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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?
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...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
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>
"Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral,"...
Is it abundant, or is it rare?
"rare earth" doesn't mean rare. "Rare earth's" are a class of elements that are fairly common in the Earth's crust but not often concentrated enough for profitable mining. The concentrated deposits that do exist tend to have many kinds of rare earth's which makes the extraction that much more difficult because they are chemically similar.
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.
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)
heat -> steam -> turbines -> electricity
its in the bloody summary
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.
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
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?
No that smell is your stupidity at not knowing what the word turbine means.
Thorium is an Actinide, not a rare-earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinide
Power and Power variation. To get enough power out of steam, you have to have high compressions, which steam is lousy at. Driving a turbine to generate electricity can be done at lower compressions, and also at more constant compressions.
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.
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.
I thought that too.
However you are forcing the thorium into decay and using the excess energy. You're basically burning the thorium.
The thorium, like most radioactive materials just helps itself along once it gets to a certain temperature through other means.
I would figure that efficiency margins are simply wildly over estimated. There may be 250kw of energy in that thorium, but you're going to lose a fair bit of it to the simple fact of keeping the reaction going.
However, reading the article more thoroughly, I notice that they simply state that there is 250kw of potential energy in 1g of thorium. Not that the process is expected to extract that much.
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.
Likely for the same reason that diesel-electric locomotives go to all the trouble of generating electricity rather than just powering the wheels from the diesel engine.
An steam engine of the piston and cylinder type - your traditional steam engine - isn't terribly efficient and requires high steam pressures. It is also difficult to recycle the water. Such engines do not have high cyclic rates but can produce quite a lot of horsepower, making it very unsuitable for something like a lightweight car. The engine would be really awful at high speeds and require a huge and very complicated transmission to operate at both low and high speeds.
Conversely, a steam turbine could operate with lower pressures but at vastly higher speeds with much less horsepower. You can't make it run very slowly at all, and like a lot of turbines the different in rotational speed between idle and max power is rather small. This would require a very complicated transmission, probably with some sort of variable-ratio component to get any speed control at all.
The end result is that it isn't just more efficient to spin the turbine at a fixed speed and use an electrical system to control the power to the wheels, it is likely the only way to do it at all that is even remotely practical. It is the fundamental reason why we don't have turbine powered cars and trucks today.
Yep, the automobile was actually seen as environmentally friendly improvement over horses!
People hate horseshit when it's not on their garden :)
Nick
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
I think this was supposed to be 250 mWh (mega-watt hours, not mega-watts/hour). Gasoline produces 33.41 kWh/gal, so 7500 gallons would be 250 mWh.
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.
Storing steam for future use requires a continuous heat source, or else when you go to harness your leftover steam, you find a puddle. Electricity is easier to route and control, and definitely easier to store. Also, whereas you'd need a big hollow pipe to transfer steam to the drivetrain, electric motors make do with wires. It's lighter, easier to control and more efficient to store.
/. because their ideas are far-fetched or justt plain illogical. If this startup can prove what they're saying, even if these guys don't stick a 227kg thorium engine in a car, they've still got a damn good idea for power generation that other power-critical applications (hospitals, data centers) would definitely benefit from. I'll be rooting for them.
Are you familiar with steam-powered cars in the early 1900's? Whereas today you'd turn a key and engage the starter and have instant power, with steam-powered cars you had to light your heat source and let the steam reservoir heat up sufficiently for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. With an all-steam drivetrain, people would die of boredom, and maybe even literally die if you have to warm up the ambulance for a few minutes before you can start rolling. In an all-electric drivetrain with a sufficient battery reserve, there's no wait. Turn the car on, shift to drive, press on the pedal, get moving. In this situation, while you're running off of the battery, the thorium-powered generator is providing heat to the water to create steam to replenish the battery.
I think the idea here is that we can enhance existing electric car offerings by including a thorium-based generation system to eliminate the need to plug into the local grid at night. Assuming you don't lose any steam and have to refill the water tank every once in a while, it would enable electric cars to travel for hundreds of thousands of miles without stopping (theoretically), and in doing so would break our reliance on fossil fuels in a way that plug-in electric cars never can.
You know, a lot of startups get a bad rap right off the bat here on
So fix it!
www.wavefront-av.com
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)
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.
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 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.
"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.
I was enjoying that story immensely right up until the point where I remembered the first law of thermodynamics.
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.
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?
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).