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8 Grams of Thorium Could Replace Gasoline In Cars
An anonymous reader writes "Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral, could be used in conjunction with a laser and mini turbines to easily produce enough electricity to power a vehicle. When thorium is heated, it generates further heat surges, allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines to produce steam that can then be used to generate electricity. Combining a laser, radioactive material, and mini-turbines might sound like a complicated alternative solution to filling your gas tank, but there's one feature that sells it as a great alternative solution: 1 gram of thorium produces the equivalent energy of 7,500 gallons of gasoline."
So when I go to the gas station and ask them for a couple of grams, I might get Thorium some day? ;)
And of course, the U.S. has the largest supply according to the chart. How convenient.
That seems like an odd combo.
Once people hear that the word "radioactive" can be reasonably associated with the fuel in their vehicles, this technology will very quickly go the way of the dodo.
That thorium powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years !
I normally hate the 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag with the fury of a thousand suns, but this one time it seems okay.
Unfortunately, this technology probably won't get to far after people read the word 'radioactive', even though I'd hazard to guess that 8g of Thorium probably has less environmental and health impact than 7,500 gallons of gasoline. Otherwise it sounds awesome. Is there another word for 'radioactive' we can use to get rid of the negative connotation?
"Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral,"... Is it abundant, or is it rare?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
especially the amazing (and potentially deadly) nuclear explosion caused when you breach the containment on a 200-year-old nuclear engine in a derelict car.
I have no idea how late-21st-century society in the Fallout reality could have gotten by with car accidents with nuclear detonations instead of gasoline fires.
I learned very early on no to take cover near a car with an engine during a firefight. I swear some of the NPCs choose to shoot up the car to kill you with the explosion.
OTOH, starting a chain reaction in a highway crowded bumper-to-bumper with abandoned cars is awesome.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
and how do we generate power for lasers?
Oh yeah, great - and then I get into an accident and spread radioactive thorium all over the road along with my body parts.
Eh, whats a little radioactivity right? Just ask the folks in Fukushima...
From the article:
A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
250 megawatts? Somebody is just making up numbers. Takeoff power for a 747 is about 100MW.
allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines to produce steam that can then be used to generate electricity.
Forget cars... every house could use one of these Thorium generators to produce its own power.
We'd no longer need a massive, failure-prone, expensive, inefficient electrical grid to get electricity.
if 1 gram = 7500gal, then a kilogram will power my house for a hundred years or more.
Where does the shark go? There's got to be a shark involved somewhere.
Why not use the expansion and contraction of the water's phase change to directly turn a driveshaft instead? You'd waste a lot of energy via the conversion to electricity. Nevermind the fact that the added electronics would be hell on landfills when the cars ultimately end up there.
According to the article, the thorium takes 30 seconds of heating before it can be used. Where does the power to run the 250 MW laser come from during this time? Or even after?
This is just some guy trying to drum up support for his startup. A combination of mining issues, radioactivity (what happens in a car crash -- call out the hazmat team!) and unproven efficiency beg this to fail.
There's something seriously lacking in the explanation. "When thorium is heated, it generates further heat surges." Where do these come from?
Nuclear fission? Perhaps possible, but why does it need to be heated for it?
Alpha and beta decay? Again, possible and even happens, but in that case 1 gram isn't going to be nearly enough.
Or perhaps thorium is being used as a store of energy, but there are better materials for it and a gram is again tiny.
My bullshit detector is beeping silently in the background...
"Thorium, an abundant and Radioactiverare earth mineral"....Sounds safe?
What happens in a car crash? Will eight grams of thorium be ejected all over the intersection?
Don't tell them that their smoke detectors may contain Americium, a radioactive element. But I guess that's ok since it's named after America and thus Patriotic. An element named after a foreign God isn't going to get cut the same kind of slack.
Every home with an atomic pile! Atomic cars! It's the 50's atomic utopia!
So, what's the thorium turn into once it's been used? That's one big question. How much radioactivity does it generate and what kinds when it is being used? And will we ever get over the fright of people having 'nuclear cars'? Will it be much worse for someone to be in possession of 8 grams of thorium than a truckload of fertilizer and some diesel fuel?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This one won't be killed by fear & paranoia over the word "radioactive" ... it'll be killed by the oil companies. Either that, or they start harvesting it and charge us US$30,000/gram.
anything that would be a good alternative to gas will get squashed.
However you look at it, it will produce the electrical power enough to run a car many times over. A simple short would be enough to create quite a large explosion, given the right condition.
Ever short-circuited a lead-acid battery of large power? You can easily maim lots of people, if that's your objective. My dad did it once in a warehouse (pre-health-and-fecking-safety) by putting a spanner on a fork-truck battery. You can literally blow the fork truck to pieces and they were scraping acid off the walls and ceiling for weeks.
Anything that's powerful enough to run your car is powerful enough to be misused to car lots of damage. Lithium batteries, hydrogen tanks, LPG bottles, you name it. If you can push a ton of metal a couple of hundred miles with it, and you can release that power almost instantaneously, you have an explosive and deadly device.
So there will NEVER be a "safe" car until we work out how to not carry that much energy about, or never be able to ever possibly release the energy it that quickly.
will that give us flying cars by 2015? Marty will be surprised if we dont make them on time, and history depends on that.
It this works as reported, why not use the heat to directly power the vehicle with steam power, rather than go through the redundant process of converting the steam to electricity which drives an electric motor to convert it to velocity? It seems one could eliminate the weight and expense of the electric drive motors, and the steam-powered electric generators in vehicle applications.
