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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? ;)
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.
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.
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...
It is a bad thing that in 2011 we're still trying to use non-renewable resources to power transportation for everyone. Even with the US having 400000 tons of thorium, I figure that's enough to power 150 billion cars. Sound like a lot, not really. In 100 years we'll be back to the same spot we are now and be guilty of pushing the problem off to our descendants.
It's apparently not particularly radioactive and CAN be blocked by tinfoil. So we can either put a small shield around it, or you can use your existing tinfoil suit. Your choice.
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
You'd almost certainly need at least some battery power between the generator and the drive-train. The battery would handle temporary spikes in power (acceleration), etc. It would also allow you to run the laser for the 30 seconds required to get the reaction going.
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...
No this is great! It'll be putting another tax on stupidity, the anti-nuclear crowd will have to pay for gas in their cars while we drive around at a tiny fraction of the cost! I don't like the carbon capping schemes I've seen so far but if we come up with a good one, that will hurt them even more! I'm all for it!
I'm already imagining hooking up 2-4 of these reactors in my car to build a poor man's Tesla Roadster! Muahahaha! >:D
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So what's the cutoff for you? Is 1,000 years long enough?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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?
It is a bad thing that in 2011 we're still trying to use non-renewable resources to power transportation for everyone.
Why? The other alternative is to leave it lying in the ground where it's useless to anyone.
Saying 'but then our kids can use it' would be stupid because people will be making the same arguments a hundred years from now.
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?
If by "pushing of the problem" you mean efficiently coming up with solutions to our problems using the best technology available, then yes that's exactly what we would be doing. If they had tried to come up with a renewable energy source before unleashing the auto mobile, we still would be riding horses around. research and development of renewable energy sources is important and should be on going, but that doesn't mean that we don't use the best solution currently available.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
The sun will go out one day too. Whatever will we do then?
It's good to have some foresight, but if you refuse to touch anything that might prove temporary, you refuse to touch anything at all.
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
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)
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.
People associate the word "explosive" with gassoline. It didn't go the way of the dodo. People don't assume fuel is safe.
There are no true renewable resources (even the sun will eventually be 'used up'). So, unless you advocate only developing technologies that can still work after the heat death of the universe, there is nothing wrong with technologies that lessen our dependence on fossil fuels.
how big for one that can out put 1.2 gigawatts at 88MPH?
There was lots of similer FUD around electricity. Are you really going to channel lightning into peoples homes. They kill people in electric chairs. It is not safe for your home!!! Use candles instead.
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.
Thorium is not particularly radioactive. It decays via alpha (which travels very poorly in air, maybe a few centimeters) and naturally occuring thorium has a half life on the order of several billion years I believe. Basically to get radiation poisoning from this stuff you are going to have to grind it up and snort the stuff. Also for earlier commenters worried about nuclear explosions fro car crashes, don't be. Thorium isn't fissile, and while it is possible to make a bomb from it is hard work. It won't just happen to explode
I knew I should have been farming that Thorium Brotherhood rep. back before I reached level 60.
Gross miscalculation?
"400000 tons of thorium"
"1 gram of thorium produces the equivalent energy of 7,500 gallons of gasoline"
400000 tons = 800000000 pounds. ... which equals 362873896000 grams. ... which is the equivalent of 2721554220000000 gallons of gasoline. ... divided by well over the world's population (we'll say 8 billion) = 340194.2775 gallons per person ... divided by 300 years = 1133.980925 gallons per person, per year
So, after adding 1 billion to the population, and assuming every single person has a car (which is ridiculous), and stretching it over 300 years, we still have a huge amount of fuel...
>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.
Protecting a few grams of Thorium against the forces imposed in a car crash isn't exactly rocket science.
Yes. there is a special dispersion system that upon impact all the contents are instantly turned into a fine powder and ejected out of the containment vessel. then to make sure it get's everywhere a final pyrotechnic charge is fired to make sure it hits everyone around and the occupants of the car.
Did you not read the article?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
150 billion cars with a 10 year life span accounting for nearly 300,000 km driven per car.
Given that population estimates put us at 12-13 billion 100 years from now.... actually, screw the growth curve. Lets just use 13 billion.
That gives us at least 115 years to figure out a more permanent solution, that is also figuring one car per person for the population of the entire god damn planet just based on US reserves.
