The article is more about molten salt reactors than thorium as a fuel. The benefits listed are from using molten salt, not thorium.

The NPR story adds to the original article — the experimental thorium reactor ran for 14 years, not 4. The head of the project was fired by Nixon (hardly a big strike against him).

It seems to me that the NPR show simply raised two objections:

1) you still have nuclear waste — less than with current reactors but arguable how much less.

2) it does not stop nuclear proliferation (this was a heated discussion point with the thorium advocate arguing that it is much harder to harvest U233 from an MSR than plutonium or enriched uranium from other sources and the anti-nuclear guy citing a paper suggesting it's easier. (U233 is easier to make a bomb with than plutonium - i did not know this.)