If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.