Different kinds of plutonium -- Pu-238 is made in special isotope reactors by exposing Neptunium targets to a neutron flux and this is the isotope that is used in radiotethermal generators (RTGs) as carried by the Curiosity rover, the Cassini probe, the Voyager probes etc. It has a short halflife (87 years) and emits a lot of decay heat but only releases alpha radiation making it easy to shield.
Power reactors produce Pu-239 and Pu-240 by adding neutrons to U-238 which makes up 95% plus of fresh nuclear fuel rods. Most of the Pu produced this way is fissioned during the fuel burn cycle but there's always some left when refuelling is carried out. Reprocessing of fuel allows this Pu to be removed and/or recycled into MOX (Mixed Oxide) fuel elements along with fresh U-235.
Reprocessing of power station fuel was thought to be a nuclear weapons proliferation danger until it was realised that regular light-water reactor designs, the most common power generating choice, produced fuel hopelessly contaminated with Pu-240 which caused any attempt to build a weapon to be so problematic that it was simpler for any nation wanting nukes to develop separate non-power reactor facilities to produce purer forms of Pu-239 by short-cycle exposure of U-238 metal to neutrons.
The reprocessing ban in the States was overturned by the Reagan administration, I believe but it's a very expensive process to carry out and freshly-mined uranium is very cheap. The growing costs of storage may encourage the US to take up reprocessing in the future, to deal with the Hanford mess if nothing else, since reprocessing reduces the volume of actual waste considerably -- a reactor refuelling operation usually involves a hundred tonnes of fuel elements but less than a tonne of that will be actual waste actinides after storage for a couple of years in a spent fuel pool to allow the more active and dangerous short-halflife materials to decay away. Anyone thinking of investing a few billion in a reprocessing plant has to consider that a future administration might arbitrarily reinstate the Carter-era reprocessing ban. Other nations such as France, Russia, Britain and Japan which reprocess fuel are more stable politically speaking and so can commit to long-term planning for this sort of operation.
The "too cheap to meter" phrase was used by opponents of nuclear power, not proponents -- after all it didn't apply to fission power plants.
Nuclear power is very cost-competitive with the cheapest coal-fired power stations but they need a big wadge of cash up front to build them. Over the expected 60-year lifespan of modern GenIII designs at 90% operational availability the electricity they generate will cost about 4 to 5 cents/kWh including reactor construction, fuel production, fuel waste handling, operation, refurbishment and eventual decommissioning. An equivalent coal-fired plant can match that price per kWh at the cost of about 500 million tonnes of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere over the same time period.
I visited the Yamato[0] Museum in Kure near Hiroshima a few years back. The gift shop had model kits on sale, including the Revell "Enola Gay" B-29. Given that the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima had been visible in Kure just down the coast, I thought it was in dubious taste. I still regret not buying the Mitsubishi Zero plushy toy though.
[0]The centrepiece of the museum is a 1:10 scale model of the battleship Yamato.
Dispersants are basically soap -- the chemicals in Corexit and similar dispersants are the same as you'll find in bottles of Mr Muscle and other household cleansers living under the kitchen sink. They work by breaking bulk oil into small droplets which increases the effective surface area of the oil and gives the bacteria that normally degrade oil a better opportunity to do their job properly. They don't cause the oil to submerge, a neat trick if it could be achieved given that crude oil is a lot denser than seawater.
Win 8 Pro has Client Hyper-V and the Surface Pro hardware is theoretically capable of supporting it so you could run Linux in a VM if you want to play with it.
The digitising area of the Note is well under a quarter of the size of the 12" Cintiq so it's not surprising that it's a lot cheaper. I have a Wacom Sapphire digitising pad, only a little bigger than the Note's working area and it retailed when new for about 80 bucks as I recall. I think the newer Bamboo with the same 6" x 4" active area is about that price today. The Wacom Intuos Medium tablet is about the same size as the digitiser on the Surface Pro and retails at about 500 bucks new, but it does other tricks like tilt and rotation detection which I'm not sure the Note's pen does. I think the Surface Pro does tilt and rotation but none of the brief reviews released after the embargo was lifted has mentioned this. In fact very few of the reviews mention the stylus digitiser operation in any detail other than using it for handwriting recognition and such.