In my alts guild bank. Now everyone is gonna be in Un'goro with their bots....wait.....
Doesn't solve the problem of steam inefficiency. There were plenty of steam cars and even the more efficient ones that reclaimed some of the steam were never particularly great on water consumption. You'd likely need to stop more often for water than you currently do for gas, and water is of course quite bulky and heavy just like gas. It's a cool idea either way, but I'd prefer a mechanical drive setup like traditional steam cars and steam engines.
Are they being followed in this article? What I do not understand is how slight radioactivity can produce more heat than is required to start the process, and how 1 gram is 7,500 gallons of gas. What in the thorium model is being consumed, and how is it being consumed without radioactive decay? Makes no sense...
Sounds good, but I will only buy one if they design the thorium receptacle to look like a "Mr Fusion" machine.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The article doesn't even make sense physically.
Majikal lasers hitting thorium, and whoosh, electricity? What is the physical mechanism for harvesting this electricity?
This smells like naked fraud.
Dog is my co-pilot.
250MW is enough to power 5000 homes running the 200 amps that would overload most breaker panels. Realistically, it could power 25000 to 50000 homes, easily. If you can do that in 227 kg unit, then this is how we should be building power plants.
This has to be a major typo. Even 250KW is a lot of power to get out of a unit that small (can still run 5 to 50 homes). Maybe 250W? Now it's just a bit small to power a car.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hedrick, the industrial minerals expert, says ... switching to thorium-driven cars would make the U.S. energy self-sufficient, and carbon emissions would plummet. “It would eliminate the major need for oil,” he says. “The main (remaining) demand would be for asphalt for roadways, natural gas, plastics and lubricants.”
Almost 50% of crude oil is unleaded gasoline. If we still refine crude for asphalt, plastics, etc., what do we do with all that unnecessary gasoline?
Ok, so you've got heat. What about the mini turbines? Do the turbines that would fit in this car exist and can they do what they are expected to do? 227 kilos is a fairly heavy engine. Would its weight be largely the turbines? How well does it scale? Could you build a tractor-trailer around it?
anything that would be a good alternative to gas will get squashed.
How's that 200mpg carburettor working out for you?
So, how does this differ from the old idea of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon ?
I am convinced that I can always be convinced otherwise.
I've been wanting a nuclear-powered car for years and I may get my wish! Granted, it's not fission or fusion, but still a cool concept.
http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/
Fuel cells made out of sand.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
watch out for the Libyans!
This is true. Back in the '50s the oil companies buried the patent for the carburetor that got 100 mpg. In fact, they used a car equipped with just such a carburetor to get all those people with rifles off that grassy knoll.
"So is the BSD licence even more 'free' (than GPLv2)? Yes. Unquestionably." --Linus Torvalds (TinyURL.com/2vugzl)
This might make sense for something like a land yacht (RV's, buses, and tractor-trailers) where existing gasoline and diesel are inefficient, and the vehicle has to often go through areas that have no fueling stations for days. Pretty much northern BC, Yukon, NWT, Nunavut, Alaska, Siberian Russia, Greenland, and Antarctica. I'd be more interested in seeing how to make this work with a Jet/Airplane so they're not flying bombs.
But for the average car, no, this is a terrible idea, the radioactivity would be released every single winter as hundreds of hopeless morons wreck their cars in foul weather.
This sounds too much like Mr.Fusion.
3, 2, 1 ...
Environmentalists are as bad as the religious zealots of the dark ages...
Mod me down but I'm just writing what everyone else is thinking!
Radioactive decay can't be stimulated by lasers.
The original article links eventually to what is basically a crackpot attempting to steal investors money.
The whole basis of the article is a complete fabrication, or at best delusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactivity "Radioactive decay is a stochastic (i.e., random) process at the level of single atoms, in that, according to quantum theory, it is impossible to predict when a given atom will decay."
Disprove this - by making it nonrandom - and you as a starting point have just got a nice shiny Nobel prize.
This is great news. Now cars will put out water vapor instead of horrible greenhouse gasses. Plus there is ALWAYS an abundant supply of water everywhere.
how big for one that can out put 1.2 gigawatts at 88MPH?
According to the article there are an estimated 440,900 tons in the US, and 1 gram could replace 7500 gallons of gasoline.
So if we liberated the entire US supply of thorium, we end up with the equivalent of 3*10^15 grams of oil, or .72% of world oil production for 2004.
So the US supply would get the world through part of a year, India's a year plus, and after that?
Interesting idea, but considering this effort would require retrofitting the entire worldwide auto fleet not sure if its the best option on the table right now.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28440%2C900+tons+in+grams%29+*+7500
Please correct me if the units are off.
There - I just established the doctrine of first declaration on /., so I get ALL the royalties and proceeds!!!!
Any of you disagree - I'll see ya'll in a court in East Texas, ya'll.
"1 gram of thorium produces the equivalent energy of 7,500 gallons of gasoline." ... and will be priced accordingly.
Wasn't the Batmobile atomic-powered?
Granite is radioactive. You are radioactive. Bananas are radioactive.
A thorium atom takes, on average, 14 billion years to produce an alpha particle which can be stopped by a piece of aluminum foil.
Worry about the chemical toxicity instead: it's a severe irritant and flammable.
I knew I should have been farming that Thorium Brotherhood rep. back before I reached level 60.
Yeah, go right ahead and put a sub-kiloton fissionable in your car, that will work out well when it goes critical. To be fair, it'd have just about the same disastrous consequences of a Pinto gas tank, but the fact that there IS a Pinto gas tank story implies that car manufacturers really don't pay enough attention to when Things Go Really Wrong, and really shouldn't be trusted with things that can ruin many people's days simultaneously.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
When can we make this small enough so it powers our cell phones and laptops? :P
Sig? Heil
if this turns out to be more than vapor.
