount of deuterium-tritium gas inside. The pellets need to be carefully cooled to cryogenic temperatures so that the gas condenses evenly around the inside of the pellet, in order to maintain the near-perfect geometry needed for ignition. Once the pellet is hit with the x-rays produced by the lasers striking the interior of the chamber (hohlraum), it compresses and the fuel undergoes fusion, vaporizing the whole package. So it takes an incredible amount of precision engineering to produce these tiny diamond pellets of fuel which then produce an even tinier amount of energy while being destroyed in the process. There is no indication whatsoever that the pellets can be scaled up due to the incredible difficulty of scaling the precision geometry involved. So I remain incredibly skeptical that this is anything more than hype for a project that's really about maintaining nuclear weapons stockpiles. I sincerely doubt this approach will lead to a real production power plant without some major research into how to overcome the requirement for extreme precision geometry and a similar effort to scale up the size of the reaction. Then throw the laser efficiency issue into the mix!