It's funny, because I have high confidence they can, and low confidence how. Just exposing my bias. Of course, I expected this result from NIF 10 years ago.

The challenge is likely to be uniformity rather than pressure. Presumably this can be addressed, but again I don't know much about the how.

Yeah, and that's probably a fair assessment. Fusion is an optimist's game. For non optimists, the promise is too great to ignore, but it took decades just to get our arms around how difficult it was going to be; hence the fusion is 50 years away and always will be reputation.

I would take this result as proof ICF can generate power, not that it's ready to. I mean, we knew from hydrogen bombs it was possible to get Q>1 from inertial confinement, but not if it could be done with beams like this. Similarly, if ITER gets their Q>10 result in the next couple of years, I would take that as evidence that magnetically confined burning plasmas can be stable, so we'll know MFE can generate power, not that it's ready to.

A fusion plant would be the same steam generator. The engineering is mature, and it's the most efficient way to turn hot into electricity. The D+T fusion reaction produced puts 80% of its energy into a neuron and 20% into a helium. Both will strike the wall of the chamber and that will heat the chamber. Cooling channels running through the wall carry the heat to a heat exchanger which makes steam for the turbine. Any other mechanism would be less efficient than steam generator.

There are the p+Boron 11 schemes that produce energetic charged particles (no neutrons), which could be, magnetically funneled into collectors to create a very high voltage DC current, however the physics challenges with that fusion reaction are higher.

So...yes, there is a big role for government labs and government-funded academic groups to do that kind of work. and the Department of Energy supports a lot of that work! But there's a wrinkle here, which is that NIF is "owned" by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. LLNL is one of the Department of Energy's 3 "weapons" labs. See, for historical reasons [which you probably know already] the DOE owns the nuclear weapons design mission instead of Defense being in charge. 3 of the DOE national labs [Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia] are considered the weapons labs. Livermore and Los Alamos are each responsible for nuclear weapons science and design, while Sandia is responsible for the engineering side. The US also does not test live nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, so the weapons labs acquired a new mission - "stockpile stewardship and management". Essentially, "go do a bunch of science to make sure that the nuclear arsenal will still work every time we need it to". A big part of this was figuring out how to experimentally replicate the conditions of a thermonuclear explosion, aka fusion. NIF is first and foremost in support of that effort, and not the energy job.

Oh cool! Well, not literally (in that case, hah, I know, lame physics joke.) Thank you! I only have a superficial knowledge of things because I was going in as an NMM and couldn't complete all of my classes, just the 60% or so that kept insisting it was the basics. I wish I coulda gone further in college, but the math just broke my mind.