Did anyone else think of Fallout 3 immediately upon reading the summary? I for one would love a nuclear powered 1950 Buick Roadmaster! Inconvenient radioactive explosive behavior aside....
So, yesterday I read that MIT cured the common cold, Penn cured Leukemia, a cancer, and today a private researcher claims to have solved both the fuel and emissions problems that are currently only getting worse. Okay, yeah, all of these are preliminary and experimental, but holy shit... Got Hope? Obama fucking delivered!
(LOL)
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
One of Robert Heinlein's kid's books had boy scouts building a thorium powered rocket that beat the commies to the moon.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mrfusion.png
Thorium is an Actinide, not a rare-earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinide
Thorium will have a natural decay rate and be built with moderators that will limit it. It won't suddenly blow up if you short two wires in the car or press on the accelerator pedal too hard. If they use the thorium produces steam to run the wheels and a small generator to for the electrical system, I'd be more concerned about the steam boiler blowing up than the thorium suddenly running wild and going into meltdown.
This sounds like a good idea and since it does sound like a good idea there's no way that it will get off the ground these days. We depend on the carbon dioxide emergency as one of several legs to prop up the Agenda 21 actions. Perhaps, after we've given up our property rights, killed off 90% of the world's population and are all living in the UN's new world order planned communities of the future, thorium powered community vehicles will pick us up and take us where we need to go but not let us actually drive.
http://help-cure-disease-now.blogspot.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/laserturbinepower
The one who has 1985 listed on the website he created in December '10? Oh yeah, where can I write a check. I need to invest in this biologist-turned-thorium-turbine expert ASAP.
The concept isn't that the thorium somehow gives off extra heat, it's that thorium is especially good at storing heat energy.
The laser is used to pump heat into the thorium quickly. The hot thorium is then put into contact with water to generate steam, but in the process the thorium is gradually cooled.
There's no magic, radioactive process going on here folks, just a material with a really high specific heat capacity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity
Corollary to Hanlon's razor: Any significantly advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
So now we're going to turn cars into steam locomotives. While I do like not having to refuel my Thorium source, what about the water? If I can only go 100 km on one tanks worth of water, for get about it.
Unless this generates more energy than it consumes (fission or fusion) then this is snake oil. If the energy comes from the laser, why not boil water with the laser?
This is yet another perpetual motion machine designed to defraud the gullible.
250 Megawatts is a joke! That sure as shit isn't going to fit in a car, not now, not ever. That kind of energy output would literally evaporate the car in minutes. Thorium is a good idea, beats the hell out of Uranium long and short term, but this 'concept' is a bid to steal money.
Some crackpot or conman has mixed some genuine stuff about sub-critical, accelerator driven, fission reactors in with the word 'lasers' and is presumably even now coining in investment.
Has the science savvy of the editors really deteriorated this badly?
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Sounds like this would be great for powering our tanks. They are big. They are heavy. They already use turbines (rather than internal combustion). And the crews are already well shielded from the fuel tanks and the turbines...
Load the tank with 100 gram of thorium and it can cross Iraq or Afghanistan several times over before needing to refuel — a major headache resolved.
Cars crash. It's a fact of life. I would much rather use that thorium in a reactor somewhere, then transfer the power from the reactor to the car. You know, on account of the fact that stationary reactors are much less likely to crash and spew parts everywhere.
You just need a Mr. Fusion.
Far too many nut jobs in America (on both sides of the equation) will carp about this as being dangerous on the highways. However, there would be multiple places why this should be developed quickly:
1) Tractors, construction equipment, etc. all make heavy use of fuel. By putting this in these, it would drop energy usage across the nation by 5% or more (yup, this equipment makes HEAVY use of fuel). In addition, it has the advantage that there is LITTLE chance of accidents compared to highway miles.
2) Trains. This could be used on trains easily. Relatively few accidents compared to cars. In addition, there could be one car up front for the engineer and major motor, with this on another car 1-2 back. With that approach, less chance of damage (again keeping the nut jobs happy).
2) Space. We need the ability to send nuke power to the moon and mars. Nut jobs get upset about Pb going up. Thorium is SAFE by itself AND even less is needed. It is ideal to send up something like this to the moon, remote missions, etc. Heck, combine this with the new Stirling power generator and we can send new voyagers out that have a VASIMR engine that will work for the next 40 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why bother with thorium? You can do the same thing with 8 grams of ordinary water, and a gadget I'll gladly sell you for $99.99.
Seriously, why is Slashdot advertising this snake oil?
Here is the gizmag article: http://www.gizmag.com/alloy-converts-heat-into-electricity/19025/ Use that with the Thorium instead of a turbine. :-)
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
Obviously it makes sense to look at nuclear engines for cars, of-course it'll only become possible when /.ers will stop laughing.
You can't handle the truth.
Thorium, by itself, does not fission. You need a neutron source to breed Uranium from Thorium which you can then fission. Just shooting a lazer at Thorium isn't going to do anything. Thorium is radioactive but you will need much more than a few grams to power you car that way.
That must be a typo. 250KW would be appropriate to power a mid-size car. 250 MegaWatts would power a mid-sized neighborhood through a heat wave.
Sign me up. If this is legit it signals a huge leap forward in power generation.
Thinking about acres of rusting thorium hulks sitting in the illegal junkyards that trouble every county.
