[Robotbeat]

Not these exact ones. And one of the important things required is scale: can you think of anything that requires tens of megawatts of average pulsed laser energy which ISN’T military? (And the military has very different requirements for wavelength, etc.) And those other efforts can also seek their own funding (there’s not a lot of money in fusion research).

If you’re in a budget constrained environment and you’re not already 100% certain this approach is the right one for future power plants, you focus on achieving the energy gain needed for such a power plant first, and the first step of that is ignition (ie where the heat of the reaction sustains some more of the reaction, not just external heat) and scientific breakeven. Once you’ve shown scientific breakeven and ignition, that’s when it makes sense to start investing a bit in the other balance of plant items.

But the bulk of the effort should still be in increasing the energy gain by leveraging ignition, IMHO.