Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century

http://www.industrytap.com/thorium-fueled-automobile-engine-needs-refueling-once-a-century/15649

by itomatik • 13 years ago

22 17 13 years ago

kmfrk• 13 years ago

I am not a nuclear engineer, so can someone explain the safety risks in the event of a car accident?

VLM4• 13 years ago

google for accelerator driven reactor. They don't work because its too inefficient to run the accelerator, aside from the usual squared/cube issues. I'm sure the first working one will be a fixed station, the next generation will be an ocean going ship, and maybe then a car. Concept cars are a waste of time to consider.

Worst case scenario if you literally ground the car into dust you'd release perhaps ten milligrams of nuclear waste. Why you'd grind an entire car into dust is a mystery. I suppose fed into a compactor and melted and recycled without removing the probably mostly unused and valuable fissionables is possible.

So in an accident would you rather have 10 mg of waste, or 30 gallons of hyperflammable gasoline, or 1000 Kg of lithium batteries, or ...

You're probably better off in an accident with this.

jrockway• 13 years ago

Not to mention that cars already contain many highly toxic materials, like sodium azide to generate gas for the air bags. From Wikipedia: "It may be fatal in contact with skin or if swallowed. Even minute amounts can cause symptoms. The toxicity of this compound is comparable to that of soluble alkali cyanides and the lethal dose for an adult human is about 0.7 grams."

And yet, it's still in pretty much every car. So I think we can probably handle some thorium, too.

userbinator2• 13 years ago

10mg of radioactive material can cause a lot more trouble than you think... especially since the hazards are of a less familiar nature than e.g. fire.

reallyseriously• 13 years ago

The risk is less than you'd think. Things can be contained quite nicely with just some reinforced steel and a bit of water. Accidents should be quite rare too with these self-driving Google cars. Now, I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Ygg2• 13 years ago

What are security implications of Thorium fueled automobiles?

What if someone places an explosive device in it? Or two thorium fueled cars crash? What happens to reactor in these cases?

Is there mini Chernobyl everytime (let's say food/water is poisoned for a month or so) this car collides with something?

I think things like thorium fueled cars would be way more useful for inter solar travels than as cars (Less chances of causing environmental disaster).

Tloewald• 13 years ago

Ridiculous puff piece. The key component for any of this is a working accelerator driven thorium reactor which we don't have. Once we have such a thing, energy ceases to be scarce (at least by current standards). Such reactors are like fusion, except instead of being perpetually 25 years away they seem to be 10-15 years away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_sub-critical...

VLM4• 13 years ago

"One benefit of such reactors is the relatively short life of its waste products, which would be in the hundreds of years as opposed to millions of years for existing nuclear reactors."

This line in the wikipedia is outright false. There's no way for a fissioning nucleus to magically know if the neutron that hit it came from an accelerator or another fissioning U atom. Neutron's can't be spray painted green to greenwash / eco brand them to magically make them better than non-greenwashed neutrons.

The rest of the article is more or less true. It misses the two most important uses of accelerator driven reactors. The first is even if you can't generate primary energy and its a net energy sink, you can still transmute elements. So if nasa needs more of specific Pu isotopes for a RTG, you can incredibly slowly create it by burning an enormous quantity of coal without having an actual reactor. Or you could make a plant that overall eats (lots of) electricity and squirts out americium for smoke detectors. The second use is obviously research, you now have a magic machine that eats electricity and while it eats electricity it creates an environment very much like the inside of a real reactor, without the costs and size and weight and security concerns of a normal reactor. Not exactly the same but probably good enough for short term materials science or other fooling around.

jessriedel• 13 years ago

Um, I have no idea about how this particular tech works, but neutrons with different momenta can cause dramatically different transitions in the nuclei they strike. No magic required. Is it clear that these neutrons are supposed to have the same momentum as those produced in traditional reactors? That would be surprising.

panzi• 13 years ago

Thunderf00t explains why this is BS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc

xanth• 13 years ago

Nope not true; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc

daniyaln• 13 years ago

Seems unlikely... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc

unmole• 13 years ago

One look at the website for LPS and you know it's pure BS: http://www.laserpowersystems.com/links/thorium-car/lps-car

gus_massa• 13 years ago

I will just repeat my comment from an article about the same car two years ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879219 ):

This is fake or a scam!

There are same interesting quotes in the original article: http://wardsauto.com/ar/thorium_power_car_110811/

First, this is not a nuclear reactor: (at the end of the article)

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 says that thorium has a lot of energy, not that they can extract it: (in the middle of the article)

Because thorium is so dense, similar to uranium, it stores considerable potential energy: 1 gm of thorium equals the energy of 7,500 gallons (28,391 L) of gasoline Stevens says.

And the explanation of how it works doesn't make any sense: (at the beginning of the article)

The key to the system developed by inventor Charles Stevens, CEO and chairman of Connecticut-based Laser Power Systems, is that when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat.

The entire story sounds very similar to the presentations of the perpetual moving machines, or the cold fusion: a promise of a lot of cheap energy, but not a working prototype that produce more energy that it consumes.

Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century

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