U.S. Researcher Preparing Prototype Cars Powered by Heavy-Metal Thorium

WardsAuto.com ^ | Aug 11, 2011 | Keith Nuthall

[Oiao]

A U.S. company says it is getting closer to putting prototype electric cars on the road that will be powered by the heavy-metal thorium (Steam Electric 250MW)... with prototype in two years....never needs refueled.

[jessduntno]

For God’s sake man, I’m a Doctor, not a magician...””

[STARWISE]

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[Moonman62]

Thorium is what’s going to get astronauts to Mars and beyond.?

Uranium could have gotten us there in the 1970's. NASA had developed a successful nuclear upper stage engine.

These days they are looking at developing a plasma engine that could get us there in two months.

[HangnJudge]

250MW should be sufficient to power a medium sized city
lets say, about 200,000 people

[PieterCasparzen]

Runs on grain.

Creates fertilizer.

You can drive drunk as a skunk and make it home safely.

Costs far less than a new car.

Lasts at least twice as long as a new car.

Can make it through 18 inches of unplowed snow.

Can ford rivers.

Can pull a wagon.

Can make it through 6 inches of mud.

[Oiao]

Agree. Thought the MW was out there too.

[KarlInOhio]

You'll need 5 of them to get to the 1.21 gigawatts needed to power the time machine in Back to the Future.

To put the 250 MW in more common engine terms, that would be 335,000 horsepower.

Because thorium is so dense, similar to uranium, it stores considerable potential energy:

I call BS. Density isn't related to potential nuclear energy. Also thorium has a density of 11.72 g/cm³. Compare that to uranium at 18.95 g/cm³. Other common elements are lead at 11.342 g/cm³, gold at 19.282 g/cm³ and tungsten with 19.25 g/cm³.

[Cheetahcat]

“Heard some interesting stuff on a company touting thorium electrical generating plants the other day. Seems the research was done at Oak Ridge, but was written off because you couldn’t build nuclear weapons from it. Sounded promising”

Thats what ,I read and this technology was not used,The Chinese are basing their next generation of power plants on this and expect to have some online in 5 years, Now we will watch them go after the thorium supplies.

[devolve]

[balch3]

the energy process, as described in the article, seems relatively straightforward. heat from the thorium powers a laser that turns water into steam for a turbine. There’s little radiocativity, aluminum foil is a thick enough shield, per the article.

[HangnJudge]

It’s not encouraging when
an article on an engineering breakthrough
gets their units wrong...

[buccaneer81]

Now that makes sense.

[buccaneer81]

LOL!

[PGalt]

LOLOL (Lots Of Laugh Out Louds)! Humorous and informative thread. Thanks to every poster.

Potential GRRRRREAT news BUMP!

[muawiyah]

Thorium is much less of a risk than uranium. The “fear” had to do with a misfire that would have had that upperstage crashing back to Earth on somebody with some hot stuff.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Thorium Reactor

[GoDuke]

Bfl.

[babygene]

TIG electrodes are 2% thorium, and there about $6 ea... Many car headlights have 1% thorium in the filaments. As far as I know it’s not ever recycled...

Doesn’t sound expensive to me.

[buccaneer81]

Ever heard the story of Air Canada Flight 143?

Or the NASA probe that splattered all over the surface of Mars?

Both the result of the wrong UOMs being used.

[Texas Mulerider]

India just brought a thorium reactor online. We should be leading the way on this. We invented it at Oak Ridge back in the 1950’s.