The bit about making nuclear weapons from thorium by products is both true and false. It is true that bucket weapons can be made from uranium 233, but not reall

The bit about making nuclear weapons from thorium by products is both true and false. It is true that bucket weapons can be made from uranium 233, but not really. Right now, when we make nuclear weapons from plutonium 239 and uranium 235, it looks like a regular machinist doing regular machinist things on a lathe, except they're doing the work in a glove box. These elements, their contaminants, and their decay products all decay by alpha decay, which is blocked a thin layer of basically anything. As long as it doesn't physically get inside your body, (hence the glove box) it's safe. Uranium 233 from the thorium cycle inevitably is contaminated by uranium 232. Uranium 232 decays quickly into thallium 208, which is a hard gamma emitter. It takes a lot of work to get uranium 233 pure enough to make nuclear weapons out of it. Bodies with the resources to deal with this are already sophisticated enough to enrich uranium 235: the uranium 233 angle is irreverent.