I don't know what Coda is but batch-resizing images isn't much of a workload in PhotoShop or other graphics packages in my experience even with sharpening and basic post-processing. iTunes is, I presume playing back music?
Benchmarks run CPUs up to 100% to stress-test the system and then hold them at that level for hours until the batteries run out or something catches fire. What you're doing doesn't sound like it smokes a lot of CPU cycles.
The high temps reported were recorded when the Surface Pro was being hammered with high-CPU and high-GPU demand benchmarks. Lots of folks with Macbook Airs and other lightweight medium-performance laptops report the same problem, not surprising since there are no miracles in hardware design, only compromises. Slim form factors plus powerful CPUs run at 100% duty cycle = high case temps and short battery life. You want more space to dissipate the heat, you want more battery to last longer then you pay for it in size and weight.
The pictures I found weren't clear whether the T900's stylus had a cable or not. In one image the stylus was being held by the end as if hand contact with the digitiser surface was a problem. I presume not though.
I understand the Pro's screen claims to be daylight-viewable but I'm not certain of that. I know the Panasonic FZ-G1 Toughpad IS daylight-viewable and it's got a combo cap/res digitiser, however I don't have 3000 bucks to drop on that lustworthy piece of indestructability.
We're discussing the Surface Pro which runs the Win 8 Pro operating system on pretty capable x86 hardware with a Cintiq-class digitiser system built in, not the Surface RT which runs a cut-down OS on a non-x86 architecture with no pen digitiser. Do keep up at the back, there.
In other words the Nexus doesn't run PhotoShop. Does it even have a stylus that's worth a damn or is it limited to finger-painting like most capacitative screens?
As for Metro, I run Win 8 on my desktop and almost never use TIFKAM since I'm not using it in a mobile mode. You ARE aware that there is a full desktop GUI in Windows 8, aren't you (hint: it looks a lot like Windows 7)? There's even a command-line interface if you want it. Right now I've got a graphics package running, two document editors open, A VPN window, a browser, an OCR package and a bunch of file explorer windows all active and timeslicing, not dormant or asleep as they would have to be on a dumb tablet with limited everything running an overgrown phone OS.
It looks like you have a Schwinn AND a pickup truck, you ride the Schwinn around for fun and use the pickup truck for business. If you bought a Pro you could replace the pickup truck by docking the Pro at your workstation and get rid of the Schwinn completely. Win win.
The T900 has a 1280x800 screen and weighs 2.4kg whereas the Surface Pro is 1920x1080 and weighs under a kilo. The pics I've seen in reviews suggest the T900's pen is wired to the base unit but it's not too clear -- the Pro's pen is of course wireless.
I'd really be interested to find out if the Pro will work with the extended range of art pens Cintiq have on offer.
How does the Nexus perform running PhotoShop? What's its multitasking capabilties like? Does it support USB 3.0? Storage expansion options? Etc. Etc.
In other words the Nexus 7 is a lot less capable for a lot less money, like a Schwinn bicycle is a lot cheaper than a pickup truck. Good luck running your construction business on the Schwinn.
"For the price of it, you can get an awesome ultrabook."
Which ultrabooks have a 600dpi pressure/angle/tilt sensitive stylus on a 1920x1080 screen?
"You can also get a comparable tablet for a lot less."
A tablet with an Intel i5 CPU, HD4000 GPU and 4GB of RAM for less money, even without the digitiser? Pray, do enlighten us.
Wacom charge a thousand bucks for their lower-resolution Cintiq 12WX screen-based digitiser tablet and that's without any computer behind it, just an input/display device. That's what's tempting me to splash out on a Pro when it is released although I may have to get a grey-market unit since there's no firm date for it going on sale here in the UK.