That is also based on known deposits of a mineral that, up until now, no one was really bothering to look for. Canada has estimated reserves of thorium that dwarf the US known reserves by a couple of orders of magnitude, if even half of it turns out to be accurate we end up with 5000 years of fuel, not 100, and again, for the entire planet. Not to mention that the thorium would buy us more than enough time to figure out how to safely use uranium, of which Canada has yet another metric shit-ton.
I think we'd be ok with a full out switch to thorium. By that time I imagine tech will have advanced plenty far enough that we won't be worrying about resource consumption anymore.
If it confuses your green little head too much, look at it this way: Its like having a miniature under-powered sun under the hood. Perfectly natural and effectively infinite.
Not really, there's a lot of it but it isn't in concentrated areas, so it is more processed that it is mined.
So what? If it has no other negative consequences, it just means it buys you another 100 years to find the optimal solution. And who knows, maybe in 100 years we will have fusion.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
Uh, you seem to have jumped from gallons to grams on the second line, which would presumably put your results out by a factor of a couple of thousand.
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....
No this is great! It'll be putting another tax on stupidity, the anti-nuclear crowd will have to pay for gas in their cars while we drive around at a tiny fraction of the cost! I don't like the carbon capping schemes I've seen so far but if we come up with a good one, that will hurt them even more! I'm all for it!
Nah, more like it will be outlawed for everyone after a scare campaign from the masses.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Idiot troll is idiotic.
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)
Please don't confuse the fossil-fuel funded anti-nuclear hysteria with those of us who actually understand how the environment works and wish to protect it. We tend to be in favor of nuclear energy as a bridge technology until something longer lasting can be developed. After all, it's safe, clean, and effective.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Yeah because no one ever died from the gasoline catching on fire in an accident.
http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mrfusion.png
Perhaps the same way you power the starter motor to turn your engine over.
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
Basically to get radiation poisoning from this stuff you are going to have to grind it up and snort the stuff.
Damn, you just gave them instructions. Since the Internet is the eternal memory of the universe there's no going back now. 100 years from now people will be cursing the name Anduril1986 as the one that disclosed the procedure for using thorium to inflict radiation poisoning.
This could mean it is no longer practical to use thorium for anything.
Thorium is an Actinide, not a rare-earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinide
Except the reality is that there have only been 2 major nuclear accidents that have resulted in radioactive material being released in to the public in the last 60 years - and with thousands of nuclear reactors word wide. How many health problems do you suppose the mining for and burning of coal have produced in the same time period? Do coal plants need to pay for this mythical insurance as well, or are you just going to give some of the biggest air and water polluters on the planet a free pass becasue they are "nuclear free" power?
"But this one goes to 11!"
400000 tons of thorium, where one gram is equivalent to some 7500 gallons of gasoline. We use 20 million barrels a day, at 42 gallons per barrel, so that means some 3.6 million days of fuel at current consumption. That's close to 10000 years. Where did you come up with 100?
And how are you going to change the ~100k RPM rotation of the turbine into the ~1000 RPM (that's 56MPH, assuming P175/35 R14 tyres) necessary to move a car's wheels at highway speeds? And how are you going to vary the output speed from 1-1000 RPM in a easily controllable way? Or even the 0-1RPM at high torque needed to get a car moving? Torque converters and clutches throw the excess power away as heat, whereas electric power can be modulated (Using PWM, for instance) to produce 0-1RPM at maximum torque with almost 99% efficiency - Look at White Zombie, or the Killacycle, for examples of that.
Update: These reactor units weigh 500lbs a piece, so...better stick to 1.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't know what their reasons are, but it seems like a good idea to me. All cards should be designed around electricity as the motive force, making it easy to swap out power plant designs. It would be incredibly useful if you could swap out power supplies after market, but even if that was impractical it would still be useful during the design and assembly stages to have a relatively unified design for everything besides the power plant.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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 that it never leaves the ground.
That's fine. We want it for cars. Airplanes can continue to use kerosene.
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.
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?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
it's exhaust is mostly harmless, if a bit smelly...
Dried horse-crap blowing around in the air is harmless?
Seriously? You really think that breathing in flakes of horse crap all then time you're out in the streets on a hot, dry day is not harmful?
