Of course, because you learn to spark fire before you build a power plant. NIF is nothing like a power plant. It was designed for stockpile stewardship and for

Of course, because you learn to spark fire before you build a power plant. NIF is nothing like a power plant. It was designed for stockpile stewardship and for fusion ignition demonstration, and they intentionally cancelled efforts to solve the engineering challenges of making this into a power plant, because doing so was premature without the ignition breakthrough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy