The fact is also that they used lasers from the 1990s, which are only 0.5% efficient. Equivalent modern lasers are over 20% efficient. They don't upgrade the lasers because it's an experimental facility and it's trivial to correct for the laser efficiency.
So how much energy would it consume to use the 20% efficient lasers? I'm guessing it's not as simple as dividing by 40, turning 50MW into 1.25MW, but even it is that simple, 1.25MW is still more than the .7MW produced.
Eh I think it would be that simple, since that's what efficiency means.
But sure, they haven't achieved engineering breakeven, but that's not what they claimed. But they're a lot closer than it seems when you don't take modern lasers into account. Even considering turbine losses, they're down to one order of magnitude.
And this is worth noting:
> The researchers also expect the energy gains to scale dramatically with energy input. We expect it to be strongly nonlinear, and it will only get better as we build designs that accommodate the increase in energy,” Spears said. “For some perspective, between the last event and this one, we put in 8% more energy in the laser and we got 230% more energy out in fusion.”
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...