And remember, it's not so long ago that the transport catastrophe facing the world was not running out of oil but that the number of horses was increasing so fast that in a few decades the streets would be so full of horse crap that we couldn't move anymore.
Crap, I posted AC.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
How do we start cars anyway? A 2-liter gasoline engine doesn't just start itself.
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 know that gas mantles contain thorium? Thorium has very low radioactivity, and it's an alpha emitter, which means you can shield the radiation with a piece of paper. You just shouldn't eat it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You just need a Mr. Fusion.
"Do you want you want you kids to have cancer? Do you know that you car could be powered by a radioactive substance?" Queue to stock footage of a nuclear bomb. "There are those out there who wants your kids to get cancer, call your Congressmen and have him vote NO on the Oil Reduction, Thorium Investment and Cancer Prevention funding bill. It is for your child's safety." Sponsored by those crazy nuts who hate everything, and will not do any real research before jumping to a conclusion.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Correcting myself:
Canadian thorium reserves are *theorized* at those levels.
Estimates based on actual mineral tests are much closer to what is listed in the article.
> And of course, the U.S. has the largest supply according to the chart. How convenient.
And that's bad because....
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It is a bad thing that in 2011 we're still trying to use non-renewable resources to power transportation for everyone...
Pssst...here's a little known secret. If we already knew the answer to this, we likely wouldn't still be digging very large holes in the earth.
Methane is a greenhouse gas. It's a real problem with cows, not sure about horses.
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.
People understand explosions though. Radiation terrifies people. They just dont understand it at all. People will freak the fuck out if you tell them bananas are radioactive like.
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
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.
In 100 years, we can do a crapload of science though... It's putting very little faith in our scientific progress to think that in 100 years we wouldn't have yet a better alternative. Cold fusion might still be just ten years away then but we're doing pretty good progress in other areas, be it solar, bio-fuels and other renewable sources. Stopping economic (and consequently scientific) progress when there are no real alternatives is a sure way to make sure we never get out of this mess.
We didn't move to oil because we ran out of coal, you know. It just turns out that the industrialization and the scientific progress that was made possible by the former led to the development of the later. In the age of coal, solar or nuclear was a pipe dream. In the age of oil, it's a reality. When we're in the next age, our time's pipe dreams might well be commonplace.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Same place we get power to run the spark plugs
Thinking about acres of rusting thorium hulks sitting in the illegal junkyards that trouble every county.
Yep, the automobile was actually seen as environmentally friendly improvement over horses!
People hate horseshit when it's not on their garden :)
Nick
Not only electricity as such; Thomas Alva Edison had an elephant electrocuted with alternating current, in part as a publicity stunt to show how dangerous AC was (in comparison to his own more benign DC).
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
Update self again: Each unit is covered with 3" thick stainless steel armor, which I would guess would be the lion's share of the weight, so putting multiple reactors in a single casing should allow the power to be ramped up without increasing the weight so dramatically. 2 or more units in a car might be possible while keeping the car light (under 2500lbs).
Also I wonder what exotic materials could give armor of the same strength at a lower weight? Titanium? Aluminum / Duralumin? Honeycombed aluminum? Some CF arrangement?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Of course the exhaust GASES are far from harmless.
According to the greens Methane is evil, So is CO2.
Kill all the horses and save the planet.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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
Your math is off. As a disclaimer, taking the article provided numbers at face value is probably a bad idea (wayyyy to good to be true), but let's do that for a moment.
About 4*10^11grams, allegedly equivalent to about 3*10^15 *gallons* of gasoline.2007 saw about 142,349,298,000 of gasoline used (a bit higher than other years, but let's round up to 150 billion gallons for the sake of simplicity). In this case, that would be just shy of 20 thousand years at an average of 150 billion gallons a year.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Good good I wish I had mod points right now. I nearly lost my coffee.
100 years is better than 20 years.
Yes, it is. In 100 years, we really should either be living on another planet, or able to replicate any element we want from subatomic particles.
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.
It's fuel(food) is grown...it's exhaust is mostly harmless, if a bit smelly...
Put enough horses as you need to perform the same job as cars/trucks/buses in any major city and let me know how well that goes.
As I argued earlier, you only do the kind of deep science required for true alternative energy when your economy is doing well enough that you don't have to focus all your resources on survival and keeping the system running.