Not implementing UEFI means the mobos can't be used in a production environment where they can receive the coveted "Windows 8 Ready" approval for millions of customers in the coming years. Continuing with the older BIOS system means they can easily boot alternative OSes for a few thousand enthusiast customers (who can in fact use UEFI anyway) but they lose the much bigger market. Decisions decisions...
Mobos are megacheap for what they do because of the numbers of each model that are built; a custom mobo with classic BIOS to specifically support Linux or other open OSes would cost hundreds of bucks per unit produced in limited quantities. At that point a cost-benefit analysis says "pay the damn Microsoft tax already!"
As I signed Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act I can't tell you about the buildings with no windows I may or may not have worked in at AWE, that is back when it was called AWRE and only did research and development, not including the work needed to build and maintain nuclear weapons which was done elsewhere. However the more secret parts of the site were housed in typical office buildings with windows.
The Ordnance Survey maps of the area did show the site as an anonymous blank area with little or no detail; Google shows the layout of the plant but details are fuzzed and there's no Streetview. The old bomber runway (AWRE was built on a WWII airfield site) can still be seen though. It's still, as far as I know, prohibited airspace for light aircraft, gliders etc.
The Galaxy Note stylus has a tip diameter of 6.5mm giving an effective resolution of 4dpi with one level of pressure sensitivity (on/off). The Surface Pro's stylus (a Wacom knockoff design) has a resolution of 600dpi with 512 pressure levels plus, if I'm reading the specs right, pen angle and tilt sensitivity included.
Wacom's screen/digitiser system of a similar size, the 12-inch Cintiq 12WX costs about the same as a Surface Pro but it's not tablet-portable, it doesn't have a complete PC underneath it and the Cintiq's screen is only 1280 x 800, not full HD like the Surface Pro.
The Pro's cardslot takes microSDXC cards. There are 64GB cards on the market for less than fifty bucks, 128GB are off-the-shelf but cost more and higher-capacity cards are on the way.
The cost of decommissioning nuclear plants is embedded in that pricetag along with waste disposal costs, insurance premiums, taxes paid to the government etc. Nuclear power station operators in the US, Britain etc. pay into a decommissioning fund during operations as well as paying a levy per kWhr generated for fuel waste disposal. Other places like Germany also supertax their nuclear generators for each refuelling cycle to help fund their renewables subsidy efforts.
It's not that difficult to decommission nuclear plants; almost all of the radioactive material is in the fuel rods which are removed at end-of-life for reprocessing and waste management just like any refuelling operation. The slight residual radioactivity of the reactor vessel decays into insignificance over a few decades; in the UK reactor buildings are mothballed for a custodianship period before they are demolished, in other places such as the US the reactor vessel is sometimes removed promptly and buried in a pit for the same period before it is recycled. The radioactive material in the vessel structure is not mobile and can't pollute air or groundwater noticeably unlike some of the fission products in the fuel rods (cesium salts, iodine etc.) which, if they are released into the environment by accident can significantly pollute large areas like fossil-fuel thermal generating plants do as a matter of course.
Amount of electricity created from fuel/wind/wave/solar/hamsters by proposed Belgian pumped storage system, zero. Amount of electricity wasted in operational losses by Belgian pumped storage system, 30%. Cost (estimated), 800 million Eu (about $1 billion US).
Nuclear generation costs about $30,000 per GWhr for fuel, waste disposal, operation, staffing etc. A modern 1.5GW reactor will cost about $5-10 billion for construction (the Chinese EPRs at Taishan are coming in at less than $5 billion, the Finnish and French EPRs are about $10 billion and counting) and will run for at least 60 years at 90% uptime, creating about 500,000 GWhr at an operating cost of $15 billion on top of construction costs giving a total amortised cost of about 5 US cents/kWhr.
Costs of running a pumped-storage system are not that easy to find and difficult to compare with an offshore system where oilrig prices might be applicable, requiring helicopters and ships for access versus cars and trucks as land-based pumped-storage systems use. One set of figures I saw for the Dinorwig pumped-storage system in Wales (up to 1.6GW on demand, about 8GWhr total capacity) was $25 million per annum, and again that system doesn't create any electricity itself, just wastes some in storage losses.
