More On Thorium Fission Reactors

New Energy And Fuel (that's two links in two days!) has an interesting article that links to a piece at Accelerating Future discussing a potential energy source with some promise, thorium fission reactors. Thorium's benefits as an energy source over uranium are manifold: it's more plentiful and thus should be expected to be cheap when mined in quantity, and absent a source of neutrons, won't go supercritical on its own. Of course, that's also a significant drawback, as the real problem with thorium is that its decay chain doesn't produce neutrons, and so the reaction has to be constantly pumped. Nevertheless, an interesting idea.