LLNL NIF has been pursuing grand experiment, big $$$ laser-ignited inertial confinement fusion for decades, milking US taxpayers without much to show for it. They need to scale energies by many orders of magnitude, gain in excess of 30, and rapidly repeat shots to get anything close to commercially viable. LLNL's NIF's rumored secondary aspirational purposes are giant lasers for nuclear arms research and developing a pure fusion weapon.<p>"A simplified economic model for inertial fusion"<p><a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.0053" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005...</a>