There's legitimate research into using a petawatt laser to knock neutrons out of things like gold, which then cause the thorium to fission. None of those things are radioactive decay though. Incidentally, a petawatt laser is rather larger than something you could put in a car.
Way back in undergrad I took a robotics course, with the robots built out of lego (pre-mindstorms, we used HC11 based micro controller boards and lego we modified with a dremel). The first lab assignment was to build a chassis that could survive the metre and a half fall from the lab bench to the concrete floor. When you thought you had something that would work, the professor would walk over and... knock your robot off the bench. Airbags were not considered.
Think about what you said. What does the phone see when you drop it? 1G? Nope, that's when you're holding it. It sees zero. If you're accelerating straight down in your car at 1G you're going to need more than airbags on your phone.
But yes, probably not good to take in the vomit comet.
People looking to make a fast buck don't hold stock very long, and so can't be responsible for long term changes, through buying stock themselves (because they'll just sell it again soon), or through influencing others (because they cause stock to drop when they sell it as much as rise when they buy it).
The get rich quick types are responsible for the high frequency volatility and, when they screw up, the massive, unfounded losses. But price variations over months and years are the result of long term investors who tend to evaluate a company on its merits.
1. What's a sub-kiloton fissionable? Do you mean less than a thousand tonnes of material? I certainly wouldn't want to put more in a car, no matter what the material is.
2. Thorium isn't fissionable (well, I suppose you could technically fission it, but not the way you're thinking).
3. A subcritical hunk of fissionable material can't "go critical" without a lot of tricky intervention. Surrounding it with very carefully shaped high explosives and detonating them with very accurate timing, for example.
You can still have a random process that just happens faster. Chemical reactions are like that - heat something up and it will (barring other effects) react faster, while still being completely random.
Of course, we don't know of anything that alters the rate of nuclear decay. Heat certainly doesn't do it.
"Anyone will attempt to go after corporate before personal users because the reward is greater."
What? Most infections are aimed at creating bot nets and the payoff is WAY higher outside of corporations. They usually monitor traffic and are pretty good at cleaning up infected machines. Home users? Not so much.
Marketshare was a reasonable argument when Apple had 2% and shrinking. Now that they've got 10%+ and growing, it doesn't hold so much water. Not to mention that Darwin runs zillions of iPads and iPhones in addition to Macs.
Stevens agrees, emphasizing his system is “subcritical.” 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.
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.
Crap. If all cars started using 20 kW/h then in less than a year and a half you'd be up to 250 MW (assuming they started at zero, which is a pretty bad assumption). These guys are being hopelessly optimistic - clearly such a car would require a much larger power plant to last a reasonable amount of time.
(just in case you missed it, kW/h is not a useful unit. You mean kJ/s, otherwise known as kW)
It's possible, but only a massively stupid company would ever do such a thing. The cost to use a crappy Blackberry instead of a PC would be enormous, since the BB itself is expensive (they don't give you that nice portable form factor for free), and even though it has a lot of peripherals to make it like a PC, they aren't nearly as good.
Use your imagination. There's considerable advantage to a portable form factor, and adding things like wired ethernet (if you even wanted such a thing) isn't very difficult. A rare purchase of a keyboard and mouse and perhaps a monitor for desk-side use wouldn't be so bad, and you end up with something that can potentially replace your desktop, notebook and, if you make it small enough, your Blackberry.
No, it's probably not practical to ditch all the PCs in a company today. Will it be in the future? Probably. There's nothing particularly special about the traditional PC form factor. Many companies ALREADY use their networked PCs essentially as dumb terminals (which are not PCs, BTW).
The point was to refute the OPs assertion that China produces no intellectual property. Being the second largest producer of journal articles, even if they are of lower quality than those produced in other countries (they're all peer reviewed by the same people), strongly suggests that assertion is false.
The US also got a big jump start by accepting scientists and other skilled people fleeing the war in Europe and by appropriating more during the invasion.
A few weeks or a month in a hospital isolation ward would be a pretty small price to pay for curing or preventing AIDS. You'd be better off than most immunoablated patients as well because you'd only be short T-cells.
If you want to spend money on rodent health care, go for it. I strongly suspect you are a VERY niche market and so giving your rat drugs that had failed human trials would be exorbitantly expensive. Expensive in a way that would make human drugs look cheap.
I guess that you never saw a road being constructed....
Not only have I seen it, I've participated in it. What's your point? If you're suggesting that we can't transition civilization to non-hydrocarbon fuels because we need large trucks to build roads, it would be perfectly feasible to fuel those with something else (fuel cells, better batteries eventually, synthetic hydrocarbons if necessary). That particular application is tiny compared to the amount of fuel spent on long haul trucking.
The rate at witch you can release the energy, to have an explosion with gasoline it needs to be atomized with a lithium battery you only need an impact at the right place but short-circuit wont do it since all lithium battery that I know of have a controller to prevent that.
Lithium batteries don't explode. They may get hot and burn, but gasoline also does that reasonably well. And there's no theoretical impediment to building a battery with a self limiting discharge rate.
At this very moment it is impossible but I agree that we should limit the burning of this precious liquid. but not for the greenness of it but because of the value of the chemicals in it.
You've entirely missed the point. We can fairly easily synthesize all the oil we need for non-fuel purposes NOW. It's not that hard, and it's not even all that inefficient. Saving oil for "the value of the chemicals in it" is not necessary.
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There's legitimate research into using a petawatt laser to knock neutrons out of things like gold, which then cause the thorium to fission. None of those things are radioactive decay though. Incidentally, a petawatt laser is rather larger than something you could put in a car.
Whew.
