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?
Construction costs, operating costs, maintenance costs, lifetime. Wind power and wave power and sun power might be free, but the thing you use to catch the power sure isn’t free.