Cool.
Because thorium is so dense, similar to uranium, it stores considerable potential energy: 1 gm of thorium equals the energy of 7,500 gallons (28,391 L) of gasoline Stevens says. So, using just 8 gm of thorium in a car should mean it would never need refueling.
Hedrick, the industrial minerals expert, says 7,500 gallons is “way more gasoline than an average person uses in a year. Switching to thorium-driven cars would make the U.S. energy self-sufficient, and carbon emissions would plummet.
250MW ?
What are they driving, a supertanker?
I used to have a bumper sticker that said “This truck powered by Metallica”.
Best build the heating plants first!
8 gm --> $40.
Maybe not so expensive?
I wonder how well these nuclear power plants mounted in automobiles will hold together during a collision? The envirowennies will scream about the release of radiation ...
The car is nice but I want one in my house. The US should pioneer widespread self generation of electricity. No grid means stable and uninterruptable power. No grid means no transmission loss. The really game changing aspects are that the electric utility monopolies are gone. A retired couple could save up in their working years for a nice 30 year reactor and retire with no electric bill the rest of their lives.
Cool.
If magically, we wake up tomorrow and very automobile plant in the world is magically making Thorium powered cars, and they cost the same as today's gasoline powered cars, then in 10 years, half the cars on the road will still be burning gasoline. That's the way the real world works. The median age of our vehicles is over 10 years today.
Now, let's inject reality and show why even half of the vehicles won't be thorium powered 10 years from today. Here are the reasons:
There is a vast cottage industry built around over-regulation and envirowhakoism. Anything that negates their existence is doomed to failure.
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
I want one for my home too.
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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.
bflr
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