This is the Charles Stevens http://help-cure-disease-now.blogspot.com/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/laserturbinepower A whois on his website shows creation in Dec 2010, and he lists. 1985 at the bottom of his website. This whole thing is ridiculous. How does this stuff make front page Slashdot? Did Slashdot merge with Enquirer or the Onion recently?
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
Let's give benefit of doubt just for a minute, even though most such stories on slashdot are thermodynamic and/or perpetual motion nonsense.
He might have been using the term "laser" to mean "laser-like", in that a triggered reaction causes others kind of like stimulated emission in a laser.
There has been years of work in "energy amplifier" systems, one of which is to bombard thorium with protons to start a cycle of capture, neutron release, breeding into u-233, etc. Essentially a small breeder reactor. If such a thing were possible, probably better to do it at secure central power plant, not in a car for many excellent safety and anti-terrorism-enabling purposes
I'm sure there will be the tin-foil hat people that will say big oil will block it, but, most likely it will be the %*#(%&@! EPA that will block it.
Actual web site of promoter. Even worse car-related web site of promoter. He's been plugging this since 2009 or so.
Laser-induced fission is quite feasible, and requires far less energy input than laser-induced fusion. Laser fission of thorium has been done on a small scale as a lab experiment. Thorium reactors have been built, with modest success.
A pure thorium reactor won't achieve criticality, because thorium has no isotopes that fission on their own. The fuel has to have uranium or plutonium mixed in to start the nuclear reaction. The laser concept seems to be to use a laser to get things going.
There's been some interest in accelerator-pumped thorium fission. It's been tried in Japan, but that group hasn't reached breakeven. It's a plausible concept, but so far nobody has been able to figure out a way to make it work.
Incidentally, this is not a "clean" process. It generates radioactive by-products where the accelerator beam hits the thorium, in addition to the usual nuclear reactor fission products. A car-sized version is a fantasy.
This is some kind of perpetual motion scam. Keep your wallets in your pockets.
First of all the claim that no nuclear reactions are going on must be false for this to work at all, otherwise this is just another perpetual motion machine.
Second, what do they mean by "heat pulses"? The only way I can see this working is if the laser manages to knock some particles loose, generate a few antiparticles, or momentarily compresses a small area of the thorium causing a non-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. If you could cause a small reaction you could certainly get some heat out of it but it would definitely be a nuclear reaction converting mass into energy.
This smells like a scam and I will assume it to be one until proof is offered.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If this tech actually works it could be the biggest revolution in energy since the discovery of oil. My only question is, does it actually work? From TFA:
> when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat
IANAnuke: So what is going on here? Is this a well known phenomenon? Is it really possible to get more energy out than you put in via the laser? If so, how come nobody ever noticed this before? If this is for real, it's huge... which is why I have my doubts. :-/
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
and give it a good marketing campaign.
I am sure they could package it as anything they want, shades of "Retsin".
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So if there's no nuclear reaction, where does all the energy come from? I couldn't find anything about thorium and "heat surges" that didn't lead back to the same article, and "thorium thermal" gives information about thorium reactors, which require a neutron source to transmute thorium into U233.
Plus the company's website looks like the typical crackpot/scam site.
Does anybody know anything about this process?
"when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat. "
Yeah. Right. If they are speaking of thorium dimorphism that does not produce energy.
"Small blocks of thorium generate heat surges that are configured as a thorium-based laser,"
Anotehr smelling one. You could induce a population ivnersion, but in that context ? make no sense.
Either somebody is reporting something they did not understand at all, or this is utter bullshit. You decide.
It not only violates physics, but common sense.
Check out http://www.laserpowersystems.com/ - that's such a classic snake oil company that I can't believe anyone ever took them seriously. (In fairness to the author, he clearly knows so little about technology that it might have looked real; on the other hand, if the rambling and disconnected ravings on that web site didn't tip him off, he's a natural mark for Nigerian scammers, and doesn't wardsauto.com do any reality checking before they publish? They made themselves look like idiots too.)
The only thing that can create that kind of power is a bolt of lightning!
So we all agree this is a joke. OK it's not April 1st so how did this get posted to Slashdot?
Oh well.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Which is it - Abundant or rare?
The whole article is GARBAGE, pure and simple. And people discuss how the price of Thorium affects the viability of this scheme.
"When thorium is heated it becomes extremely hot and causes heat surges allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines producing steam that can then be used to generate electricity. It also helps that it has a very large liquid range between melting and boiling point."
Newsflash: when iron is heated it becomes extremely hot! Let's power our cars by bars of steel heated by lasers!
You are not going to get additional energy out of thorium unless you start a nuclear chain reaction (discounting its minuscule decay heat). And to start it you need to make it critical. Critical mass of a Thorium sphere is about 20kg. And while you might lower it a bit by compressing it, I somehow doubt that you're going to have Jupiter-core-level pressure to make 8g of Th dense enough to support the chain reaction.
And even if you do, you'll get a non-trivial amount of energy in form of such nice things as gamma rays and neutrons. And remember, it takes about 1000 Joules of gamma ray energy to kill you. That's about 0.05 seconds of output of 20kW engine.
would be to fund research, design, and construction of thorium reactors for power production. This could eventually be a large central power station or distributed generation. Then stay with hybrid and electric vehicles. Frankly having people driving around with radioactive materials in their vehicles, given how poorly people drive, gives me the creeps. Whereas with a few exceptions most power plant operators are far better equipped and trained to handle these materials.
I wondered the same thing. Curiously, I can't seem to find much on the web. It's used in breeder reactors: it captures slow-moving neutrons and turns into a uranium isotope with a much shorter half-life (yielding fissile material, hence the name "breeder" reactor), but I don't see how that has to do with heating it or hitting it with a laser.
