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by rob74 1283 days ago
Depends - if someday they manage to make the fusion generators compact enough (think of the coffee-machine-sized "Mr. Fusion" that Dr. Brown brought back from 2015 in Back to the Future where you could throw in any kind of junk and it would use it to provide energy, or even the shipping container-sized units that Lockheed Martin is envisaging), it might be interesting for military purposes. But it's very optimistic to believe that the NIF will seriously work on sustained fusion and extracting the generated energy in a usable way - after all they are called National Ignition Facility, so now they achieved that, mission accomplished. They can now run further ignition experiments with various pellets, laser configurations etc. and study the results, but they will probably say that a new facility (and more money) is needed for further studying sustained fusion.