Quite a few energy-hungry industries already use cheap night-time baseload electricity -- iron and steel foundries for example often do melts during the night and pour and cast during the day.
As for the projected cost of 800 million Eu, that's about the regular price for pumped storage. Dinorwig and Cruachan in the UK cost about the same, roughly $200 million per GWhr of storage in today's money. Storage generally is expensive; pumped storage is cheap compared to batteries (about $1.5 billion per GWhr), capacitor banks, flywheels etc. It would be more productive to build a nuclear baseload generator station (500,000 GWhr of generation @1.5GW over a 60-year lifespan for about $20 billion construction and lifetime operating costs) but that's not too likely due to nuclear being scary.
Tokamaks have produced fusion energy -- the single run on JET produced a significant amount of energy (22MJ) for a macroscopic period (over a second) with a Q (energy return) of 0.65, and that's with a tokamak that was never designed to produce high Qs in the first place -- JET was and still is a research tool, limited to short bursts of plasma heating and magnetic confinement.
What's the best Q-factor result from Polywell fusion at the moment? I can't easily find figures on numbers from experimental hardware on the Internet.
The folks designing ITER expect it to reach a Q of 10 or so, 50MW heating energy in resulting in 500MW (thermal) fusion energy and that sustainable for hundreds of seconds. Plasma stability, the bugbear of confinement systems is better understood than it was thirty years ago when JET and the other big tokamaks were first built. There will be other problems but that's why ITER is experimental -- a prototype power reactor wouldn't be very much bigger than ITER or so folks think and there was some temptation to build it to that scale.
If Polywell or Focus can demonstrate long-duration high-Q fusion and energy recovery before ITER's first light (expected in 2019 or so) then it will probably become a white elephant. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
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Different kinds of plutonium -- Pu-238 is made in special isotope reactors by exposing Neptunium targets to a neutron flux and this is the isotope that is used in radiotethermal generators (RTGs) as carried by the Curiosity rover, the Cassini probe, the Voyager probes etc. It has a short halflife (87 years) and emits a lot of decay heat but only releases alpha radiation making it easy to shield.
Power reactors produce Pu-239 and Pu-240 by adding neutrons to U-238 which makes up 95% plus of fresh nuclear fuel rods. Most of the Pu produced this way is fissioned during the fuel burn cycle but there's always some left when refuelling is carried out. Reprocessing of fuel allows this Pu to be removed and/or recycled into MOX (Mixed Oxide) fuel elements along with fresh U-235.
Reprocessing of power station fuel was thought to be a nuclear weapons proliferation danger until it was realised that regular light-water reactor designs, the most common power generating choice, produced fuel hopelessly contaminated with Pu-240 which caused any attempt to build a weapon to be so problematic that it was simpler for any nation wanting nukes to develop separate non-power reactor facilities to produce purer forms of Pu-239 by short-cycle exposure of U-238 metal to neutrons.
The reprocessing ban in the States was overturned by the Reagan administration, I believe but it's a very expensive process to carry out and freshly-mined uranium is very cheap. The growing costs of storage may encourage the US to take up reprocessing in the future, to deal with the Hanford mess if nothing else, since reprocessing reduces the volume of actual waste considerably -- a reactor refuelling operation usually involves a hundred tonnes of fuel elements but less than a tonne of that will be actual waste actinides after storage for a couple of years in a spent fuel pool to allow the more active and dangerous short-halflife materials to decay away. Anyone thinking of investing a few billion in a reprocessing plant has to consider that a future administration might arbitrarily reinstate the Carter-era reprocessing ban. Other nations such as France, Russia, Britain and Japan which reprocess fuel are more stable politically speaking and so can commit to long-term planning for this sort of operation.
The "too cheap to meter" phrase was used by opponents of nuclear power, not proponents -- after all it didn't apply to fission power plants.
