This seems to be getting way ahead of itself. Seems like they should look to hit important milestones like producing more energy from the reaction than is required to sustain it, before they start worrying about producing electricity for pennies per kilowatt-hour. Walk before you run, and all that.
If we had stayed with fission instead of bailing after relative non-incidents (Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island), wouldn't it have drastically increased the power supply to almost that point?
The casualties, even the most indirectly computed casualties, from nuclear accidents are far, far less than the casualties from coal. It's going to get even worse once the sea levels really rise.
A single fission plant used to supply about a third of my energy; if they had proliferated to the extent people thought they would have, it energy would have, in fact, been a lot cheaper.
Democratic ignorance and regulation killed that dream, though. At least we still have "clean coal."
China which cares little about what people think and has huge air quality problems. Yet it is still building a lot of coal plants instead of nuclear. Which might suggest there not the ideal solution you think they might be. France was actually the most reliant on Fission of any country and even they are stalling far back from there peak despite having few actual problems of any kind.
There are 72 nuclear reactors being built around the world right now. 29 of them are in China. They're building more reactors than the next four builders combined. That is, more than Russia, India, Korea and the United States put together. [1]
The Chinese government has stated that they want to decrease their reliance on coal by building more natural gas, nuclear and solar power capacity. [2]
Aside from a few regions, I don't think they've stopped building coal plants entirely, but the Chinese government pretty clearly likes nuclear power.
Of course they want to divirsify 77% of the total electrical capacity is coal. More importantly they had to shut down 2.5% of the nation's coal plants (58 units or 14,020 MW of capacity) in 2008 due to coal shortages.
However, in the end these charts says more than I can:
PS: Of total annual production: Hydroelectric = 20.7% in 2006, Coal = 68.7% in 2006. = 89.4% Compared to France which get's 75+% of it's power from nuclear and has little in the way of coal reserves. http://our-future.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/coal_reserve...
Edit: To be clear, even after that construction is over Nuclear is still going to be a small fraction of overall capacity.
It's hard to say, but since nuclear power paranoia didn't really kick off until around the 70s, even the most optimistic scenario there would put "too cheap to meter" status at 3+ decades after the first self-sustaining controlled fission reaction in 1942. We're still some unknown time before the first self-sustaining controlled fusion reaction, so discussion of extreme cheapness seems premature.
"wouldn't it have drastically increased the power supply to almost that point?" No. Building and running fission power plants costs a lot of money, people would stop doing so as soon as they couldn't make a profit out of it.
A lot of fusion researchers think we really ought to consider economics when we choose what reactor designs to pursue. It'd be a shame to spend a lot of time and money on an approach that can't compete in the market.
It would be a shame to spend a lot of time and money on an approach that can compete in the market if it works, but doesn't work.
Maybe it's my programming bias at work here, but it seems like getting anything to work should come before trying to optimize it to be cheaper than anything else out there. Until you have a working system to experiment with, how can you even be sure where the true costs will lie?
It's not that hard to project the costs of a reactor. Tokamaks for example have to be very large for net power, and the chamber has to be surrounded by neutron-shielded superconductors. That's going to be expensive.
Whether the plasma will behave the way we want is a tougher question, but roughly how much a device will cost to build is relatively easy to answer.
There's another benefit to cheaper approaches: you can afford more experiments, and you can probably do them faster. Taking a couple decades and $50 billion to build one experimental reactor is not necessarily the fastest approach to getting something to work. ITER is the ultimate waterfall project.
A lot of the cost will be ongoing operating costs, and a lot of that probably can't be easily predicted without operating experience. Of the expenses involved in running a fission plant (even in a hypothetical generous regulatory regime), how many of them could have been accurately predicted in, say, 1930?
This seems to be getting way ahead of itself. Seems like they should look to hit important milestones like producing more energy from the reaction than is required to sustain it, before they start worrying about producing electricity for pennies per kilowatt-hour. Walk before you run, and all that.