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The NIF strategy is more like an internal combustion engine: load fuel, start reaction, capture energy, remove byproducts, start over. The lasers are acting like spark plugs, triggering the fuel to release all its energy at the top of each cycle.
In other words, the French strategy is "build a miniature sun", the American strategy is "build a miniature hydrogen bomb". In theory, it should be easier, hydrogen bombs already exist after all, but to trigger the reaction, you need to find a way to squeeze a lot of energy into a really small space to make the hygrogen atoms kiss, and you can't use the traditional method of "put a plutonium bomb next to it" for obvious reasons.
A decade and 3,000 failures and they are probably spinning some PR so they don’t get defunded
The NIF is the fourth shot at this, and has a target performance about an order of magnitude less power that what experimental tests (using nuclear weapons) indicate is needed to be directly supplied to the fuel.
> The facility is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and is a key element of NNSA’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain the reliability and safety of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without full-scale testing.
Most of the Department of Energy budget goes towards nuclear weapons, although they also do some work on civilian nuclear power and pure science. The name was always a bit of a euphemism.
Weapons research is one of the top level missions of LLNL [0], where the NIF is located. I guess it’s controversial to some, but it’s not like it’s supposed to be a secret or anything.