Mind the frickin' laser...
you're supposed to predict 20 years for horrible disasters to occur. In 20 years: Global Cooling will destroy civilization. We're going to run out of gas in 20 years. We only have enough coal for 20 years. California will be hit with a super earthquake within 20 years. Mt. Saint Helens will erupt within 20 years. Population growth will cause massive starvation within the next 20 years. Global Warming will kill all life on Earth within 20 years.
Critical disasters are ALWAYS predicted within 20 years.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Yes. Lots of things are radioactive. Very few of them are concentrated enough to hurt you.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Thorium decays as an alpha emitter. The worst it can do is cause something akin to a sunburn. Even were those eight grams released, they would be of negligible risk unless ingested.
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)
depends on your perspective of problem. If we only had cows and horses, and no other sources of greenhouse gases, and 1/7th the population of people it wouldn't be a problem. If you tried to have horses for 7 billion people.. well.
Cows also produce a relatively large amount of methane compared to other animals.
440,00 tons is just in the US. I just did a similar back-of-envelope calculation and calculated that the US could support its current consumption for 14,000 years on 440,000 tons of thorium. 440,000(tons) * 907,184.74(g/ton) * 7,500(gal/g) / 31(gal/bbl) / 19,000,000(bbl/day) / 365(days/year) = 13,925 years I assumed that a bbl of oil gets converted to a bbl of gasoline, which is a very conservative assumption.
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
Doubt it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4
Hey at least we won't have to go invade some country to get it.
Knowing us, we would sell it all to China.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The sun will go out one day too. Whatever will we do then?
It's good to have some foresight, but if you refuse to touch anything that might prove temporary, you refuse to touch anything at all.
In the long run, we're all dead. - John Maynard Keynes
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
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?
I saw the starting procedure for a sewage/storm pumping station once. The giant diesel engine had two power sources to compress the air needed to get it going. The 'regular' one was an electric motor connected to a compressor. The 'backup' one was a small handle connected to a compressor. I saw no way for the engine to compress it's own startup air, so I would assume that in the event of a prolonged power outage there would come a time when someone would have to take the uncomfortable wooden seat and spend hours cranking the handle to store up the energy needed to make it start.
There is a fun little dance the operator has to do during startup to switch the camshaft from 'air' to 'fuel' while simutainously closing the compressed air feed, opening the fuel feed and engaging the cam for the fuel pump. Lots of controls all need to be operated within a single cycle.
i'll settle for being able to grow anything we need, including vehicles with pseudo-"muscles" for engines that take cellulose.
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.)
>>Even with the US having 400000 tons of thorium, I figure that's enough to power 150 billion cars. Sound like a lot, not really. In 100 years we'll be back to the same spot we are now and be guilty of pushing the problem off to our descendants.
Well, if 1g of Thorium is enough for 75,000 miles, and people drive an average of 15,000 miles per year, then every car will consume 200 milligrams per year.
That's enough for 2 trillion car-years of fuel. And that's just America's reserves. The worldwide reserves are estimated to be about 4x larger, though undoubtedly even more can be found via mineral exploration, or 8 trillion car-years of proven reserves.
indeed, the thorium reserves of earth are sufficient for about 4,000 years of an earth with 8.5 billion people (which will be the peak population of earth in about 2070 followed by very small rate of decline if current trend continue)
I truly hope that is the case. of course, you'll have the same type of electric vacuum cleaner, but the gen iv+ thorium breeder reactor will be in a nice secure power plant staffed by competent people.
So we all agree this is a joke. OK it's not April 1st so how did this get posted to Slashdot?
There was a brief analysis of this problem in an old issue of Scientific American. I don't have a cite. At the turn of the twentieth century the daily population in a large city could exceed one hundred thousand horses. Every day each horse produces approximately ten kilograms of manure and several liters of urine. Does anyone want to go back in time and experience New York City on a hot muggy summer day in 1901? There's a reason our grandparents had the expression "Smelled bad enough to knock a buzzard off a shitwagon."
Oh well.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
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.
