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."

Comments

Hmmm

[WrongSizeGlass]

So when I go to the gas station and ask them for a couple of grams, I might get Thorium some day? ;)

Re:Hmmm

[elrous0]

Depends on the neighborhood.

Re:Hmmm

[rwa2]

"abundant" "rare earth mineral"

Sounds like like it's only relatively abundant.

Also sounds like 1g of Thorium probably only translates to 7500 gal of gasoline under optimal conditions, which I take to mean unrealistic efficiencies and economies of scale beyond what's achievable for a turbine that would fit in a small car. Just one of the silly things about steam turbines, they're only really efficient enough to be practical when they're really really big (like, 777 or better yet factory-sized).

Re:Hmmm

[wagnerrp]

The term "rare earth" is a bit of a misnomer. The materials themselves are not that rare. The issue is that they are not commonly found in a rich deposit. Rather, they are dispersed throughout an area, requiring expensive mining and refining techniques.

Re:Hmmm

[Hadlock]

Assuming 50% real world efficiency, and that your car averages 20mpg, 1 gram of thorium would still get you through your first 75,000 miles. I'm ok with that! They can design a helium fuel tank to not rupture in an explosive manner at highway speeds in a car, surely they can put 1g of thorium in a container that won't disperse the material in an aerosol form on impact. I'm not sure what the cost of Thorium is, but I'm willing to bet 1g of refined Thorium is under $200. I spend that much on gas in a month.

Re:Hmmm

[f()rK()_Bomb]

Rare earth elements arent actually rare, its just a confusing name. Thorium is actually pretty plentiful, 3 or 4 times more common than uranium and its very easy to extract. We get it was a by product when we purify the rare earths we need anyways. Thorium would have been used for the original nuclear reactors, its vastly safer and you cant use it to manufacture weapons. And therein lies the problem of course, they wanted to be able to make nukes from reactors back when we built them.

I believe you are right about them really making the numbers sound much better than they should be. That sounds like the kind of efficiency youd get from using thorium in a full-scale nuclear plant.

Re:Hmmm

[Russ1642]

Exactly. But then again this is an article about something that's very dense.

Re:Hmmm

[shadowfaxcrx]

Well, there's also the bit that if it starts going into cars, demand will go up, and so it will be more expensive.

That said, it'll be part of the price of the new car, so you won't notice as much. If you're dropping $30,000 on a car, you won't notice an extra 3 or 4 grand on the loan for the first 10 years of fuel all that much.

If this ever came to fruition, it would wreck hell on the roads until we re-organized the tax system to collect infrastructure taxes off of something other than gasoline.

Re:Hmmm

[NeverVotedBush]

I just read the article - this is a scam. A hoax. They say one gram = 7500 gallons of gasoline but at the end claim no nuclear reactions are taking place. They say you have to "superheat" the thorium for that to happen.

Without nuclear reactions, there is no way to have one gram of thorium release the same energy as 7500 gallons of gasoline. It's simply impossible.

And there is no way to have a laser cause a nuclear reaction unless you are using it to implode targets.

Thorium is being looked at as reactor fuel but it's not the kind of reactor that would fit under an automobile hood.

I hope nobody invests any money in this. It isn't real.

Re:Hmmm

[lpp]

Demand will go up, but it's also possible that production efficiency will go up too which coupled with competition from other manufacturers would cause prices to go back down.

Re:Hmmm

[rlanctot]

I think the challenge here is not to design a container that won't explode, but to design a container to keep environmentalists' brains from exploding when they hear the words 'car' and 'radioactiver' used together.

Re:Hmmm

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I still think they should leave him in Khazad Dum, and find a better way to make white people rich, than these atomic automobiles.

Re:Hmmm

[DigitalReverend]

That 440,900 tons equals 399,977,751,866 grams

If one gram = 7,500 gallons of gasoline that the equivalent of 2,999,833,138,995,000 gallons of gasoline.

