Comments by "Nicholas Conder" (@nicholasconder4703) on "Dr Ben Miles" channel.

Using molten salt has one further advantage. It avoids something that caused a couple of the explosions at Fukushima and may have contributed to the Chernobyl disaster. It has been shown when the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods gets exposed to air, the steam begins to react with the hot metal and the metal oxidizes, releasing hydrogen gas. It is known that at least one of the explosions at Fukushima was a hydrogen, not steam, explosion. If the system does not contain any water, this reaction cannot occur.
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They also had the US Defense Department pressuring them to stay with Uranium reactors because reactors using U-235 can produce Pu-238 used in atom bombs. People like Admiral Rickover wanted nuclear weapons, not Thorium reactors for civilian usage. By the time that civilian usage became more important, the industry was locked into building uranium reactors and didn't want to fork out the R&D money for thorium reactors.
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Actually, the biggest issues are the creation of U-233 and how to deal with the Protactinium 233 (half life 27 days) and Pa-231 (half life 32,000 years) that is produced, which are all highly radioactive (producing lots of beta and gamma radiation) but which needs to be removed from the process. Theoretically, a Thorium reactor could be safer to operate (it won't suffer a meltdown), but presents massive health risks to workers in the plant.
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Unless the boron fusion reactor can be developed (which captures photons directly from the fusion process without the need to produce steam), the steam turbine is here to stay.
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