Flibe Energy president and chief technologist Kirk Sorensen joined Adam Taggart on Thoughtful Money for a wide-ranging conversation, “Is Thorium the Future of Nuclear Energy?”

The discussion traces the renewed interest in nuclear energy driven by growing electricity demand, examines China’s molten-salt thorium reactor program and how it builds on the 1960s Oak Ridge experiments, and explains thorium’s resource abundance, fuel-efficiency advantage, and non-proliferation profile. Sorensen walks through how a molten-salt reactor works, why its high-temperature, low-pressure operation provides inherent safety, and how the failure modes of conventional reactors do not apply to it.

The conversation also covers the history of how molten-salt development was set aside, the current wave of small modular and molten-salt reactor activity, the role of surplus weapons material as fuel, and why a thorium-fueled approach could ultimately lower the cost of nuclear power.

Taggart and Sorensen first spoke about thorium more than a decade ago, and this interview revisits that long-running conversation with the benefit of everything that has changed since.