The great thing about nuclear power production is it looks great on paper. So did Uranium fission. The problems are 1) building reactors that last long, are inherently safe (even in case of operator error), need little maintenance 2) run a nuclear fuel cycle 3) safe disposal of nuclear waste.
Sorry guys. Nuclear had it's change. All these objectives could have been achieved with 1960 nuclear technology. None of them were. Why do you think changing the fuel type will change this?
There is one nuclear reactor, inherently safe, maintenance free, million years fuel included, no waste. It comes at NO cost and its energy is easily distributed to all consumers, although the reactor is located some 90m miles away from all inhabited regions. I don't see viable competition to that one.
Nuclear power sources should be reserved for interstellar travel not for running your AC.
99% of nuclear research performed in the world up to the 2000s was driven by military interests.
Even the latest iteration of 4th Gen nuclear, IFR reactors were invested on because they were a great source of plutonium, IFRs could be tuned to produce less energy and maximum breeding capability (but GE conveniently hides that from the public in their S-PRISM presentations).
LFTR is among the very few nuclear techs out there that work with the worst nuclear material for weapons, Thorium and Uranium 233. So it gets ZERO USA public funding.
In fact the only reason molten salt / Throrium reactors were pursued in the USA was because before ICBMs were perfected, the US Air Force wanted nuclear powered bombers. Bombers that could stay aloft for a month. And the only nuclear technology that stands some chance of being possible for that application was molten salt / Thorium fueled reactors, exactly because they are extremely safe, compact and reliable.
With about 1% of total funding nuclear energy from 1950 to 1970, Oak Ridge National Labs managed to make a research reactor that operated for a total of 22000 hours, that did exactly what the scientists predicted it would do.
LFTR reactors don't require advanced computers to operate, their safety characteristics are from the basic physics in the reactor design instead.
The biggest difficulty in pursuing this technology is exactly the economics, it's too cheap to build and operate, why would GE invest on something that would steal it's profits on uranium nuclear, wind turbines, natural gas power ?
The Germany clean energy plan is projected to cost one trillion euros.
Kirk Sorensen quit his job at NASA to pursue this. It reminds me of a guy that put his millions into Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City.
To be conservative, it seems like he needs less than half a billion US$ get the research reactor done, finalize design and certify. Plus some billions to build the assembly line to mass produce them. But there's no point in doing this unless we can silence those that continue to believe solar and wind are an economical solution to our problems.
Perhaps we'll need to see the ocean rise another 50cm (2 ft) before we take the problem seriously, and realize the only solution is if we can make renewables cheaper than coal, cheaper than natural gas. I think Germany gave us one trillion reasons why this equation isn't true.
) instead of a quarter million. 
