Pardon me for being a skeptic, but I remember how 'nuclear power generated electricity was going to be so cheap to produce that it would be free'...
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for developing alternate forms of energy generation and transport. What I reasonably fear is the sort of political climate which discards that which works for that which does not, and then mandates the latter. In the end, the marketplace should decide.
That's more than right and we should be going after every energy source available to us on a wartime basis as we speak. Aside from the fact of still having 20 - 30 years of petroleum fueled vehicles in service starting from now, there's the question of how money sent to the opeckers gets used, i.e. to fly aircraft into our taller buildings, i.e. you have to figure that into the cost.
But thorium is a spectacular possibility. It's vastly more efficient for producing energy than uranium is and totally clean, burning down to nothing as it is used. It can't be used to make bombs (which is why nobody was interested in it in previous decades), and is much more plentiful than uranium.