Good question - note that the ThorCon project is not a nuclear power plant, but a factory for producing nuclear power plants (class NuclearPlantFactory? :) ).

Good question - note that the ThorCon project is not a nuclear power plant, but a factory for producing nuclear power plants (class NuclearPlantFactory? :) ). From their site: "A single shipyard can produce 20 GW’s of ThorConIsle power per year. In terms of resource requirements, one gigawatt of ThorCon power is not a big deal. The scale up rate will not be limited by shipyard capacity, but by the rate at which the turbogenerators can be built." So let's say 18000 GW (converting 556 exajoules/year and rounding up). Divide by 20 (GW per shipyard per year) to get 900 ThorCon-shipyard-years. If we say two decades to get it done, that's 45 shipyards, which seems doable? There are 285 active shipyards worldwide right now. But anyway, like you said, we can maybe cut it in half, and not everything has to be powered by nuclear, just enough to replace fossil fuels. On the other side, many areas of the world are energy poor and impoverished because of that. It would be great if we could use a lot of this energy to improve lives of people living in these areas, so we would probably want to build substantially more.