[gpm]

It's a completely different approach to fusion.

Lasers are really inefficient (poor at transforming electrical energy into light energy). They got more energy out than they put into the pellet, but nowhere near as much energy as they put into the lasers. Which means that turning that experiment into commercial fusion is... "not straightforward".

[DennisP]

NIF's lasers are only 1% efficient but they date back to the 1990s. Equivalent modern lasers are over 20% efficient. If they had modern lasers they'd have produced fusion power of about 20% of the input power.

They seem to scale well, too. In their big shot they increased the laser power by 8% and output went up 230%.

That said, compared to Helion it'd still be a lot harder to make a practical reactor with NIF's approach.