I did find a book on Google that suggested a laser could knock gamma rays out of gold foil which in turn could accelerate the decomposition of a uranium isotope, but I don't know if that's related to this.
As a physicist, I can tell you the summary is complete bullshit. The linked articles are bullshit too. Investor scam at best.
Thorium is linked by many as a "magic cure" for nuclear waste from uranium. Basically, using thorium instead of uranium reduces and eliminates some of the transuranics. But this is still a nuclear fuel. It is not suppose to be used in cars! What is the difference between using thorium in cars or plutonium in cars?? Nothing! It's the same mode of transport and power generation and both are completely impractical.
This is all bullshit because it requires critical mass. Thorium requires highly enriched U-235 so thorium can be bred to U-232. It is madness to even think of applying a process like this to anything mobile.
A nuclear reactor requires over 100 tons (100,000kg) of fuel. It uses up only a few hundred kg of fuel before it needs to be refueled. It does not mean a few hundred kg of fuel powers the nuclear plant. It is impossible to have a safe fission reactor in such a configuration.
Far too many nut jobs in America (on both sides of the equation) will carp about this as being dangerous on the highways.
It's a scam m8. It's a scam.
>>Don't tell them that their smoke detectors may contain Americium, a radioactive element. But I guess that's ok since it's named after America and thus Patriotic. An element named after a foreign God isn't going to get cut the same kind of slack.
Thanks for the reminder. I forgot I needed to rename Thursday!
-Rick Santorum
That's what tweaks my suspicion... we've been blasting "nuclear" materials with lasers for decades, and I've never heard of this effect before. If this is something new -- an "over-unity" power source -- it ought to merit a Pons-and-Fleischmann-style press conference.
Also, what happens to the Thorium as it is "used" in this process? Does it degrade to Lead? How is this supposed to work?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
It reminds me of Sub Culture, a 90's PC game where you pilot a tiny yellow submarine around and collect things like thorium and bottle caps for cash. Instead of gas stations, we'll have The Brotherhood.
Funny, I've done it and all it did was weld the spanner on.
Lead-acid batteries explode due to hydrogen (a by-product of the charging process) being ignited by sparks, not the electrical energy they store.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A generator based on Thorium could easily compete with Andrea Rossi's so called Cold Fusion energy generator... wondering if he uses a similar "secret ingredient" in his device...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/24/1550205/Italian-Scientists-Demonstrate-Cold-Fusion
"Sounds like like it's only relatively abundant."
Common enough to be used in lantern mantles for decades. It is actually a "waste" product from the refining of rare earths used in electronics and electric cars. Thorium is one of the reasons that we don't produce rare earths in the US anymore. It is slightly radioactive so the cost of disposal is very hight.
How ever this all sounds like snake oil to me. Look at this part of the story!
"This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the same state and is not turned into uranium 233, which happens only if thorium is sufficiently super-heated to generate a fission reaction. “It’s very safe,” he says."
Where does the energy come from? What are the physics of how this works? I mean come on Slashdot this is makes the cold fusion story look like good science! This actually from the description violates the laws of the universe! You can only get x amount of energy from a chemical reaction to get this level of power you have be using a nuclear reaction of some kind! Thorium is a good energy source in when used in nuclear reactors. Pointing an laser at a block of metal and getting more energy out than you put in without any nuclear reaction is extremely questionable at best. I want some physics to back up that claim.
Why not just pursue the bigger thorium energy reactors to replace regional power plants, and then just use electric cars? Put the complexity in one place instead of having millions of little pony sized reactors wandering the roads.
Yep that's right, as much as 7500 gallons of gasoline. Why? Because the oil companies are not going to just roll over and give up their profits. If they see this as a commercially viable alternative to fossil fuels they will position themselves to be the ones selling the thorium.
From the article:
A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
250 megawatts? Somebody is just making up numbers. Takeoff power for a 747 is about 100MW.
Alllll RIGHT, flying cars!
thorium, fuck yeah!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think you mean "one-point-twenty-one jiggawatts". Any scientist will tell you that's the correct pronunciation and unit.
Thorium is used in Coleman Lantern Mantels to make them burn brighter. A guy I knew worked at a nuclear plant and after returning from work after a camping trip, he set off the radiation monitors when he tried to leave. The culprit turned out to be a left over mantle in his shirt pocket.
You only need a V8 to power the generator to run the laser. Nice power savings there.
The one with the 1.9 year half-life? Or the 14 billion year one? I want to know how long I have to avoid that intersection after a crash ruptures the containment vessel...
Speaking of which, how much shielding do I need to drag around if I intend to have non-damaged offspring? Enough lead, and it might take 8k equivalent gallons just to back out of the driveway...
"The key to the system developed by inventor Charles Stevens, CEO and chairman of Connecticut-based Laser Power Systems, is that when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat."
Right, I heat something and it gets *more* dense eh? And that makes it give off heat? Sure.
"Small blocks of thorium generate heat surges that are configured as a thorium-based laser"
What?
"A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says."
I hope so, because 250 MW is a little under 350,000 hp.
I was enjoying that story immensely right up until the point where I remembered the first law of thermodynamics.
...I'm going with Cold Fusion. It worked at the University of Utah in the late '80. Then the government, or maybe it was the oil companies, wait, the oil companies had the government cover it all up.
Hmm, The article is basically 'Please Invest Here! We want your money to ( thorium is the next big thing technobabble babble babble most people with money aren't nuclear engineers so the naive among them may part with dough yeah that means you, give me your money! )'
What I want to know is how Thorium in cars is doable when Thorium in giant power plants has yet to take off?
