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But that wont happen because they'll ban the thing over irrational fear before the technology reach the point it can print a cup of earl grey.

Okay, let's say you want to make a cup of earl grey tea from energy alone. For simplicity's sake, let's pretend you are providing the cup and the only thing you need to create is 250 mL (~8 fl oz for those of us in the benighted US) of pure water at 100 C. I chose 0.95835 g/cm3 as the density of H2O @ 100 C.

Synthesizing that water from pure energy in a 100% efficient process that magically created only the appropriate molecules would require approximately 6,000 gigawatt-hours of energy, aka 2.15E16 J (hooray for e=m*c^2 being on-topic for once in forever). FWIW, the absolute minimum amount of energy required is equivalent to over 5 megatons of TNT .

For reference, the generating capacity of the entire United States is approximately 1,000 gigawatts . So, uh, in some mythical 100% efficient conversion of electricity to matter it would require the entire generating capacity of the United States for over 6 hours (line losses, oh my!) to produce the water for one cup of earl grey. If you want to stay true to concept, let's say your tea needs to be ready in 5 seconds. Okay, that represents 4.3 petawatts .

So, no, I doubt a ban will be what stands in the way of you getting your replicated earl grey.

Besides, anything that created that much power would be instantly weaponized.

He who smelt it.... Really? Did you read that article because for it to be true it would require magic!
"This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the same state and is not turned into uranium 233, which happens only if thorium is sufficiently super-heated to generate a fission reaction. “It’s very safe,” he says."
Well that violates the laws of universe. It is impossible to get that much energy out of chemical reactions so where does the energy come from?
    And also this!
"A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says."
Really? Might I suggest you type in 250 MW into this calculator. http://www.unitconversion.org/power/megawatts-to-horsepowers-conversion.html
Here let me do it for our. "335,255.52239875 HP" Yes sparky that comes out to over 300 thousand horsepower!
The USS Nimitz class aircraft carrier only makes 280,000 HP! Imagine the zero to 60 time! Of course you would need a radiator the size of a football field to keep it from melting in seconds.
And you have the nerve to call someone stupid because they find this questionable. I think they know what a turbine is they also know magic when they see it.

Close is relative, it is equal to almost 619,000 Plank Lengths.

http://www.unitconversion.org/length/centimeters-to-planck-lengths-conversion.html

Good catch! I didn't even pay any attention to where it linked to! I was more concerned that the source page didn't actually list the joule estimate. USGS lists "24 megatons thermal energy (7 by blast, rest through release of heat)" which is 1.00416e+17, which is actually less than than the ICR estimate.

That said, I'll take the USGS estimate over some random dude's uninformed opinion. Especially since you grossly overestimated estimate the volume involved. Only .67 cubic miles was actually moved via the landslide, with .046 cubic miles of lateral blast, .26 cubic miles of ash, and .029 cubic miles of lava.

Your strawman has a pretty obvious flaw: 1 mole of gas @ STP takes up 22.4 L. 1 cubic meter is 1000 L. This changes the numbers, a bit, e.g. from $500/g to $11.2/g for D2, and on, down the line (by >4000%).

According to http://www.unitconversion.org/unit_converter/energ y.html it takes 859.85 nutritional calories to produce 1 kWh of energy. Then subtract the amount of energy it takes to heat and light the gym, and you'll quickly see how impractical this idea is.