> If a town of 1,000 bought a 1-megawatt thorium reactor for $250,000, using 20 kilograms of thorium a year with almost no oversight, every family could pay as little as $0.40 a year for all their electricity...

Are they really arguing that thorium power would be too cheap to meter?

Uranium is a pretty small part of the cost of generating nuclear power. (<10%) What makes nuclear power expensive is the tremendous upfront cost of building a safe reactor.

Thorium reactors aren't magic; they're still nuclear reactors. They produce plenty of radioactive waste. A thorium reactor might not be as susceptible to certain types of failure as a uranium reactor, but they're still dangerous enough that it will be necessary to build them to a similarly high standard.

In some ways, thorium could be more expensive. Thorium reactors need a kick-start from a uranium reactor, so they're inherently more complicated. Thorium waste decays faster, but more intensely. Some tasks that can be done by hand in uranium reactors would require robotics in a thorium plant.

Thorium may or may not be a good idea. But to assume that it will be cheaper than uranium is a bit foolish after witnessing what a graveyard uranium reactors made of such dreams over the past sixty years.