What's particularly different than this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Energy_amplifier
...
Warning!!! This news is just a typical STOCK SCAM!!
There's no other news about "Laser Power Systems" company, its site is a typical stock-scam site with "Investor" contacts prominently displayed along with sciency-looking text. The same exact news report has been posted all over the clueless 'tech' sites, including the Slashdot (editors, do you even know a bit of physics???).
Never mind that there's no known mechanism how a visible (or even ultraviolet) spectrum laser can affect nuclear decay. Influence on fission is also out of question with such small samples - there just won't be any appreciable fission going, and heating tends to slow fission down (by narrowing adsorption rate of slow neutrons by nuclei). Such a discovery would get an instant Nobel Prize, no less. Yet we see no publications about it.
PS: technically, one type of nuclear decay (which doesn't happen in Th-232, btw) can be affected by chemical composition. To the tune of 0.01% of decay speed.
So you shoot a laser at the thorium and it makes a "heat surge." You use the heat to make steam to run a turbine etc.
If I shoot a laser at most things I'll get a "heat surge."
So what?
For this to be of any use, more energy must be coming out than going in with the laser, which implies some kind of (nuclear) reaction going on in the thorium. I'd imagine there would be fission products and neutrons given off in that case.
So what are the fission products? Do they need to be contained? How much heat do you get out per Joule of laser energy put in? How big is the neutron flux? Big enough to be a hazard to biological systems nearby (people)? Neutrons can be captured by other atoms and cause induced radioactivity, for example some kinds of steel containing nickel become highly radioactive given a neutron flux, not to mention the sodium found in common salt.
This sounds like a lot of balderdash to me.
Stick Men
Many people here (myself included) have wondered how this is even supposed to work. In the original article, the inventor claimed:
In which case it's not clear at all how he's generating so much energy from such a small amount of weakly radioactive material.
So I went to the guy's website (laserturbinepower.com) and read a very short article called "thorium trigger". It claims:
There was also some more material on a page marked "cars":
Presumably he means that this does not use a reactor.
It appears he's relying on some effect of accelerated decay, where decay is sped up by a laser, without any nuclear chain reaction (not even a subcritical one).
I googled for "accelerated decay" and found that this effect has not been demonstrated in a laboratory. Although a few independent researchers claim they have observed the phenomenon during their experiments, the most recent claim of accelerated decay was rebutted by the Lawrence Livermore Lab, here.
This appears to be snake oil.
It is pretty obvious that it is a hoax. If they could pull this off at the car level then they could certainly pull it off at larger scales, such as power generating plants. And much safer too, since power generating plants crash into each other much less often than cars do. Since the technology isn't being used to replace uranium based nuclear reactors, and more uranium based reactors are being planned in spite of the many problems (waste products, and the slightly annoying problem of destroying large areas when something does eventually go wrong being a couple), then one would have to be an idiot not to see that this was a hoax.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That's pretty cool, actually -- laser-induced fusion is reasonably well established, and dumping neutrons into an otherwise subcritical chunk of Thorium sounds like it might even be half-way safe.
I'm amazed anyone could get that from the articles, though -- I read them reasonably closely, and all they ever said was that they "heated" the Thorium, and that there were lasers involved, and pulses of heat.
Lots of engineering left to do, though.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
It's happened to real stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-metal_hydride_battery#Patent_encumbrance_in_electric_vehicles
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This guy probably read this pop-sci article:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/pocket-particle-accelerators-could-bring-safer-nuclear-power-neighborhoods
I see his logic:
Step 1: Trade out particle accelerator for lasers (TOTALLY the same thing)
Step 2: Make a 1995 style website in stylish orange, slap some electrical mumbo-jumbo in there, and say you're open to investment
Step 3: Pat yourself on the back
Step 4: Profit!
One of my favorite things about Slashdot is reading analyses of hoax articles by knowledgeable posters. It's fun to see a huckster get eviscerated by someone who knows what he's talking about. I've learned a lot about science this way, so keep the hoax Slashvertisements coming.
A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
A 250MW car?... are you planning on it breaking the sound barrier or what?
It might bring it closer to its critical mass and thus speed up the decay, but then my understanding of physics is limited mostly to 1st year calc based college physics with a bit of simulation of physics problems thrown in so I could be completely off on this.
Time to offend someone
I think energy of 7500 gallons of gas is only a couple of orders of magnitude lower than the energy released from of 1g of antimatter reacting with matter. Antimatter is considerably more rare than thorium and is slightly more difficult to store, unfortunately.
How can something be both "abundant" and "rare" o.O
I see you believe in the junk like the fish carburetor, catalytic carburetor, and the vapor carburetor then. Now normally I wouldn't pimp my own page like this but I get sick of hearing this kind of stuff. Oil companies don't care what your energy source is so long as they are the ones providing it.
Time to offend someone
In his mind it is probably more like a 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood with the 500 ci engine that gets 500 mpg. Since that is usually some type of similar land yacht in these stories. These cars also drive either halfway or the whole way across the country on a single tank half tank or gallon of gas in the story as well.
Time to offend someone
But how much is that in Graphene made from Girl Scout Cookies?
Fandroids hate facts.
Considering the recent events at Fukushima, isn't it too early to be stupid again?
(Yeah, I must be new here... on Earth)
It doesn't.
It's just a typical scam.
And shut down the entire town town after an accident? I would rather take shutting down the entire world after 100s of years using gasoline. Thank you very much.
I tried checking how much energy you could extract from 1g of Thorium, and it doesn't add up.