Nuclear power is very cost-competitive with the cheapest coal-fired power stations but they need a big wadge of cash up front to build them. Over the expected 60-year lifespan of modern GenIII designs at 90% operational availability the electricity they generate will cost about 4 to 5 cents/kWh including reactor construction, fuel production, fuel waste handling, operation, refurbishment and eventual decommissioning. An equivalent coal-fired plant can match that price per kWh at the cost of about 500 million tonnes of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere over the same time period.
The Pedobear plushie toys I saw on sale in Akiba last year? The turd plushy http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee12/nojay_photo/Odds%20and%20Sods/poo.jpg advertising constipation medicine in a drugstore window in Onomichi?
The Wave-motion Cannon was upstairs in an exhibit gallery showing models, artwork, animation cels etc. from the Space Battleship Yamato movies.
I visited the Yamato[0] Museum in Kure near Hiroshima a few years back. The gift shop had model kits on sale, including the Revell "Enola Gay" B-29. Given that the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima had been visible in Kure just down the coast, I thought it was in dubious taste. I still regret not buying the Mitsubishi Zero plushy toy though.
[0]The centrepiece of the museum is a 1:10 scale model of the battleship Yamato.
Edit: "crude oil is a lot less dense than seawater".
Dispersants are basically soap -- the chemicals in Corexit and similar dispersants are the same as you'll find in bottles of Mr Muscle and other household cleansers living under the kitchen sink. They work by breaking bulk oil into small droplets which increases the effective surface area of the oil and gives the bacteria that normally degrade oil a better opportunity to do their job properly. They don't cause the oil to submerge, a neat trick if it could be achieved given that crude oil is a lot denser than seawater.
Win 8 Pro has Client Hyper-V and the Surface Pro hardware is theoretically capable of supporting it so you could run Linux in a VM if you want to play with it.
The digitising area of the Note is well under a quarter of the size of the 12" Cintiq so it's not surprising that it's a lot cheaper. I have a Wacom Sapphire digitising pad, only a little bigger than the Note's working area and it retailed when new for about 80 bucks as I recall. I think the newer Bamboo with the same 6" x 4" active area is about that price today. The Wacom Intuos Medium tablet is about the same size as the digitiser on the Surface Pro and retails at about 500 bucks new, but it does other tricks like tilt and rotation detection which I'm not sure the Note's pen does. I think the Surface Pro does tilt and rotation but none of the brief reviews released after the embargo was lifted has mentioned this. In fact very few of the reviews mention the stylus digitiser operation in any detail other than using it for handwriting recognition and such.
I don't know what Coda is but batch-resizing images isn't much of a workload in PhotoShop or other graphics packages in my experience even with sharpening and basic post-processing. iTunes is, I presume playing back music?
Benchmarks run CPUs up to 100% to stress-test the system and then hold them at that level for hours until the batteries run out or something catches fire. What you're doing doesn't sound like it smokes a lot of CPU cycles.
The high temps reported were recorded when the Surface Pro was being hammered with high-CPU and high-GPU demand benchmarks. Lots of folks with Macbook Airs and other lightweight medium-performance laptops report the same problem, not surprising since there are no miracles in hardware design, only compromises. Slim form factors plus powerful CPUs run at 100% duty cycle = high case temps and short battery life. You want more space to dissipate the heat, you want more battery to last longer then you pay for it in size and weight.
The pictures I found weren't clear whether the T900's stylus had a cable or not. In one image the stylus was being held by the end as if hand contact with the digitiser surface was a problem. I presume not though.
I understand the Pro's screen claims to be daylight-viewable but I'm not certain of that. I know the Panasonic FZ-G1 Toughpad IS daylight-viewable and it's got a combo cap/res digitiser, however I don't have 3000 bucks to drop on that lustworthy piece of indestructability.
We're discussing the Surface Pro which runs the Win 8 Pro operating system on pretty capable x86 hardware with a Cintiq-class digitiser system built in, not the Surface RT which runs a cut-down OS on a non-x86 architecture with no pen digitiser. Do keep up at the back, there.
In other words the Nexus doesn't run PhotoShop. Does it even have a stylus that's worth a damn or is it limited to finger-painting like most capacitative screens?
