this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Inertial confinement fusion techniques don't really have a steady state. The idea is to take a pellet of fusion fuel, compress it with a powerful laser to make it fuse, then eject the pellet and insert a new one. It's kind of analogous to a car engine, where you keep injecting a small amount of fuel, igniting it, and ejecting the spent fuel, over and over again.
The reason ICF fusion scientists like to exclude the laser from the efficiency calculation is that they are looking at the efficiency of the fusion process itself, so the efficiency of the laser is irrelevant. There is an argument for this from a scientific point of view, but for a practical powerplant the overall efficiency of the entire system is important. It's a contentious issue.