People often lump the concepts of thorium and molten salt reactors together and when they advocate for molten salt thorium reactors make the claim that those reactors can consume nuclear waste. One the one hand breeding thorium 232 into uranium 233 is done in the thermal spectrum while it takes a fast neutron spectrum to fission transuranics, which is more feasible to do in molten salt fast reactor running on uranium/plutonium, otherwise you would need to make the reactor more complicated and run it in a mixed spectrum.

You break it down in layman's terms and "Science-splanee" it for "the rest of us". Love the channel! Keep up the good work! Thanks!!

I'm not in the nuclear field, but I do build my own amps with vacuum tubes. So I get the feeling of being able to have some physical interaction with your work. I especially like watching the electrons traverse empty space & striking the glass. Quite a nice blue glow from ionization (or so I've been told). AMD I've definitely got some Thorium in some of my oldest tubes...

It's not much, but I really want to show my appreciation for the work you put into these videos. They are a joy to watch for nerds like me. Especially with the slides where you have everything neatly categorised. This was 40 minutes of reactor goodness! And as an aside; yes, the RBMK was designed with plutonium breeding in mind. It is a direct descendant from military plutonium-producing graphite reactors (AM-1/AMB-100/AMB-200). Such a big, and powerful reactor cannot only make oodles of electricity, it can also breed lots of high-quality plutonium in a relatively short time. They endowed it with the on-power refuelling capability for being able to run longer in-between outages, but also that they could take designated fuel assemblies out to harvest the fresh plutonium before it would accumulate too much Pu-240. I haven't been able to find anything indicating that Unit 4 was ever used in such a manner, but it was most certainly a design requirement. Am looking forward to the next iteration in this series!

I feel that a genuine advantage of thorium over uranium is that it is more abundant in the crust than uranium, meaning that you don't have to do expensive seawater extraction to get it, but breeding in general is expensive anyway, even more so for thorium because of U-232 as you mentioned

Thank you for your video. The future of the nuclear reactors is in the fast spectrum.

Hi Charlie , thku for the 2nd video my dude

Loving this series

Cool as mate, feel so smart rn

I have a question when making plutonium do the two extra protons get absorbed through alpha particles I’m only confused cause when u 238 absorbs enough neutrons to become plutonium I seem to miss where the other protons come from

to slow