Here’s the problem with inertial confinement. Even if a pulse hit break even, it will be a while until the system can fire the next pulse. There is a lot of residual heat left in the neodynium glass rods used in the lasers, and that heat has to be dissipated before the next firing. There have also been incidents where a mere speck of dust on a glass rod shatters when the xenon flashtube goes off to excite the glass into lasing. There are also tremendous stresses on the capacitors used to fire the flashtubes, and capacitors have been known to explode (these are big capacitors).
The inertial confinement devices at Lawrence Livermore are more for testing and verifying weapons physics.
Here’s the problem with inertial confinement.
***The problem with such confinement systems is that you’re trying to confine atoms on 6 degrees of movement at one single time.
It would be simpler to attempt confinement of one or 2 degrees of movement rather than all 6. That’s the difference between Cold Fusion, where the hydrogen atoms are already being confined in a metallic cage, and plasma fusion, where there is zero confinement to start with.