Maybe this could also open up more avenues for money.
Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing returns applies.
Edit: to clarify, lasers will have some maximum efficiency that is less than 100% and approaching that maximum is subject to diminishing returns.
I wouldn't bet on no breakthroughs happening in laser efficiency, but more efficient lasers doesn't look like it will be enough to get to net energy given other inefficiencies in the system.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. This is a physical process which is known to be exothermic for the energy ranges we care about.
As another example, raising the temperature of a flammable material 1 degree from room temperature will probably not light. Ditto with 2 degrees. But eventually, if you raise the temperature high enough, you’ll get more energy out than you put in. That’s the type of process we’re talking about now.
It has nothing to do with energy generation though, and never has.
That's utterly incorrect:
"Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy was needed to create it (and thus will require more gain to produce electricity after considering losses). It also appears that an order of magnitude improvement in laser efficiency may be possible through the use of newer designs that replace flash lamps with laser diodes that are tuned to produce most of their energy in a frequency range that is strongly absorbed. Initial experimental devices offer efficiencies of about 10%, and it is suggested that 20% is possible."
With current technology, running an ICF plant would cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars per hour in hohlraums, since a single one costs millions, and you need to shoot several times per minute to produce energy.
That's why ICF is not even close to being a plausible electricity generation technology, so it is only being researched by nuclear weapons research labs like LLNL.
For an actual look at the challenge of ICF i'd say look here: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TE_1704_web.p...
and also consider that it might be used in combination with MCF for example: https://medium.com/fusion-energy-league/the-fundamental-para...
The reports you quote actually mention the target costs very clearly. The IAEA one talks about needing 500,000 targets per day, and sets a target of 0.30$ per target. At the time it was written, it says that a target costs 1000$, which is probably before NIF found put just how much more stringent the requirements for the shape of the target were (since the numbers I saw last time NIF achieved ignition were closer to hundreds of thousands of dollars per target, though maybe I am misrembering).
It's also worth noting that that report was expecting NIF to achieve the current milestone within 3-6 years, and it actually took 13. So I feel their numbers can well be considered optimistic.
HiPER is also dead, I think.