It could be a plausible solution to our electricity woes to a degree. Mainly in baseload electricity supply which is about 60% of the U.S. grid. Small liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTRs) can fit on a flatbed truck and mass manufactured. The idea is that we can connect these to existing coal plant secondary systems around the country and replace the coal boilers.
Thorium is extremely abundant. We have 3000 tons of it sitting in nevada gathering dust because we have nothing better to do with it. Also, you can get an incredible amount of energy and little waste out of a liquid thorium reactor. See http://energyfromthorium.com/. That's Kirk Sorensen's blog. A NASA engineer who's really led the movement on LFTRs and got featured in Wired for it.
If we can get the cost per megawatt of capacity low enough, liquid fluoride thorium reactors could even be used for peak power. They can scale their power output up and down pretty rapidly, since they would use Brayton-cycle gas turbines for power conversion, and it's possible to continuously (or very frequently) remove xenon-135, which is a neutron poison and has traditionally made it harder to adjust the power output of nuclear reactors.
Thorium is extremely abundant. We have 3000 tons of it sitting in nevada gathering dust because we have nothing better to do with it. Also, you can get an incredible amount of energy and little waste out of a liquid thorium reactor. See http://energyfromthorium.com/. That's Kirk Sorensen's blog. A NASA engineer who's really led the movement on LFTRs and got featured in Wired for it.