It’s a big deal because it demonstrates scientific break even for the first time and confirms that the process of achieving ignition is repeatable. Ignition is important because it’s how the process can be scaled in a chain reaction where the heat of the reaction sustains the reaction, not just laser energy alone. To get useful electricity, you usually need an energy gain of 25-50.

NIF is a scientific demonstration facility, not in any way designed to be a power plant, nor should it be. it’s wasteful to build a steam turbine and boiler and efficient lasers when you haven’t even demonstrated ignition yet. Now that they have ignition, they can start thinking about the power plant a little bit more. But they still need to increase the gain to like 25-50 by leveraging ignition.

Article on an actual power plant demo follow on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...