Assuming you start with naturally occurring 232Th and extract 100% of the energy of every step in the decay chain, I get 42.647 MeV per nucleus.[1] That's 6.83x10^-12 J per nucleus, or 1.76x10^10 J per gram. A gallon of gasoline is 1.3x10^8 J.[2] Taking the ratio of the two, the decay of 1 g of 232Th emits the energy equivalent of 135 gallons of gasoline, much less 75,000. Regardless of how you convert it to useful work, the energy has to be there in the first place. And the number Stevens claims is high by a factor of 500.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain#Thorium_series
[2] http://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumbers.pdf
A car AND a dirty bomb, pre-assembled!
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
How is it that Thorium is both a rare earth mineral and abundant? It that only since the Thor movie came out?
...to be true.
See the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel
Ignoring the fact that I don't know where to go and buy a gram of Thorium. From TFA, "...His idea is to replace the gasoline engine with an electricity generator that doesn’t require a battery." So how does one fire up the Laser? Maybe a Capacitor of some kind?
Please Slashdot, you have lost all credibility.
Slashdot's Karma == Crappy (mostly through junk science articles)
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
articles found on the internet. You guys are so smart!
A new application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
If you have steam, why bother to turn it into electricity? Steam delivered to each wheel and through a turbine or pistons would be more efficient.
The first linked article above is gibberish. The second one is a minor rewrite of the first. The website of LaserPowerSystems (ahem!) does not inspire confidence.
Trying to squeeze some sense out of the article, I'd guess that they claim that, by using a laser to heat up a hunk of metallic thorium, they can get it dense enough to fission by itself. Perhaps the laser is related to a neutron generator? I'd also guess that "250MW" is a typo for "250KW".
Or maybe it's just a bunch of buzzwords strung together in hopes of attracting some scientifically illiterate venture capital.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Let us know when Google Shopping for Thorium shows us a kit.
That is not the only error in the article. They also cannot seem to convert English tons to Metric tonnes with a constant multiplier. The "heat surges" that the design depends on seem to be an imaginary phenomena. I don't where the 250 Megawatt figure came from.
They seem to be talking about alpha decay though. I am not sure how much energy that releases. They want to induce alpha decay by using a laser. It can't be done, but why should the laws of physics prevent someone from investing in this company?
Since laser inducement of thorium decay has never been before to even a single atom.
Can't drive one of these things downtown, nope, sorry. No nuclear weapons, no nuclear reactors. If they were careless about how they wrote the laws, it'd also be no radioactive smoke detectors or medical equipment either, or at least you have to sneak those past the "Nuclear-Free Zone" signs.
Couple of grams of other stuff? As other people have noted, yes, you can find that easily enough.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And just what is the life expectancy of a motorcycle with a nuclear reactor mounted between your legs? And is the driver's name "Raven"?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I had oil heat in my house when I lived in New Jersey. I had a 500 gal oil tank, which probably lasted most of the winter.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is B. S. Remove this article !
"CEO
Helyxzion, LLC
Biotechnology industry
January 1986 – January 2009 (23 years 1 month)
chairman of the *broad*"
I bet like most advanced tech, militaries will be the first users, assuming it isnt a scam. US navy ships first then maybe tanks and army trucks. maybe remote bases
I read the headline as "8 Grams of Thermite..." :) Quite a visual.
This sounds like baloney. There is no plausible mechanism for that kind of energy without nuclear reactions, and with nuclear reactions, there would be problematic fission products. 250 MW is insanely large; maybe it is a typo for 250 KW, which would be plausible for a fairly powerful car. On the other hand, maybe it is just a B.S. number that somebody made up. Bottom line: if somebody solicits you to invest in this one, watch your wallet!
Have to agree here. It's got to be a scam. I didn't make it past the fourth paragraph of the article before we delved into the world of pseudoscience. Heating thorium makes it "more" dense ad that's why it give off more heat? There must be a Nobel prize in there somewhere. A material that compresses when you heat it, rather than expanding. While it might, or might not, be true at a certain temperature and pressure, like the triple point or some other boundary condition, it certainly wouldn't be true in a general sense.
The article seems to point to building a laser out of thorium, and thus creating a energy cascade inside the thorium. This would produce plenty of energy, but while thorium might have the equivalent of 7500 gallons of gasoline, you couldn't extract all that energy. Just as you can't extract all the energy in a gallon of gasoline. Extracting all the energy from a material would leave it as 0 degrees Kelvin. Good luck with that one in a 500 lb engine block!
While they are correct that a single sheet of aluminum foil will block the alpha and beta radiation of thorium, you'll need a good thickness of lead to stop the gamma radiation. And if you're creating a cascade event in the thorium as a beam of energy, you're going unleash a whole mess of gamma radiation.
All that said, the idea of a thorium engine is certainly feasible. and might someday be a useful space engine. As a car engine, plausible? Irrelevant. No government is going to allow people to drive around with big, or little, piles of thorium. It would be trivial to build an accelerator device, in your storage shed, to enrich the thorium into uranium (q.v. Nuclear Boy Scout).
Who the heck stole my Thorium???
As others have pointed out, the story is baloney. Easy to prove:
Average energy density of gasoline (from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Energy_content_.28high_and_low_heating_value.29) is 34.8 MJ/liter.
So 7500 gallons, if burned completely, produces 988 GJ.
Then assume we have 1/2 gram each of Thorium and anti-Thorium, so we can convert all their mass to energy. The result comes to 89.875 TJ, about 100 times more energy than in gasoline.
