“Too cheap to meter” generally refer to a commodity that is so inexpensive that it is cheaper to provide it for a flat fee than to go to the trouble of monitoring its usage. It should be pointed out that it doesn’t mean free.
Did It Refer to Nuclear Energy.
The phrase comes in a speech [pdf] given by Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commision in 1954. It is really a prediction of a rosy future.
It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, — will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as a matter of history, –will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, –and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.
Lewis L Strauss, Chairman United States Atomic Energy Commision. Speech delivered to National Associated of Science Writers 9/16/1954.
The anti-nuclear crowd often uses the phrase on how nuclear fission energy has not lived up to its hype. Although some people have pointed out that this was was never about fission, but about fusion. Strauss would have been aware of Project Sherwood, which at the time was a classified project for nuclear fusion.
But Many Predictions Are Coming True
So while fusion did not come true being the technology that is 20 years away and always will be, many other things are coming true. OK, there does not seem to be any submarine travel as of yet, but air travel is now commonplace, but perhaps more interestingly…
Famine is Decreasing
Life Expectancy is Increasing
So Are We Still Twenty Years From Sustainable Nuclear Fusion
Still hard to tell however for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) just announced the machine assembly phase has started on 7/28/2020 and first plasma is scheduled for December of 2025. ITER should be the first fusion plant that will produce surplus energy in theory 500MW of fusion power from 50 MW of heating energy.
Some of the issues on fusion are probably you have to spend a good amount on research to get anywhere. This is in the era of Big Science where to get advances we have to spend money on huge projects. The most current example is the discovery of the Higgs Boson. We couldn’t have found it without having the Large Hadron Collider which cost about $9 billion and was built on some of the existing infrastructure CERN already had. The costs of ITER construction will be over $15 billion. So this may be one of the biggest science projects in the world. If it makes fusion possible it will be worth it.
Another reason fusion is 20 years away and always will be is a certain amount of funding is needed to keep big science moving. Spend too little and the growth and maintenance of institutional knowledge ends up being stagnated so there is an dollar amount that we have to be above to keep the projects moving. Current world GDP is 124 trillion dollars so this huge project is less than an 8,000th of the world’s economy.
So Is It a Too Cheap To Meter Future
It would seem with enough money spent on the problem and the growth of knowledge fusion is a solvable problem. Not only is it Big Science, but it will be Big Infrastructure. The biggest cost will be to build the plants, not to fuel them. So we can look forward to energy abundance, and perhaps truly too cheap to meter.