As for Metro, I run Win 8 on my desktop and almost never use TIFKAM since I'm not using it in a mobile mode. You ARE aware that there is a full desktop GUI in Windows 8, aren't you (hint: it looks a lot like Windows 7)? There's even a command-line interface if you want it. Right now I've got a graphics package running, two document editors open, A VPN window, a browser, an OCR package and a bunch of file explorer windows all active and timeslicing, not dormant or asleep as they would have to be on a dumb tablet with limited everything running an overgrown phone OS.
It looks like you have a Schwinn AND a pickup truck, you ride the Schwinn around for fun and use the pickup truck for business. If you bought a Pro you could replace the pickup truck by docking the Pro at your workstation and get rid of the Schwinn completely. Win win.
The T900 has a 1280x800 screen and weighs 2.4kg whereas the Surface Pro is 1920x1080 and weighs under a kilo. The pics I've seen in reviews suggest the T900's pen is wired to the base unit but it's not too clear -- the Pro's pen is of course wireless.
I'd really be interested to find out if the Pro will work with the extended range of art pens Cintiq have on offer.
How does the Nexus perform running PhotoShop? What's its multitasking capabilties like? Does it support USB 3.0? Storage expansion options? Etc. Etc.
In other words the Nexus 7 is a lot less capable for a lot less money, like a Schwinn bicycle is a lot cheaper than a pickup truck. Good luck running your construction business on the Schwinn.
"For the price of it, you can get an awesome ultrabook."
Which ultrabooks have a 600dpi pressure/angle/tilt sensitive stylus on a 1920x1080 screen?
"You can also get a comparable tablet for a lot less."
A tablet with an Intel i5 CPU, HD4000 GPU and 4GB of RAM for less money, even without the digitiser? Pray, do enlighten us.
Wacom charge a thousand bucks for their lower-resolution Cintiq 12WX screen-based digitiser tablet and that's without any computer behind it, just an input/display device. That's what's tempting me to splash out on a Pro when it is released although I may have to get a grey-market unit since there's no firm date for it going on sale here in the UK.
Not implementing UEFI means the mobos can't be used in a production environment where they can receive the coveted "Windows 8 Ready" approval for millions of customers in the coming years. Continuing with the older BIOS system means they can easily boot alternative OSes for a few thousand enthusiast customers (who can in fact use UEFI anyway) but they lose the much bigger market. Decisions decisions...
Mobos are megacheap for what they do because of the numbers of each model that are built; a custom mobo with classic BIOS to specifically support Linux or other open OSes would cost hundreds of bucks per unit produced in limited quantities. At that point a cost-benefit analysis says "pay the damn Microsoft tax already!"
As I signed Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act I can't tell you about the buildings with no windows I may or may not have worked in at AWE, that is back when it was called AWRE and only did research and development, not including the work needed to build and maintain nuclear weapons which was done elsewhere. However the more secret parts of the site were housed in typical office buildings with windows.
As for AWE being "secret", the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) used to hold annual protest marches to the site -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldermaston_Marches
The Ordnance Survey maps of the area did show the site as an anonymous blank area with little or no detail; Google shows the layout of the plant but details are fuzzed and there's no Streetview. The old bomber runway (AWRE was built on a WWII airfield site) can still be seen though. It's still, as far as I know, prohibited airspace for light aircraft, gliders etc.
The Galaxy Note stylus has a tip diameter of 6.5mm giving an effective resolution of 4dpi with one level of pressure sensitivity (on/off). The Surface Pro's stylus (a Wacom knockoff design) has a resolution of 600dpi with 512 pressure levels plus, if I'm reading the specs right, pen angle and tilt sensitivity included.
Wacom's screen/digitiser system of a similar size, the 12-inch Cintiq 12WX costs about the same as a Surface Pro but it's not tablet-portable, it doesn't have a complete PC underneath it and the Cintiq's screen is only 1280 x 800, not full HD like the Surface Pro.
The Pro's cardslot takes microSDXC cards. There are 64GB cards on the market for less than fifty bucks, 128GB are off-the-shelf but cost more and higher-capacity cards are on the way.
