My personal take, and I'm being completely cynical, is that the entities you mentioned above won't make any kind of move towards thorium UNTIL they can figure out a way to justify maintaining current profit levels...even though they'll be able to do it for cheaper.
I believe there's a fine line between cynicism and reality...
In an interesting piece on Thorium, The
New Republic, one of Mike's favorite sites, recently continued the trend of damning praise, along with a little history:
Okay, so it's cheap and plentiful, coughs up less waste (and what waste does remain is far less nasty), and it's hard to make a weapon out of the byproducts. But if thorium reactors are so swell, uh, why don't we have any? Martin argues that it's partly an accident of history. In 1965, Weinberg built a working prototype molten-salt reactor, but the U.S. government preferred uranium reactors because it wanted the leftover plutonium to make bombs. And after Weinberg was ousted from Oak Ridge in 1973, thorium research withered away.
The rest gets blamed on path dependency. Nowadays, U.S. power companies seem to feel more at ease with the light-water reactors they've been running for decades. Even if thorium reactors could prove 50 percent more efficient than their uranium counterparts, utilities aren't keen on plunking down big bucks to build (and learn how to operate) a radically new reactor design. They're having a hard enough time getting old-fashioned reactors off the ground as is.
