This article is obviously a PR piece, not an objective review, and the interviewee receives funding from the program. Looking around a bit, here's a discussion

This article is obviously a PR piece, not an objective review, and the interviewee receives funding from the program. Looking around a bit, here's a discussion from 2018 that's a bit more revealing: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.20180615b/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2018061... > "In the latest round of experiments, the capsule shells consisted of diamond doped with a thin layer of tungsten, and the hohlraums were made of depleted uranium. Earlier experiments had used plastic shells and gold hohlraums. Sebastien Le Pape, lead author of the paper, says the uranium hohlraum boosted the peak energy deposited on the capsule by 25 terawatts, for a total of about 450 TW." Clearly the cost of these fuel capsules is prohibitive when it comes to any practical power production system, plus there's nothing like an energy capture-and-conversion-to-electricity system being developed. It certainly looks more like nuclear weapons research than power production research. The real goal is just preserving the budgetary outlay: > "The new results were achieved before the Trump administration proposed cutting funding for NIF by $57 million, to $287 million in fiscal year 2019. That would have forced a 30% reduction in the number of experimental shots of the 192-beam laser. Lawmakers instead added to NIF’s funding next year: The final appropriation will likely end up between the $330 million included in a House-passed bill and $344 million included in a Senate measure." Notably, DOE budgets for solar PV development remain entirely minuscule in comparison, which is one reason why it's China, not the USA, that has mastered efficient production of high-efficiency, high-durability monocrystalline silicon PV panels at scale. These of course compete directly with natural gas for power production, and the US wants to be the biggest natural gas exporter in the world. Not hard to understand what's really going on at the DOE/NNSA, whose original name was the Manhattan Project, then the AEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Atomic_Energy_Co...