I'm not disagreeing with you. But why are we limiting ourselves to thinking just about cars? A cost effective electric generator for homes and businesses would be a game changer calling into question whether we even need an electrical grid. As I understand it, homes are often terribly energy inefficient and a big percentage of electrical power is lost in transport through the grid. Aren't there some big benefits there, too? Particularly if the generators needed weren't quite compact enough for current vehicular engine compartments. Either have one per home, or even just replace transfer stations with larger thorium generators and reduce the distance the power has to travel.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
harmless, no. Better than coal dust and the general crap spewed from factories 50 years ago, absolutely. Horse shit is overall pretty harmless. They're herbivores, so after a few days it becomes fertilizer. Not that you want to be chomping down fertilizer. The exhaust from leaded petrol cars was pretty nasty in quantity.
The transport catastrophe you speak of was only a big city problem. Even until the 1940's much of the world ran on horse power (including the infamously mechanized german army).
The root of the problem, much like every other problem, is that we were fine from a sustainability perspective when the population of the planet was in the 700 million - 1 billion range. Elephants powered work all through asia and some of africa, horses could move people around. Get up to 2 billion people, especially with modern sewage so you can support millions of people in a small city area and you compact all these horses and people. Get to 3 billion, 4 billion, and you simply need much better transport capacity to supply anywhere important. It's not so much horse shit that's the problem it's that you can't clean horse shit and move traffic fast enough, and remember cars and trucks easily move 10x as much material per unit space as a horse (if nothing else but by moving substantially faster). 75% of the population dying before they're 5 isn't desirable either. We just got better at keeping people alive faster than we got good at making birth control.
Of course eliminating the need for a huge number of horses freed up food for the population expanding.
Yes, only for idiots who don't realize what the "rare" actually means. It means "rarefied" which means it is more widely dispersed than a rich deposit which is more heavily concentrated. It does not mean there is not abundant quantities of it.
For those who didn't catch the sarcasm of parent... Water vapor is much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. And I salute a fellow heretic of the new religion.
Mind the frickin' laser...
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.
I'm inclined to agree with someone above and think they meant MWh.
(7,500 gallons) * (132 * (10^6) joules per gallon) in (megawatts * hours): 275 MWh
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."
"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
Agreed 100% actually.
We should be getting these installed into transfer stations etc.
There is more than enough fuel there to do it.
I think you mean "one-point-twenty-one jiggawatts". Any scientist will tell you that's the correct pronunciation and unit.
"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.
How did you get the car to go fast enough to crack the 3" armor around the reactor?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
The element is in a container made from three inch thick stainless steel.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Good luck cracking the 3" stainless steel armor. That's more than an aircraft's flight recorder has.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
Well there isn't a monopoly on thorium production, the US and China will be competing so they won't be able to gouge us.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
isnt that what a fly wheel and transmission is for? granted they may need to be improved / made for this application but isnt the purpose the same?
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.
If your body parts are spread out all over the road, you are unlikely to care about the condition of the Thorium containment vessel ... or anything else for that matter.
Yes, there would be a crash-rated containment vessel for the Thorium. What? You were planning to store the Thorium pellet in the cup holder between the front seats?
And while we're at it, let's compare the scale of the Fukushima release to that possible from your Thorium-car. Release estimates vary pretty wildly, but let's use a low-end number of 50 million Curies. A Curie is the radioactive decay equivalent of one gram of Radium-226 (decays per second.) So Fukushima released at least the equivalent of 50,000 kg of Radium-226 into the environment. Your 10 g Thorium pellet is, what, 10 orders of magnitude smaller than that?* So for an equivalent Fukushima release, every car on the planet would need to be Thorium powered, and every one would need to simultaneously be involved in a containment-vessel-rupturing accident. I rather like the distributed containment vessel architecture from a safety perspective.
* - assuming Radium-226 and Thorium-whatever have equivalent radioactive decay rates, which they don't.
It doesn't.
It's just a typical scam.
A car AND a dirty bomb, pre-assembled!
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
You forgot to take into account how much water will be needed to make the steam, and how carrying enough water to give a car the same range is has with gasoline will make it much larger and heavier than it is today. What will you do in states like California that constantly have drought problems? Oh, and no you can't just convert the steam back to water. Doing so would require a massive condenser to handle the volume of steam needed for power and it would never fit on a single car.
There is actually a really good reason why we still use non-renewable energy sources. Nothing has come anywhere close to replacing them and won't for a long time to come.
