Apparently, the pictured car is the Cadillac WTF.
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The actual car consists of the steering wheelā¦ Once you grip the wheel with both hands, the body forms around you.
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Thorium doesnāt support self sustaining reactions. You have to force it to fission. Stop bombarding it with neutrons or whatever, and it stops producing energy.
Now thereās waste heat from the byproducts continuing to decay, but thatās not the main source of power for thorium reactors.
Can someone who knows more about this stuff than me tell me what happens when a car running on radioactive material gets into a car crash?
That sounds like a good attitude in general, but the real point of nuclear powered vehicles has always been fighting crime. And since criminals are superstitious and cowardly, that means you want the car to look dark and intimidating, say like a creature of the night.
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From what Iāve heard, this guy is nothing but a big scam artist. But the possibility being put forward is, to some extent or another, actually real.
There is some work on nuclear lasers involving Thorium, e.g. the population inversion takes place due to the meta stable states of the thorium 229mTh nucleus (rather than a population inversion in the electronic structure as per typical lasers). But I think you only get about 7.8eV per atom, which is generously about a factor of 10 larger than a regular chemical reaction. The interest in Thorium lasers is mainly academic, e.g. could it even possibly work? - if so itās a novel lasing mechanism and will get you a nice paper (someoneās preprint is here) in a prestigious journal. Can you run a car on Thorium? Paint me sceptical on this one. It sounds like a good way to separate investors from their money though, and Iām always in favour of that.
ETA:Reading the blurb for āLaser Power Systemsā it sounds like the name is generic - I canāt see any description of a thorium laser? Maybe they had a previous scam and the name stuck.
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Aw man, Iāve tried to submit thorium related material to BoingBoing for years, and the story they pick up is the āthorium carā nonsense.
This is what Iāve been working on: http://thoriumremix.com/
Thorium is a practical fuel for fission. It generates less plutonium waste than uranium. It is more common, and can be consumed (albeit with difficulty) in a THERMAL SPECTRUM nuclear reactor. That means those 4th Gen ābreederā reactors can be created without needing large quantities of fissile material in the reactor core.
To do this efficiently, the thorium can be dissolved in molten salts. Once we ditch solid fuel rods, all sorts of new options open up for reactor design. We donāt fuel our cars with solid fuel, why use solid fuel in nuclear reactors?
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Since it would be designed for such a scenario, probably nothing.
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Rocket Ship Galileo meets Tron.
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nuclear fictionā¦ 
http://granades.com/2011/09/16/in-which-i-use-scientific-reasoning-to-doubt-the-thorium-powered-car/
love the last paragraph. or you could read:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Thorium/#.UngE-RCDDIU
which explains how america could turn itās nearly 500k ātonnesā of thorium into nuclear waste through a number of different ways that include the use of breeder reactors producing uranium-233. donāt get me wrong, if you could escape velocity that waste into the sunā¦ . until then, i donāt want it parked next to me.
nice looking caddy.
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I assume you mean 229mTh
From the grenades.com comments:
The way heās extracting energy from the thorium has been revealed as āTesla Technologyā that increases the decay rate of the thorium by several thousand times using a Tesla coil. This causes insanely energetic emission of beta and alpha particles which pump the laser, which heats the water, instead of, say, just having the particles do it directly.
So, 100% pure BS.
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āGilded perpetual motion woo.ā I like that phrase!
Seriously, this is so obviously bullshit that it begs the question of who is being scammed. Pumpānādump on thorium mining penny stocks?
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Been following the thorium debate for some time now. Iām interested in this company in particular http://www.transatomicpower.com/. And in light of a story I read today that wind, solar, etc. will not fill the gap (āTop climate change scientistsā letter to policy influencersā http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html?iref=allsearch, the need to look at these alternative forms of nuclear.
Oh my god. I thought you were making a joke, but thatās the real name of the car. Now its twice as funny.
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I think it is true that our current nuclear reactors are woefully inefficient. The task of processing the waste is just ignored in the āonce throughā fuel cycle. I think it is the case that a lot of uranium leaves the reactor unburnt amongst the āwasteā. Iām not sure why this is ā possibly because reprocessing the spent nuclear fuel once it is contaminated with gamma-emitting uranium decay products is more expensive than mining fresh uranium out of the ground.
Does it also use copper bracelets, magnets, and healing crystals? āWe combine five forms of pseudoscience to bring you the Teslamax Thorium Car!ā
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I thought it was because the technology needed to reprocess spent fuel is exactly the same technology needed to refine uranium into weapons grade uranium, and is thus extremely tightly controlled and impractical for a for-profit company to deal with.
Ah, okay that makes sense too. I read about this in āSustainable Energy Without the Hot Airā (which got boinged a while ago), and that book claimed that we by restricting to āonce throughā we extract about 1/70 of the energy available in the known best case with optimised reprocessing.
