China says it's putting a few billion into building prototypes.

It takes a long time to break dirt on any nuclear project in the U.S. 2027 is a totally unrealistic to time frame to build anything.

Everyone else can build nuclear faster than us. Timeline to build a nuclear reactor here is minimum ten years for a pre licensed design (I don't think anyone has done it that quick since the 70's) and waaayyy longer for an unlicensed design (35 years?)

You have two nuclear reactors sitting and gathering dust in Washington. They were supposed to build five. Only one ever powered up. It's a good example of the nuclear project life cycle in the U.S. Cost and time over runs, a fearful public and the economics of the thing not working out will kill or delay any project to the point that domestic innovative nuclear power is dead here.

If there is any chance of thorium being viable, we won't be the ones to prove it. A thorium reactor might be built with Bill Gates money or something but it'll happen in Indonesia, China or India.

I'll even go far as to say America will never lead in any nuclear power construction project again because the regulatory, environmental and local governance issues in front of it, unless that nuclear power project is on a Navy ship.

I guess your argument is that it's not viable and no one is as dumb as us so we are the only dummies that would do such a thing. There are some smart people who think it might be viable and politicians aren't too carful with public monies. It's not beyond reckoning that someone will put the financing behind a project but I'd be fucking shocked if the U.S. was able to break dirt faster than a decade without the whole thing becoming a regulatory, political or environmental debacle.

P.S. Washington does have a working reactor beyond the 5 I was talking about and I've heard that it chugs along just fine. I had a professor who was an energy economist that sat on the board that recommend mothballing the five reactors they gave up on, shit was a fiasco.