We were pleased to get this question because we had just read an article about it. One of the challenges with thorium for reactor fuel is that it has been historically very expensive, monetarily and environmentally, to process. There is a project at LANL that has taken on thorium chemistry. It is called Th-ING, Thorium Is Now Green. This team has developed a much cleaner and much cheaper way to process thorium that avoids exotic chemistry, high temperatures, etc. It sounds very promising. There is a technical article about Th-ING at: http://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue2_2011/story6full.shtml .
By the way, another development happening here is a program experimenting with sandwiches of materials with atom-thick layers of, for example, copper and niobium, that results in a sheet with not only extraordinary strength, but an ability to repair itself, or heal, from radiation damage. These materials may one day serve to shield or replace materials used in nuclear reactors today that become brittle with continued exposure to radiation.