However, since I heard nothing about antimatter in the article, I guess they won't get perfect energy conversion, so they'll have to resort to the next best thing: nuclear fission. On average, fission of one Th232 atom produces 200 MeV, only a fraction of a percent compared to complete energy conversion. Thus, the total energy content of 1g of Th assuming every atom fissions is about 83 GJ, ten times less than 7500 gallons of gas.
Hurray, I've earned my geek badge for the day!
Steam doesn't scale down very well so you'd be lucky to get within an order of magnitude of the quoted numbers with something as small as a car. Locomotives are big for a reason.
Why is all this stuff being reported as if it is true and not a 1950s "flying car by 2000" concept article?
Marty: "Are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear? " Doc: "No, no, no, no. This sucker's electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need."
won't work, unless you also have a banana peel
A few grams of thorium stored in a presumably heavily armored box (500lbs of gear around it) is a big risk? You know they ship big crates full of fire alarms with no armor right?
Dude, just ... just proofread. Mmmkay?
So how does creating a bigger waste problem with Thallium 238 solve any problems. Waste management remains the issue for nuclear power, one that is unprofitable to solve.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is all well and good, it would be great to do this, but really a much better and practical application of this would be to provide each car with 2 things - Standard Battery for driving .. and a FIXED generator build on this that could power both the house and the car.
Then in the worst case of a collision at least there won't be radio fall out while keeping it green .. simple yes ?
You might want to think about the meaning of the word "better" in this context.
Canadian tar sands that everyone are depending on to save America from peak oil;
http://s.ngm.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/img/candian-oil-sands-615.jpg
Deleted
I am going to ask the obvious: If you can built electric cars and thorium reactors that are barely small and efficient enough for electric cars, why not just put slightly bigger Thorium plants into gas stations and fuel the cars' batteries?
That would eliminate the efficiency concerns and even some of the distribution problems.
is the environmental impact.
I have very little knowledge of thorium and even less on how it would be used in an engine, but I think the big selling point here would be whether it's more or less environmentally friendly than gasoline. Or at least that would be the selling point for me.
Now normally I wouldn't pimp my own page like this...
I agree with you, and I respect the fact that you put two links in your comment and a link in your sig, as well as the "homepage" field!
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
to power my car from here to Quickey Mart?
Cant wait to live in a world where everyone is driving around in radioactive laser-turbine nitroglycerin coated cars.
I envy people who can say or write these things with a straight face and be taken seriously.
"Because thorium is so dense, similar to uranium, it stores considerable potential energy."
"Stevens agrees, emphasizing his system is âoesubcritical.â This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the same state and is not turned into uranium 233, which happens only if thorium is sufficiently super-heated to generate a fission reaction."
"Thorium has unique properties that make it useful as such a source, he says. For instance, it has the highest melting point of all oxides."
"when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat. "
Dense.
to get back to steam?
I found this company: White Whale Productions says they can replace the internal combustion engine and other power systems that require carbon based fuels and reduce the carbon footprint to zero with the "Thorium PowerPack" a leased device to power mobile transports (cars, and trucks, trains and boats). Eventually they believe their PowerPacks will be as common as the dry cell battery, replacing all of the existing batteries, and carbon-based fuel driven engines. http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:White_Whale_Productions,_LLC:Thorium_Power_Pack
Skip Stein Free Agent Management Systems Consulting, Inc. http://www.msc-inc.net www.linkedin.com/in/skipstein
to keep environmentalists' brains from exploding
Today I will let my diesel truck idle for 6 hours, Drop several CFL bulbs and put the refuse in the regular trash, turn my thermostat down to 68 degrees, print obscene amounts of data on my colorjet printer then throw it away and smoke in close proximity to a clean air rally...while i sit idling in my diesel truck.
Of course, I will do all of this wearing my "keep the earth green" t-shirt.
It's the least I can do.
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
IANAnuke: So what is going on here? Is this a well known phenomenon? Is it really possible to get more energy out than you put in via the laser?
If the laser increases thermal energy from below an energy of activation to above an energy of activation of a substance, then yes.
In that case, the energy wouldn't be coming from the laser, it would be coming from a volatile ready-to-react mixture of chemicals that simply wasn't hot enough to start a thermal positive feedback loop and start reacting on its own, without added heat from the laser.
To build the power generator for the business purpose will be much more efficient than for the car.
If it is feasible, it would worth billions bucks.
So, I played a little math and it looks like 1 gram of Thorium would power my car for about 11,000 miles. I see the car being pre-equipped with the element, and the auto industry pre-equiping a car with 5 grams... then telling you it cannot be replaced due to the huge economic impact. There won't be gas stations to fill up from. It will be like Apple's integrated battery...
That said, the cost of one gram of Thorium would end up being as high as 7,500 gallons of gas...which is about $26,000.
According to the chart, there are about 400 billion grams in the US, or 3x10(15) gallons of gas. That's equivalent to 15,000,000,000,000 barrels of oil. Based on US consumption, that's 71,428 days or about 195 years.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I looked up the domain registration for Laser Power Systems and found that it was registered to Charles Stevens, current CEO of Laser Power Systems and former CEO of Helyxzion, a company that developed software for interpreting genetic sequences. I found this post on the wonders of the Helyxzion technology and how it could "cure ALL disease", "regrow lost limbs", "rebuild damaged organs", etc. Looks like that cash cow ran dry and now he's hoping Thorium and lasers will pay the bills. PEW PEW!!
From the desk of the CEO of Laser Power Systems, what is posted on this web site (slashdot) and many other like it is mostly misinformation (crap) written by people that are NOT scientist and know nothing about lasers, thorium or what the company is working on. So go to the official web site of laser power systems.