For those who do find themselves bothered by this kind of thing, these projects are almost always a few layers deep on what they're actually researching. I would assume this is more fun demo with a potential economic application in large scale roasting but that the research value (and intern training value) are in the general research area of broad solar concentrator R&D. If you look at the publication history for the folks involved you'll see a lot of papers on molten salt solar concentrators (materials, plant design, physics of etc).
Sandia does a lot of really interesting and valuable research (across all the sites but NM and CA in particular).
For those who do find themselves bothered by this kind of thing, these projects are almost always a few layers deep on what they're actually researching. I would assume this is more fun demo with a potential economic application in large scale roasting but that the research value (and intern training value) are in the general research area of broad solar concentrator R&D. If you look at the publication history for the folks involved you'll see a lot of papers on molten salt solar concentrators (materials, plant design, physics of etc).
Sandia does a lot of really interesting and valuable research (across all the sites but NM and CA in particular).