I thought it was odd that he talked about magnetic confinement fusion, when NIF is inertial confinement. He never described inertial confinement even though that’s what was being discussed in the announcement. And then he said he suspected the announcement was that they had generated more power than they had put in, which is not true and was not expected. (They announced that they got more heat energy emitted than they put in to the pellet, but their laser system is 1% efficient so they lost 100x more total energy than was emitted by the pellet.) so he’s conflating Q plasma with Q power plant. That’s actually a really important fact he ignores. If he had actually tried to understand this announcement he could have talked about how NIF is a research facility and isn’t meant to be a power plant. Instead he just goes on talking about a hypothetical world where scientists have solved fusion power and the earth can begin healing from carbon emissions. But we’re many decades from being able to use fusion for that. You’re right that if you follow his words carefully you will see that he’s technically clear he’s speculating, but he completely fails to explain the actual significance of this announcement, does make several inaccurate claims (talking about magnetic confinement when discussing NIF, and critically conflating Q plasma with Q power plant), and generally makes it seem like this small stepping stone is more like some holy grail. Anyone not well versed in the subject could watch that and come to the conclusion that we’ve solved fusion power generation, and we just haven’t.
One of the things about Tyson is that he will just bluff his way through stuff when he doesn’t really know about it. He has like a really friendly personality and he projects a lot of confidence, but he says a lot of inaccurate things for a science communicator. The fact that he talks about magnetic confinement and never mentions lasers for example makes me question if he even knows how NIF works. It’s not his field and he may literally not know. But that didn’t stop him from going on national TV to discuss it, while making sure to mention his latest book.