My understanding is that thorium reactors have a bit of a chicken and the egg problem.
We've got plenty of experience building more traditional nuclear designs - considering how conservative and concerned the masses tend to be when it comes to nuclear technology (not entirely unreasonably), do you want to be the one "risking" it on an "unproven" reactor design? It's politically tricky, in an age when several countries are phasing out nuclear power entirely in a knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima.
Even ignoring political risk, I'd imagine there's some budgetary risk for investing in the "cutting edge" of nuclear tech - more room for new mistakes to be made, additional complications to be discovered, resulting in budget overruns.
I believe China is investing in building thorium reactors. It wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the future, the US is left in the position of poaching nuclear talent from China to play catch up in the thorium reactor department.
We've got plenty of experience building more traditional nuclear designs - considering how conservative and concerned the masses tend to be when it comes to nuclear technology (not entirely unreasonably), do you want to be the one "risking" it on an "unproven" reactor design? It's politically tricky, in an age when several countries are phasing out nuclear power entirely in a knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima.
Even ignoring political risk, I'd imagine there's some budgetary risk for investing in the "cutting edge" of nuclear tech - more room for new mistakes to be made, additional complications to be discovered, resulting in budget overruns.
I believe China is investing in building thorium reactors. It wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the future, the US is left in the position of poaching nuclear talent from China to play catch up in the thorium reactor department.
Wikipedia lists a lot of possible disadvantages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Pos...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor...