Ooooh, this is my can o' worms.
First of all: YES, go nuclear.
Second of all, this chart is assuming a uranium-powered PWR, which is actually completely outdated at this point. Molten salt reactors can run off of thorium; it's cheaper than uranium, far more plentiful, the thorium fuel cycle resists nuclear weapon proliferation, and all reactor designs of the past decade, especially in the U.S., as passively safe. No matter what happens to them, if their operation is interrupted, they shut themselves down without needing outside input.
Theoretically, sure. Practically, hell no. ALL our power-producing reactors are Generation II/II+ light water reactors. Liquid metal designs exist (along with all maner of other advanced designs like pebble-bed, waste-recycling PRISM, etc.), but there's a HUGE difference between designs on paper and actual operating plants (I'm talking commerical, not prototypes). Implementation is a long way off, if it ever even happens. Personally I believe high temperature gas is more likely, or simply advanced design LWRs more likely still. Thorium fuel is also a long way off, and harder to implement than it seems on paper. You can't have just a thoruim core, it has to start out with some amount of uranium or plutonium load. And at least according to the design team that did this my senior year of uni, thorium is, for the moment, actually far more expensive than uranium fuel. You need more complex latticing and zoning of the fuel, and thorium is something of a "specialty metal" right now because of its low demand, and therefore lack of production ability. This CAN change by putting some effort in establishing infrastructure for thorium, but that's probably not going to happen until uranium becomes more expensive.
Oh dear. Molten salt reactors have been around for over a half-century. The first one began operation in 1954. Most have fuel cycles that initially require U 233, and then they cycle the fuel between Th and U 233, and also distill out Pa 233 that decays to U 233 and can be reintroduced to the fuel.
The advantages are FAR too numerous to ignore. Passive safety is a hallmark of almost all generation 4 reactor designs, but molten salt reactors also do not operate under high pressures, don't require a pressure vessel, and the salts used for fuel are stable compounds. Since the fuel requires chemical purification at some point, it's also easy to remove neutron poisons, a plague in most currently operating reactors and a factor that can significantly decrease safety (the effects of neutron poisons combined with several other factors were the cause of the Chernobyl accident, which was essentially a showcase of the worst possible way to design a reactor). Because of the lack of need for a high pressure vessel, these designs can be less expensive to build, and they're also very easily scalable, from submarine-size to commercial gigawatt-scale plants.
Thorium is currently discarded as waste while purifying other metals; in the crust, it's about as abundant as lead, which is to say, it's far easier to find than uranium, and molten salt reactors can burn almost any transuranic fuels with little modification. Thorium can be had at about $15 per pound. Uranium is well over 3 times that, and that's just to buy it. Then, you've gotta enrich it, which is a fantastically expensive process, and by fantastically expensive, I mean enrichment is currently what prevents all countries that aren't first-world and rich from having access to nuclear power.
The biggest problem right now is the plumbing, but when compared to the advantages, it's just a matter of time before we find a solution to it. Yes, it does need an initial supply of U 233, but most current designs for this type have positive breeding coefficients once fueled and thus produce more fuel than they consume. Most of our new designs have really removed the availability of fuel from the difficulty evaluation. The real difficulty is getting people to stop being afraid of the world nuclear.