The cost of decommissioning nuclear plants is embedded in that pricetag along with waste disposal costs, insurance premiums, taxes paid to the government etc. Nuclear power station operators in the US, Britain etc. pay into a decommissioning fund during operations as well as paying a levy per kWhr generated for fuel waste disposal. Other places like Germany also supertax their nuclear generators for each refuelling cycle to help fund their renewables subsidy efforts.
It's not that difficult to decommission nuclear plants; almost all of the radioactive material is in the fuel rods which are removed at end-of-life for reprocessing and waste management just like any refuelling operation. The slight residual radioactivity of the reactor vessel decays into insignificance over a few decades; in the UK reactor buildings are mothballed for a custodianship period before they are demolished, in other places such as the US the reactor vessel is sometimes removed promptly and buried in a pit for the same period before it is recycled. The radioactive material in the vessel structure is not mobile and can't pollute air or groundwater noticeably unlike some of the fission products in the fuel rods (cesium salts, iodine etc.) which, if they are released into the environment by accident can significantly pollute large areas like fossil-fuel thermal generating plants do as a matter of course.
Amount of electricity created from fuel/wind/wave/solar/hamsters by proposed Belgian pumped storage system, zero. Amount of electricity wasted in operational losses by Belgian pumped storage system, 30%. Cost (estimated), 800 million Eu (about $1 billion US).
Nuclear generation costs about $30,000 per GWhr for fuel, waste disposal, operation, staffing etc. A modern 1.5GW reactor will cost about $5-10 billion for construction (the Chinese EPRs at Taishan are coming in at less than $5 billion, the Finnish and French EPRs are about $10 billion and counting) and will run for at least 60 years at 90% uptime, creating about 500,000 GWhr at an operating cost of $15 billion on top of construction costs giving a total amortised cost of about 5 US cents/kWhr.
Costs of running a pumped-storage system are not that easy to find and difficult to compare with an offshore system where oilrig prices might be applicable, requiring helicopters and ships for access versus cars and trucks as land-based pumped-storage systems use. One set of figures I saw for the Dinorwig pumped-storage system in Wales (up to 1.6GW on demand, about 8GWhr total capacity) was $25 million per annum, and again that system doesn't create any electricity itself, just wastes some in storage losses.
Quite a few energy-hungry industries already use cheap night-time baseload electricity -- iron and steel foundries for example often do melts during the night and pour and cast during the day.
As for the projected cost of 800 million Eu, that's about the regular price for pumped storage. Dinorwig and Cruachan in the UK cost about the same, roughly $200 million per GWhr of storage in today's money. Storage generally is expensive; pumped storage is cheap compared to batteries (about $1.5 billion per GWhr), capacitor banks, flywheels etc. It would be more productive to build a nuclear baseload generator station (500,000 GWhr of generation @1.5GW over a 60-year lifespan for about $20 billion construction and lifetime operating costs) but that's not too likely due to nuclear being scary.
Tokamaks have produced fusion energy -- the single run on JET produced a significant amount of energy (22MJ) for a macroscopic period (over a second) with a Q (energy return) of 0.65, and that's with a tokamak that was never designed to produce high Qs in the first place -- JET was and still is a research tool, limited to short bursts of plasma heating and magnetic confinement.
What's the best Q-factor result from Polywell fusion at the moment? I can't easily find figures on numbers from experimental hardware on the Internet.
The folks designing ITER expect it to reach a Q of 10 or so, 50MW heating energy in resulting in 500MW (thermal) fusion energy and that sustainable for hundreds of seconds. Plasma stability, the bugbear of confinement systems is better understood than it was thirty years ago when JET and the other big tokamaks were first built. There will be other problems but that's why ITER is experimental -- a prototype power reactor wouldn't be very much bigger than ITER or so folks think and there was some temptation to build it to that scale.
If Polywell or Focus can demonstrate long-duration high-Q fusion and energy recovery before ITER's first light (expected in 2019 or so) then it will probably become a white elephant. I wouldn't hold my breath though.