Put it in a reinforced steel or carbon fiber box. Throium isn't that radioactive, and the radiation it emits is trivially blockable.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
A flywheel will smooth out any potential variations in the speed of the turbines (Which wouldn't really be a problem here), and a transmission will gear up/down the output, yes. But given the difficulty in controllably varying the speed and power output of the turbines, you would have a (comparatively tiny) "power band". When you have to change gear 40 times to get to 50MPH, you really have an inefficient system. A CVT could be used, but again you would have power being thrown away, and it still wouldn't solve the problem of needing to slip the input vs. the output. But Electricity can be generated at >80% efficiency, transferred and modulated with >97% efficiency, and stored with >95% efficiency, and you will already need a store of power to begin the reaction from cold every time. So why build 2 power generation systems (steam for motion and steam for electricity) with all the added complexity and inefficiency that brings, when you can make just one (Electricity) and use that for everything?
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.
Saying 'but then our kids can use it' would be stupid because people will be making the same arguments a hundred years from now.
Actually that would be very smart of both us and those future generations, up until the point where they need the resource, and then because previous generations were smart about conservation, it was there for them when they needed it.
Of course I think that we are the generation that currently needs whatever it is that can get us off of burning fossil fuels for energy. If there's something other than thorium that can do it, then it would be quite intelligent to leave the thorium unused.
But right now we're still working on figuring that out, so exploring thorium makes a lot of sense. If thorium reactors are the key to expanding nuclear energy, then let's do it. Or if this article turns out not to be complete BS, then that would be great too.
The enemies of Democracy are
A new application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
... because he already has invested in solar ...
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?
Well go figure it the fuck out and quit wasting time bitching on slashdot.
Since laser inducement of thorium decay has never been before to even a single atom.
"Do you want you want you kids to have cancer? Do you know that you car could be powered by a radioactive substance?" Queue to stock footage of a nuclear bomb. "There are those out there who wants your kids to get cancer, call your Congressmen and have him vote NO on the Oil Reduction, Thorium Investment and Cancer Prevention funding bill. It is for your child's safety." Sponsored by those crazy nuts who hate everything, and will not do any real research before jumping to a conclusion. Exxon-Mobile, Shell, BP, and Saudi Arabia, Inc.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
That's ridiculous. You can't plan on those timescales. If you somehow figured out how to make cars run on oxygen alone there's no way to say that oxygen won't someday become scarce. Solar panels use the sun to make electricity, but they aren't built of out rays from the sun, they're built of materials on earth, some of them very rare.
A 100-year energy source is fantastic. As in, it's a fantasy to think we can even plan that far out.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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
"CEO
Helyxzion, LLC
Biotechnology industry
January 1986 – January 2009 (23 years 1 month)
chairman of the *broad*"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Horse crap is not harmful at all.
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).
Sponsored by those bastards making big money from the petroleum industry, even.
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
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.
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
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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
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.
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.
Batteries don't store enough energy per weight and volume.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Watch out, that banana you're eating might just be radioactive! Oh, but wait, your body is radioactive, too!
I am not devoid of humor.
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.
We COULD be doing a crapload of science, but the U.S. government doesn't seem to care much for funding science. Auto makers and oil industry won't work on this, it's against the status quo and doesn't immediately improve profits, so Wall Street won't be interested in it either. My wife is an astronomer, and their sister telescope originally was funded entirely through the National Science Foundation. The funding was reviewed every year, and they've lost a lot of personnel to other telescopes because the NSF got down to less than a month before funding expired to renew it for the next year. Since then they've been able to diversify some of their projects so they're not 100% dependent on NSF for funding.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
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.
In its defence... The US government is flat broke and has been running on borrowed money for a great many years now. Even the so-called drastic cuts they were arguing about a while ago were cuts on planned increases (2 trillion cuts on planned 9 trillion budget increases).
Diversification as you've mentioned seems like the viable option in your specific case. But I think everyone in the US should put quite a bit of thought on what they feel they're entitled to as far as government hand-outs are. Debt costs a lot more (interests) than a balanced budget. A 1% cut across the board (*everything*) for six years followed by a freeze (no cut, no increase) would balance the budget in about 8 years without shutting down any program. If on top of that you get rid of monsters like DHS and end the senseless wars, you can do it in a lot less time.
Mind the frickin' laser...
400.000 ton is 40.000.000 kg = 40.000.000.000 g.
No need to convert to imperial units and back.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.