All the advantages for thorium-powered nuclear reactors still apply, but apparently there is a large constituency for the prevention of widespread adoption of a cheap, reliable and safe source of energy for the population at large.
Uranium-powered nuclear reactors have received the lion’s share of funding into research to make them more reliable, at the expense of funding thorium-based reactors, for what apparently is one overriding reason - it is impossible to weaponize the spent fuel from a thorium reactor into a thermonuclear bomb of some kind. It is my firm belief that the “spent” uranium rods, by-product of uranium power plants, which still contain some 97% of the potential extractable energy when removed from service, are retained for only one purpose - the production of fission and fusion thermonuclear weapons, or at least the threat to carry out such a program.
The presence of such a threat sure keeps the SANE crowd pumped up, but then, they actually have another agenda - maintaining an artificial scarcity of potential means to spread prosperity to parts of the world that do not now enjoy the benefits. With prosperity comes independence and freedom, through competition and assignment of benefits based upon individual initiative - rewarding merit.
And the possibility of that just sends some folks into fits of paranoia and jealousy.
Well one of the biggest reasons the Federal labs abandoned the two thorium reactors they were testing — was because they were not dual use. You can’t use thorium for nuclear weapons.