This experiment was a remarkable achievement which puts the USA in the scientific and engineering worldwide forefront of the "holy grail" of controlled fusion. However, this experiment had dual purposes. One of them, to find a way to generate "clean renewable limitless energy", is a secondary one because it will be years, decades more likely, before this experiment yields clean energy EFFICIENTLY. It seems the main immediate purpose involves finding a method to ensure the safe testing of our nuclear weapons and methods without having to test/explode nukes underground.

I learned this from watching two videos by the people, scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, who accomplished this who basically said that. The first one is a short announcement at the link with this OP. The second video is a two-hour press conference providing more technical and scientific details and is included in the comments section.

Note that this was an experiment where total overall efficiencies were not considered. Only accomplishing the end result of having more energy out than was put in DIRECTLY. Direct input of 2.05 megajoules via 192 laser beams yielded about 3.15 megajoules output from the resulting fusion event. Their description of how this was measured, in the second video posted in the comment section, is fascinating. (The panel discussion/ press conference begins at about 45 minutes into the video.) To generate that much power with the lasers they used 300 megajoules of electric energy from the grid. So, overall, it was extremely inefficient.

1 Yes, the article was actually misleading, since they only measured direct input to make their claim of "creating fusion energy." The actual energy input was 100 times greater than the energy output, so what we have is another Utah "cold fusion" claim.

2 Indeed Bill. It's more smoke and mirrors to get the public off the high price of energy.

I would add that if fusion ever did become practical the government would no doubt seek to heavily regulate it, and the media would run scare stories about the dangers, etc. The whole goal of "green energy" is to produce only enough so that they can dole it out as they see fit. It's all about control. Fusion would get us out of that (were it practical) and they have no intention of letting us get out of that. Ditto with fission, which is now pretty safe and efficient. They look at Fukishima, where a tsunami hit, and try to somehow say this was a disaster tied directly to nuclear. If a dam had been there and been hit it would have killed a lot of people too.