I am not denying that the project has serious problems-
I may be a little biased because I work with lasers and visited NIF once- talk about awe inspiring!
What I was getting at was that the benifit to our technology has been immense- The capabilities created by NIF will greatly aid the construction of future large telescopes, and it has advanced laser technology immensely! Materials science has also benifited.
I have also read papers on some of the things that could be done with NIF and I am pretty excited about it...
That being said, poor judgement and unrealistic expectations have made it into a budget disaster.