Investors: hide your wallets. If only one could sell this short!
I would hate to drive that car, I bet it has a terrible turn radius.
This is utter horseshit, and transparently so. Iâm astonished that anyone at Boingboing has fallen for this.
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" Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat.". What? What the hell does that mean? The density of a material has no relationship to its ability to create power.
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Thorium is fissionable, but there is no way in hell the NRC is going to license car companies to include nuclear piles in their vehicles.
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You can also extract power from a radioactive substance through radioactive decay, but youâd need a deal more than a few grams of material to power a motor vehicle.
Donât have the time to investigate this myself, but just submitted it to Snopes, and in the meantime, use some common sense, or at least run crap like this past an actual scientist before you link to it.
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like i said, nice caddy.
It is total bullshit, if that is what theyâre saying. Heat has no effect on radioactive decay at all. Heat is a property of matter at the molecular level, of which nuclei are blissfully unaware.
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Thorium is an alpha emitter. You can tape it to your forehead and it wonât hurt you.
That linked article is singularly uninformative. Iâm gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that this is some form of radioisotope thermal generator. Nothing else makes any sense. Well, pseudoscience does, but leaving that aside . . .However the very long half life of the main thorium isotopes suggest that it would not make all that good a fuel for an RTG. Seebeck effect thermocouples only have around 10% efficiency so long half life = slow decay = not all that much heat + low efficiency conversion = low power output. A gram might well be worth 7000+ gallons of gas but if it takes you 14 billion years to extract the energy, youâre going to miss yous date.
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Nononono.
This is a nice caddy.
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To add to the bullshit tally: Since when is Thorium one of the densest materials found in nature? Itâs about as dense as lead, which is roughly half as dense as uranium, which in turn is roughly one-hundred-trillionth as dense as the stuff a neutron star is made of (is there denser stuff? I dunno - neutron stars are just my go-to for âreally denseâ). Does nature stop at the edge of Earthâs atmosphere?
About the only thing I could see that would have made this (marginally) plausible would have been a claim to have worked out a miniaturised ADSR (accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor). Proposed designs use molten lead-bismuth eutectic as a coolant (melting point can be as low as about 125°C), so a great deal of radiation shielding is built in. Essentially, the accelerator knocks neutrons loose from a spallation target, which cause U233 breeding in the thorium. Stop the bombardment, the fission stops. The engineering firm Aker is one of the ones working on designs for this, and they arenât fly-by-night: Aker announcement (PDF).
I use the term âmarginallyâ advisedly, though (as in âNot effinâ likely!â). The accelerator isnât going to be trivial to power up. Efficient compact accelerators are still in the proof-of-concept/prototype stage (along the lines of EMMA scaled up, perhaps). ADSRs are still in the prototyping stage. Aker is proposing a small reactor design - in the 600 MW range - and theyâre proposing it to be ready around 2030, soâŚ
Iâm with Joel. (âWhy would you use a laser to heat water to steam, when the fission produces all the heat you need?â) A straight heat exchanger between the coolant and the turbine steam would be plenty efficient. But mainly, leaving aside the lasers and the Tesla coil âwoo-wooâ, the kind of maturity of technology heâs claiming is roughly equivalent to advertising ICs while germanium transistors were still in the proving stages (and I tend to doubt that you can scale an ADSR down to that size and get more power out than you put in, but I am not a nuclear engineer).
It should be quite effective, thoughâŚ
âŚat separating investors from their money.
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the article does seem like BS. But mis-labeling the neutron gun (thats what an accelerator is, it shoots subatomic stuff at high speed) as a laser is the only way this makes any sort of marginal plausibility
Only Cadillac could âdesignâ something THAT ugly!
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Although thorium decay products are preferable to uranium/plutonium decay products, that doesnât help you very much if they get into the environment for the forseeable future. Itâs just a question if you get half as much carcinogens after hundreds of years, or after tens of thousands.
So minutes, years or centuries after you crash&burn your car, it doesnât matter much if you ran it on thorium, plutonium or asbestos. Youâre gonna die, the people who live there are gonna die, and for the next couple of centuries people will get cancer because you DUI.
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Merely indicating that the engineers at GM know itâs balloneyshite, too.
Well, any energy shortfalls would be covered by the Steorn Orbo generator in the back.
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I wonder whether Steorn actually believed their spiel? I mean this Thorium car is so clearly nonsense that it can only be fraud, whereas my sense was that the Steorn people thought they were genuinely onto something, at least at the beginning. I think the appropriate treatment for Laser Power Systems should be to make them power their web server using Thorium and see how long they maintain a presence.
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The most surprising thing to me is that they chose to support it on 24 spokeless bicycle wheels.
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A car that runs on human sacrifices? I saw a few thousand of them on the way to work this morning.
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[quote=âanon29631895, post:33, topic:13410â]This causes insanely energetic emission of beta and alpha particles which pump the laser,[/quote]Ahh, good olâ LASIEER technology.
I look forward to the wider adoption of âinsanely energeticâ in the scientific literature. It could do for physics what the factorial did for mathematics!
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Detroit? LOL, in case you havenât noticed, not the great
influence on the auto industry it once was. -
Itâs the energy companies that would object, not the car
companies.