  In 2009, the U.S. used 126,773,388,000 gallons of gasoline. http://americanfuels.blogspot.com/2010/04/2009-gasoline-consumption.html

Which means that the US supply of thorium could provide the equivalent of 21,751 years of gasoline usage in the U.S.

I think it's plentiful enough.

Re:Hmmm

[mlts]

If someone can do this with a motorcycle, think about a few changes to make the engine run at 3600 rpm in the US or 3000 RPM overseas, or variable RPM with an inverter.

Having the ability to have cheap power, even if it about 5 to 20 kilowatts would change life greatly for villages. This would provide water filteration ability, power for a water pump for running water, lights, HVAC for a building for those too young/old/infirm to take the heat. Slightly larger models can help with desalination (even if it is the primitive process of distilling the water 3-4 times), and then pumping it inland.

Another use for this would be coupling the motor with an inverter and a capacitor bank and having clean power for remote data centers, be it a shed that has a heater to keep the servers running in the middle of Alaska to transmit weather and seismic info, to stations which watch forest 24/7 in case of forest fire, to seismic info near volcanos.

Cars are cool, but the biggest application for this technology wouldn't be transportation (although it would help it), but electricity generation.

Re:Hmmm

[jcr]

Better by what criteria?

I love the idea of massively decentralized power generation. It could free up gigatons of metals that we're currently using in high-tension lines, towers, tranformers, etc, etc. Not to mention, without transmission lines, your power doesn't have to fail anytime you have a massive snowstorm.

-jcr

NIMBY

[ddxexex]

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?

Re:NIMBY

[ZombieBraintrust]

Hom many gallons of gasoline does it take to mine 8g of Thorium? Oil comes out of the ground pretty easily. Is it similer to mining coal? Or are we talking displacing and sifting through a ton of dirt and rock?

Re:NIMBY

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

It's rock you'd be sifting through anyway: thorium is a byproduct of rare earth production.

Yeah, right.

[Animats]

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.

Where?

[wsxyz]

Where does the shark go? There's got to be a shark involved somewhere.

Where is the energy coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:So which is it?

[kimvette]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element

Despite their name, rare earth elements (with the exception of the radioactive promethium) are relatively plentiful in the Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million (similar to copper). However, because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found in concentrated and economically exploitable forms known as rare earth minerals.[3] It was the very scarcity of these minerals (previously called "earths") that led to the term "rare earth". The first such mineral discovered was gadolinite, a compound of cerium, yttrium, iron, silicon and other elements. This mineral was extracted from a mine in the village of Ytterby in Sweden; many of the rare earth elements bear names derived from this location.

Good thing I have a stash....

[babywhiz]

In my alts guild bank. Now everyone is gonna be in Un'goro with their bots....wait.....

Re:I want to power my house with this

[a_nonamiss]

What's more, you could charge a battery powered electric vehicle at your house, and save the need for you to lug around a small nuclear reactor in your car. The article talks about the difficulties of miniaturizing it for use in cars. Simple solution: don't. We already have batteries that fit nicely into a car and have a range nearing 300 miles, in 10 years that range will probably be 10 times what it is today. Plus, if it meant efficient energy, I wouldn't really mind something the size of a box truck in my backyard, or my basement. Hell, you could probably bury most of the reactor underground.

Or a complete lie.

[queazocotal]

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.

Holy shit, what's going on in the world...

[verbatim]

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)

Re:Holy shit, what's going on in the world...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

You left out Duke Nukem Forever.

Several thoughts

[WindBourne]

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.

Where is the energy supposed to come from?

[erice]

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.

Re:Why convert the steam to electricity?

[cdrguru]

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.

Yeah, he's done this before... crook

[liquidweaver]

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?

Here's the actual web site.

[Animats]

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.

The agony of being a scientist

[Sans_A_Cause]

I was enjoying that story immensely right up until the point where I remembered the first law of thermodynamics.