[HangnJudge]

250MW ?

What are they driving, a supertanker?

[buccaneer81]

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

[buccaneer81]

You have a good point:

"Three megawatt hours of electricity would be required for an electric car to travel 12,000 miles a year."

NYT Article

[aquila48]

They must mean KW, in which case it would correspond 1.34x250= 335 HP.

[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.