Lots of things beat coal on a price/kW basis once you account for the massive externalized costs of coal: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/tallying-coals-hid....

Coal isn't cheap, it just has the desirable property that more than half its costs can be easily externalized rather than being paid by the people who use the power.

I would imagine that the price/kW of coal will become easier to beat as we run out of it.

Pick your favorite energy technology (oil, wind, solar), it still applies.

It's quite a bit harder to run out of wind and solar.

Yeah. My comment has nothing to do with finite or infinite amount of any energy technology but rather that my original comment applies to fusion competing with the price of any existing energy technology such as coal, oil, wind, solar, etc.

Sure, but it's not too difficult to run out of the materials necessary to usefully collect those energy sources.

We're not running out of coal any time soon.

Much of the cost of these projects likely results from the research nature of them. Once we get a viable model, we will likely be able to produce a cheaper plant because 1) we know what we are doing, and 2) now that we know it works, we can build it bigger.