The cost of a heat engine is primarily determined by the area of the
heat exchanger surfaces involved. Those areas go down with the fourth
power of absolute temperature - so operating at higher temperatures
reduces cost. I think it very interesting that the 600F that nuclear
reactors operate at today make them precisely competitive with oil.
Double their absolute temperature - and their cost drops to 12.5% of
current costs. Increase their temperature to half the surface of the
sun (routinely handled in chemical processing, high temperature
exhausts, and re-entering heat sheilds) and the cost drops to 0.1% of
today's costs.
This is a well known engineering fundamental that has been ignored or
marginalized throughout the history of commercial nuclear
development.
Combining the low-cost of high temperatures with chemical processes
that produce hydrogen from water efficiently at high temperatures,
produces synthetic fuels at highly competitive costs
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974vdit.conf...37B
So, operating at 3x current temperatures, produces systems that are
1.3% the cost of today's nuclear systems - that's 3.7 cents per watt -
that's 30 cents per megawatt-hour - that produce hydrogen with over
40% efficiency - that's $40.00 per metric ton of hydrogen!!! A
metric ton of hydrogen when burned has the same heat value as;
6.2 tons of coal --> $6.45 per ton equivalent
23.4 barrels of crude oil --> $1.71 per barrel equivalent
1192 gallons of gasoline --> 3.4 cents per gallon
143 mcf of natural gas --> $0.28 per mcf
This sort of thing has been ignored - we can blame the tofu munchers -
but those who wish to maximize the value of existing fuels in the
ground did a lot to gain control over those assets and likely would do
much to maintain values in a changing technology landscape.
Certainly, we cannot expect conventional energy to embrace technology
that would ultimately lead to their downfall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Billings
