India has a lot of thorium; this is a natural step for them. The reactor itself looks decent technically; they've got experience building and operating similar reactors, and it'll produce a lot less waste than the light water reactors that most of the world is using. The 300 MWe size should be easier to finance than the usual gigawatt behemoths. The passive safety features are nice. I'm afraid I can't get too excited about it, but it's a pretty good-looking reactor.

The maddening thing, though, is that they haven't been too forthcoming yet on how they're going to keep the costs down. How much will one of these things cost? How long will it take to build? I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out.

At present Plutonium is used instead of Uranium to seed Thorium. Annually consuming 880 kg of plutonium for energy production from 'seed' rods, converts 1,100 kg of thorium into fissionable uranium-233.

One of the proponents of Thorium nuclear came to google to give a tech talk. The video describing the technology can be found here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

Very good coverage of the thorium fuel cycle and associated reactor technology is to be found at http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/ . Thorium is abundant and, moreover, can be used more efficiently than uranium.

While thorium is easier to use efficiently than uranium (the LFTR on the page you linked is brilliant), I'd like to point out that we can use uranium orders of magnitude more efficiently than we're using it now, by building breeder reactors like the Integral Fast Reactor or similar things.

The big reason we're not is because we have plenty of uranium-235 right now; there's no compelling economic case for efficiency yet. The key thing to remember is that "nuclear waste" is just another way of saying "slightly used nuclear fuel", and by stockpiling it in dry cask storage, we're building up a huge fuel reserve for future generations.