It is interesting to read how much optimism is bubbling away in the fusion industry about the likelihood of hitting the "power in", "power out" break even point soon. Thing is that these Livermore experiments, while fascinating, are cooking the energy books to a large degree, and basing the "power in" on that that of the power of the laser beams that finally ignite the fusion reaction in a little capsule, but ignore the losses in the system on the way to producing that beam, and the laws of thermodynamics being what they are, these losses are significant. In fact is is widely acknowledged that to operate commercially, any such fusion reactor would have to produce anywhere between 30 and 300 times more energy out than in, to operate in a viable way. This implies scaling up the fusion reaction significantly, and this has been the issue all along with this technology. Optimism is fine, but I wouldn't bet on seeing this technology working on an industrial scale any time soon.
Talking of the little capsule, it is a most amazingly engineered piece of technology.
The bath of X-rays fills the cylinder and, fourteen nano-seconds in, they reach a capsule at its centre. The capsule is about the size of the pupil in your eye and so perfectly spherical that if it were as big as the Earth, the largest imperfection would be just 10 per cent the height of Mount Everest. Making a sphere so small and so perfect took hours of dextrous work with futuristic tools. The outer layer of the capsule is, incredibly, made of diamond. There’s a middle layer of cold, solid hydrogen, and an inner layer of gaseous hydrogen. X-rays vaporise the outer layer, pushing hot material away from it. Just as a rocket expels hot material in one direction to move in the opposite direction, the rapid vaporisation of the outer layer in one direction forces the capsule to contract. The speed is dramatic; the collapse of the capsule proceeds at a pace in excess of 350 kilometres per second (800,000 miles per hour).
The solid layer of hydrogen and its gassy centre accelerate inward on themselves. They eventually reach just a thirtieth of the original capsule radius; it’s as if the Earth shrank to a ball 260 miles across – much like trying to squeeze a football down to the size of a pea. The solid layer of hydrogen becomes so tightly squeezed that a teacup full of it would have a mass of over two hundred kilograms. In the capsule’s gas centre, the implosion ratchets up the temperature. The atoms in the capsule may be different, but the temperatures, pressures, and densities are similar to those found in the Sun: a tiny star has been lit. The pressure alone is 300 billion times what we experience on Earth. At the temperatures within the capsule, ripped-apart hydrogen atoms crash into each other so energetically that their nuclei begin to react. But not in the chemical reactions that you might have seen in school science classes. These are nuclear reactions, nuclear fusion reactions.
Turrell, Arthur. The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet