ICF really doesn't have this potential, definitely not in the way it is practiced here. Each shot at NIF costs a few million dollars in material costs alone, because of the precisely machined parts that are required to achieve inertial confinement of the plasma long enough to make it start fusion, which get destroyed in the process.
This was a 50 years project because huge installations need to be built in order to gain knowledge about different technologies and aspects of fusion. The goal of these experiments is to achieve fusion power plants. ITER is probably going to be the first large scale demonstration, though I would not rule out an unexpected innovative design to pass it at one point.
The goal of NIF is weapons research, not fusion power (though their technology can in principle be used for fusion power as well, albeit extremely unlikely to be economical).
ITER is indeed aimed at studying fusion for power generation. It's important to remember though that even if ITER reaches its stated goal, it will not generate even one milliwatt of power - it will in fact consume much more power than it can generate. In fact, they are so far from net power generation that they didn't even bother to try to extract any usable power from the plasma - it wasn't even worth it to add turbines.
DEMO will be the "project" to try to obtain positive net power from plasma (it's not a project, it's just a concept that several countries aim to separately execute on, unlike the international collaboration of ITER). And the timeline for any DEMO net power generation is estimated at 30 years after ITER is successful - so 2050+ IF both ITER and DEMO achieve their expected timelines perfectly.
I'm somehow afraid of a world in which huge amounts of energy can be wasted without having a bad conscience. Probably it would lead to some new problems.
Aren't you also excited of the new possibilities? I really believe that once we have left the energy crisis behind us we will witness a new golden age of civilization.
I agree, but the bureaucrats in charge are more responsive to their own immediate needs than to the long-term outcomes. That is to say, it is in their best interests to prevent an exciting new technology to come out and eradicate the problem as then they would no longer have their jobs.
