You'll never be able to compete with that, fission, fusion, whatever. We still don't know where to put the waste, we still refuse to acknowledge the ability to reprocess said waste, and so forth. You don't even need more storage to run wind and solar as base load; you simply need to overbuild capacity and maintain a sufficiently intelligent transmission network. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Solar and wind will win the day.
I did see a paper a couple years ago on running a section of the U.S. electric grid on wind/solar alone. They had a computer try about ten thousand scenarios, and found that the cheapest was to overproduce energy by a factor of three, and add a bit of storage. So at least for that region, wind/solar would have to be less than a third the cost of fossil per kWh to be competitive. I certainly hope it gets there.
In the meantime, we can't really afford to be picky about our non-carbon energy sources. Modern nuclear plants have excellent safety records, and more advanced reactors look even better. Let's just not build any more of the 1970's-era plants that have run into trouble. We've learned a lot since then.
Grounding on hard rock is tough. There are methods for measuring ground conductivity, and in a situation like that, you'll need them.
Airplanes though, are supposedly struck by lightning, and continue to work. I'm guessing that this has something do do with them being suspended in air, and not having a connection to ground.
http://www.copper.org/applications/electrical/pq/casestudy/m...
Why can't the ocean be used as ground?
You do realize their are passively cooled nuclear reactors being designed?
Artificial fusion actually requires higher temperatures than fusion in the core of the sun[1] because other parameters are less beneficial than at the center of the sun.
