I'm of the mind that any investment into energy research is not a waste of money, but I'm also hella biased. So I'm not totally bummed to see that there's been a small revival into Thorium, although I also suspect that this will eventually lead to a dead end. But like you say, I have never been impressed with the arguments for Thorium. John Oliver recently did a bit that I listened to on the road home from Tennessee, and found myself thoroughly disagreeing with. Looks like I wasn't the only one [WARNING: Forbes autoplay bullshit]. So apparently John Oliver is not apart from the immense swath of folks who hear "radiation" and go into intellectual shutdown mode. And of course, I'm doing fusion (not fission), which produces a comparatively negligible amount of nasty byproducts. It's just really hard. I still think that if someone had a clever enough team and the right facilities/funding that they could pull it off, but it'd still take 10 - 15 years.