Way back in undergrad I took a robotics course, with the robots built out of lego (pre-mindstorms, we used HC11 based micro controller boards and lego we modified with a dremel). The first lab assignment was to build a chassis that could survive the metre and a half fall from the lab bench to the concrete floor. When you thought you had something that would work, the professor would walk over and... knock your robot off the bench. Airbags were not considered.
It's a problem if you're going to "personally pick it up" and put it in your trunk like the OP was.
I hope not. I'd fail them all for this idea.
They realize it in a hurry the first time they have to replace a phone. And they are better people for it.
Think about what you said. What does the phone see when you drop it? 1G? Nope, that's when you're holding it. It sees zero. If you're accelerating straight down in your car at 1G you're going to need more than airbags on your phone.
But yes, probably not good to take in the vomit comet.
People looking to make a fast buck don't hold stock very long, and so can't be responsible for long term changes, through buying stock themselves (because they'll just sell it again soon), or through influencing others (because they cause stock to drop when they sell it as much as rise when they buy it).
The get rich quick types are responsible for the high frequency volatility and, when they screw up, the massive, unfounded losses. But price variations over months and years are the result of long term investors who tend to evaluate a company on its merits.
"Stevens has worked out you’d require a 227kg, 250MW thorium engine in order to power a typical road car."
Yes, he's planning to put a 250 MW, 500 lbs power plant in each car. Yes, he's full of shit, but that's the least of the mistakes.
I don't remember the commies, but I do remember they found Nazis when they got there.
1. What's a sub-kiloton fissionable? Do you mean less than a thousand tonnes of material? I certainly wouldn't want to put more in a car, no matter what the material is.
2. Thorium isn't fissionable (well, I suppose you could technically fission it, but not the way you're thinking).
3. A subcritical hunk of fissionable material can't "go critical" without a lot of tricky intervention. Surrounding it with very carefully shaped high explosives and detonating them with very accurate timing, for example.
Blowing apart a nucleus isn't quite the same thing as stimulating nuclear decay. Yes, the effect might be similar, but the processes are different.
You can still have a random process that just happens faster. Chemical reactions are like that - heat something up and it will (barring other effects) react faster, while still being completely random.
Of course, we don't know of anything that alters the rate of nuclear decay. Heat certainly doesn't do it.
I'm pretty sure there are very few Slashdoters who can lift 500 lbs.
No you can't. You can't increase nuclear decay by heating something.
"Anyone will attempt to go after corporate before personal users because the reward is greater."
What? Most infections are aimed at creating bot nets and the payoff is WAY higher outside of corporations. They usually monitor traffic and are pretty good at cleaning up infected machines. Home users? Not so much.
Marketshare was a reasonable argument when Apple had 2% and shrinking. Now that they've got 10%+ and growing, it doesn't hold so much water. Not to mention that Darwin runs zillions of iPads and iPhones in addition to Macs.
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?
The laser isn't 250 MW. The power plant is. And I suspect they actually meant 250 kW.
Crap. If all cars started using 20 kW/h then in less than a year and a half you'd be up to 250 MW (assuming they started at zero, which is a pretty bad assumption). These guys are being hopelessly optimistic - clearly such a car would require a much larger power plant to last a reasonable amount of time.
(just in case you missed it, kW/h is not a useful unit. You mean kJ/s, otherwise known as kW)
You still haven't mentioned what you're going to use all this benzene for.
It's possible, but only a massively stupid company would ever do such a thing. The cost to use a crappy Blackberry instead of a PC would be enormous, since the BB itself is expensive (they don't give you that nice portable form factor for free), and even though it has a lot of peripherals to make it like a PC, they aren't nearly as good.
Use your imagination. There's considerable advantage to a portable form factor, and adding things like wired ethernet (if you even wanted such a thing) isn't very difficult. A rare purchase of a keyboard and mouse and perhaps a monitor for desk-side use wouldn't be so bad, and you end up with something that can potentially replace your desktop, notebook and, if you make it small enough, your Blackberry.
No, it's probably not practical to ditch all the PCs in a company today. Will it be in the future? Probably. There's nothing particularly special about the traditional PC form factor. Many companies ALREADY use their networked PCs essentially as dumb terminals (which are not PCs, BTW).
For what? And what does it have to do with 18 wheelers?
The point was to refute the OPs assertion that China produces no intellectual property. Being the second largest producer of journal articles, even if they are of lower quality than those produced in other countries (they're all peer reviewed by the same people), strongly suggests that assertion is false.
The US also got a big jump start by accepting scientists and other skilled people fleeing the war in Europe and by appropriating more during the invasion.
A few weeks or a month in a hospital isolation ward would be a pretty small price to pay for curing or preventing AIDS. You'd be better off than most immunoablated patients as well because you'd only be short T-cells.
If you want to spend money on rodent health care, go for it. I strongly suspect you are a VERY niche market and so giving your rat drugs that had failed human trials would be exorbitantly expensive. Expensive in a way that would make human drugs look cheap.
Not only have I seen it, I've participated in it. What's your point? If you're suggesting that we can't transition civilization to non-hydrocarbon fuels because we need large trucks to build roads, it would be perfectly feasible to fuel those with something else (fuel cells, better batteries eventually, synthetic hydrocarbons if necessary). That particular application is tiny compared to the amount of fuel spent on long haul trucking.
Lithium batteries don't explode. They may get hot and burn, but gasoline also does that reasonably well. And there's no theoretical impediment to building a battery with a self limiting discharge rate.
You've entirely missed the point. We can fairly easily synthesize all the oil we need for non-fuel purposes NOW. It's not that hard, and it's not even all that inefficient. Saving oil for "the value of the chemicals in it" is not necessary.