The future of energy is thorium. Even 12-year-olds know that.

So you've been hearing a little bit about this "thorium" thing, but haven't yet wrapped your head around it and how it promises a new era of safe, meltdown proof nuclear power that leaves little waste?

Don't worry, because seventh grader Katie Hudek has made a series of YouTube videos explaining it all. You can watch the first one below. It's less than six minutes long. If you don't have six minutes, skip to 3:45 where Katie explains thorium's advantages over conventional uranium fuel.

Katie, who was 12-years-old when she produced the series, extols the advantages of putting liquid thorium fuel into a reactor known as a LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor). LFTRs and other types of molten salt reactors (MSRs) are different from today's nuclear plants, which run on solid uranium fuel. A summary of the advantages according to Katie; LFTRS:

• Can't meltdown because the liquid fuel drains safely into a tank in the event of a problem
• Operate an normal pressure rather than at the potentially dangerous high pressure of conventional reactors
• Don't require a cooling system that can fail, as happened at Fukushima
• Have a far greater fuel efficiency than standard reactors
• Leave only small amounts of radioactive waste
• Do not have hydrogen gas that can cause an explosion, as happened at Fukushima

The U.S. built a molten salt reactor in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, under the tutelage of Alvin Weinberg, who was also a pioneer of uranium civilian nuclear power and who came to favor safer molten salt designs. President Nixon abandoned MSRs and settled on uranium reactors that produce plutonium waste - desirable in the Cold War.

Katie is full of insights about nuclear power, a potential key to a low carbon energy future. She notes how nuclear fuel has a far greater energy density than any other fuel source. Translation: a gram of thorium (or uranium) packs an enormously greater energy wallop than does a gram of coal or anything else, and a nuclear power plant takes up less space than a field of wind turbines.

The ultimate advantage of that depends, though, on the complicated machine that you build to tap and harness the nuclear power.

Make that machine a LFTR, and you have the future of energy, says Katie, who herself with her clowning informative style could possibly represent another future - that of the next science television host. Or maybe she's the future Alvin Weinberg.

Katie's thorium video: