On the reactor thread the cheap breeder is a good start. Then make one or more production reactors. Then work on upgrading the breeder. All or nearly all the components in the breeder upgrade for use in the hotter versions, so no loss there.
The hottest breeders take tons of copper, so start with this 'cheap' one:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…0g6qsbvixywnyd51gvkxykc7f
you can add chambers and heating cells to this as you get the materials and steadily improve the breeding rate or save up and jump to the hot one.
Eventually end up here:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…2vt1g6tuvvbtxfdj9vbrmejx8
Seems to be a little confusion on the fuel life cycle.
The breeding process is:
Craft the uranium ingot with 8 empty cells around it to get 8 depleted cells.
Craft the depleted cells with coal to get 8 isotopes
Place isotopes in an active breeder reactor next to a fuel cell (uranium usually)
Isotopes convert in the reactor inventory to enriched cells
Finally you make a decision on what fuel to use:
Add coal dust to enriched cell to get uranium cell -- later versions of gregtech make this require a canning machine
OR
If you want thorium/plutonium instead of making uranium here you would centrifuge 8 enriched cells.
The centrifuge recipe is 8 enriched cells = 4 thorium cells, 1 plutonium cell, 3 depleted cells. Some later versions of gregtech give you dust and require you to use the automated canning machine to get them back in the cells. So for your 8 enriched cells you use the 4 thorium and 1 plutonium in a reactor and re-enrich the depleted cells.
When cells are consumed int he reactor they have a 25% chance to leave a depleted cell as well. To keep the reactors running you should always have depleted cells coming from ingots and the 25% from finished cycles to keep running.
To use up thorium and plutonium in the quantities you get centrifuging enriched cells check the reactor thread for the gregtech reactors section. There is a 367 EU/t reactor that uses them in balance. Then a couple others that run slightly imbalanced -- where you would run two 420 EU/t reactors and one 484 EU/t reactor and have the fuel consumption balance across the 3 reactors. I personally like the 367 reactor sqeezed down to 4 chambers, so you can stack them in like zombie's 100 EU/t uranium reactor.
Don't think the 4 chamber revision is in the first post, but is in the thread or here is a link:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…s10kbpppyf8ji8znssf1xklq8
Last thing to consider is all the GT reactors are changing in 1.5.1, so most of this will not work as well if you update.