NIF Ignition Achievement Although the National Ignition Facility achieving positive energy output is hailed as an achievement in fusion energy, I am curious whether their configuration could ever be adapted to produce continuous power. The fuel is at the center of a symmetric array of lasers, and it is hard to see how a "feed system" could be developed to pull in new fuel constantly.  Moreover, their approach requires tritium, which is seriously lacking and would need an entire industry built up to produce enough of it to power any industrial fusion plant.
To be frank, the NIF seems like a curiosity more than a serious energy breakthrough.  I don't wish to sound needlessly skeptical or dismissive, so my honest question is: are there legitimately feasible design concepts that adapt the NIF approach to generate continuous power?
 A: Yes, there is the Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) concept. It includes a light-gas gun that would inject 15 targets per second into the target chamber, and a tritium breeding ratio of 1.05. Pursuit of this concept was canceled after ignition was not achieved as promised by the end of 2012. However, the repeated demonstrations of ignition in 2021/22 invite renewed conversations about LIFE and have also emboldened startups such as Focused Energy and Marvel Fusion, which are developing their own design concepts.
For LIFE to become commercially viable, the laser efficiency and repetition rate has to be increased, and the target fabrication further optimized. For example, the NIF lasers required $300$ MJ of input energy to deliver $2$ MJ laser energy to the target chamber, which in early Dec 2022 generated $3$ MJ of fusion energy. The LIFE concept uses laser diodes that are more efficient and allow a higher rep rate than the flashtubes currently in use at NIF. The repeated demonstration of ignition is an important milestone that has moved the promise of inertial fusion energy from 5-6 decades away to perhaps only a few decades (in the cautious words of the LLNL director at the 20 min mark here).
A: 
I am curious whether their configuration could ever be adapted to
produce continuous power.

Depends on the definition of "ever"!
When they originally developed the concept the idea was that future lasers would be so powerful that you could cause ignition by starting a shock wave in a liquid drop. So the idea was to use a perfume-mister sort of arrangement to produce tiny drops that would fall through a hole into the hohlraum. The amount of fuel in the drops would be tiny, so the resulting explosions would be on the order of a few hundred kJ, so a properly engineered hohlraum the size of a beer can was expected.
Well... didn't work out that way. NIF's lasers are four times the power of the most rediculous ones they were planning on, and it still barely gets to ignition. To do this, they have to use a hyper-engineered target capsule, the fuel has to be in a thin shell so the interior is empty, and the explosions are large enough to damage the entire system.
We do have good ideas how to improve the laser system. They are pretty certain there's a 10x improvement there. There is also the possibility of replacing the laser with a particle accelerator, which would give 30x or something like that. So if we have 10x then we put 30 MJ in for 3 out, which doesn't really help, and if we have 30x then it's 10 in for 3 out which is getting us closer.
So no matter what, we still need to improve the fusion side of things. And that's the problem. There may well be a 10x improvement there, but we already know that it will be stupidly complex and expensive. And that brings us to the next issue...
When it comes to nuclear power, proponents often think of it as a purely technical problem. If You Make it They Will Build It. No. We already have a million power sources we don't build because they're too expensive. People will build your new one when it is:

*

*working

*less expensive

We still don't have (1), and (2) may well be impossible. They've known this all along, they called it the "kopek problem". You see, that 3 MJ of fusion output might be converted to 1 MJ of electricity. 1 MJ is 0.27 kWh. Right now, that's worth about 0.8 cents here in Toronto. The target they used required 55 man hours to build and is made out of diamond in a gold-covered cylinder. That costs more than 0.8 cents.
So the kopek problem is basically your fuel has to cost less than the electricity it produces. A liquid drop from a perfume mister? Yeah, OK. A hyper-engineered target capsule made of diamond and gold? Not in a million years. And it really does seem that you need that level of complexity. Unless something really changes, you are literally better off burning dollar bills.
