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To: Oiao; HangnJudge; azcap; cc2k; buccaneer81

I found this comment on one of the website reporting on this to be more credible than the claim:

“What utter twaddle....this has scam written all over it.

First, Thorium isn’t a material known to lase - and “heat surges” (whatever they may be) are nothng to do with lasing. Nor is persuading a material to lase a net creator of energy - the total energy of the emitted photons will always be less than the energy required for “pumping” - in fact, most lasers are extremely inefficient, converting at best a small percentage of the energy input.

Second, stimulating alpha and beta emissions/decay isn’t something you can achieve by doing anything to do with lasers - nor do alpha or beta particles play any part in a nuclear chain reaction (neither is absorbed by other nuclei). That requires neutrons and fission reactions.

There are about a dozen other obvious gaping holes in this (work out, for example just how much surface area you’d need to remove 250MW of heat from this unit at (say) 700-800C - then compare it to the surface area available in the “car engine” sized unit). For comparison, the gas-turbine engines used in Concorde produced about 37MW each.

For a website that claims to be looking at what engineers come up with, you don’t seem to have applied even the smallest amount of the sort of analysis that an actual engineer would immediately think of.”

http://www.crazyengineers.com/thorium-powered-cars-could-become-reality-786/

I think this is even less credible than Rossi’s cold fusion claims.


46 posted on 08/13/2011 7:58:42 PM PDT by aquila48
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To: aquila48

Yeah, nice dream, but the thorium reactors aren’t quite small enough for individual use.

But someday they will be.


52 posted on 08/13/2011 8:10:17 PM PDT by BenKenobi (Honkeys for Herman!)
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