[RightWhale]

why hasn't it happened yet?

Coal and oil are by far cheaper, even with oil at 93 a barrel.

[eraser2005]

And Nuclear costs about $2000 per kW of capacity to build... so if this cost $2 million for 40 kW, then it is about 250 times as expensive as a Nuclear plant.

Naturally, costs would decrease with mass production.

And this likely would have significantly lower operating costs than a nuclear plant.

So while it may be expensive, I’m all for research into this. After all, we didn’t figure out how to build a nuclear reactor cheaply, efficiently, or even safely on our first attempt. We managed a partial meltdown TWICE at Idaho National Labs at both EBR-1 and SL-1 in the early days, and killed a few workers.... should we have given up then because things went seriously wrong and the things weren’t cheap?

[Aquinasfan]

Coal and oil are by far cheaper, even with oil at 93 a barrel.

Pretty simple answer 8-)