You'd be surprised at how quickly people can get things done if their lives are on the line. We have more then enough thorium in the world to deal with the wor

You'd be surprised at how quickly people can get things done if their lives are on the line. We have more then enough thorium in the world to deal with the world's power demands (It's about as common as lead), we have much safer reactor designs created and tested, and we have thorium designs created and tested. It's just that there is a lot of politics and public opinion is not for nuclear power, it is very much for "green" power, which makes it not politically viable to create the number of nuclear plants needed supplant say coal/oil/gas fired power stations as our main supplier of baseload power. The major problem with solar is that the sun goes down half of the day, there isn't any viable means to move power halfway across the world and there isn't any viable means to store anywhere near the amount of energy that is required to power a civilised country overnight.