Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished.....
If you want ON or OFF the DIESEL ”KnOcK” LIST jut FReepmail me..... This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days.....
Posted on 11/14/2013 2:24:11 PM PST by neverdem
If your car was powered by thorium, you would never need to refuel it. The vehicle would burn out long before the chemical did. The thorium would last so long, in fact, it would probably outlive you.
That's why a company called Laser Power Systems has created a concept for a thorium-powered car engine. The element is radioactive, and the team uses bits of it to build a laserbeam that heats water, produces steam, and powers an energy-producing turbine.
Thorium is one of the most dense materials on the planet. A small sample of it packs 20 million times more energy than a similarly-sized sample of coal, making it an ideal energy source.
The thing is, Dr. Charles Stevens, the CEO of Laser Power Systems, told Mashable that thorium engines won't be in cars anytime soon.
"Cars are not our primary interest," Stevens said. "The automakers don't want to buy them."
He said too much of the automobile industry is focused on making money off of gas engines, and it will take at least a couple decades for thorium technology to be used enough in other industries that vehicle manufacturers will begin to consider revamping the way they think about engines.
"We're building this to power the rest of the world," Stevens said. He believes a thorium turbine about the size of an air conditioning unit could more provide cheap power for whole restaurants, hotels, office buildings, even small towns in areas of the world without electricity. At some point, thorium could power individual homes.
Stevens understands that people may be wary of Thorium because it is radioactive — but any such worry would be unfounded.
"The radiation that we develop off of one of these things can be shielded by a single sheet off of aluminum foil," Stevens said." "You will get more radiation from one of those dental X-rays than this."
It’ll have to do until we get dilithium crystals.
Fool. Car makers are in business to make money and they don't care what the fuel is.
Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished.....
If you want ON or OFF the DIESEL ”KnOcK” LIST jut FReepmail me..... This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days.....
"The radiation that we develop off of one of these things can be shielded by a single sheet off of aluminum foil," Stevens said
“It’ll have to do until we get dilithium crystals.”
Or a Beryllium Sphere. LOL!
Imagine you are a cop, fireman or EMT dispatched to a Thorium-powered car crash.
I’m waiting on my LENR/CANR/LANR/NOT(WELL MAYBE) COLD FUSION HOT WATER GENERATOR.
It’ll bring hot showers and joy to the Heart of Darkness..... .someday.
Yeah.. I hate it when you crack the Beryllium Sphere. They are quite hard to replace.
A small sample of it packs 20 million times more energy than a similarly-sized sample of coal
At the current rate of progress, it will happen 250 years before hot-fusion powered water heaters.
asked & answered
-—————www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg85737.html————————————
Thorium as an energy source has a great deal to recommend it.
Unlike uranium, thorium is not “fissile,” so it needs to be coaxed into a reaction. In the presence of “fissile” elements, a sufficient amount of energy is released to kick-start the thorium reaction to produce a satisfactory amount of heat energy, which may be used to propel a steam turbine for direct power generation, and has a certain degree of “throttle response”, in which the reaction may be damped down, or raised to a more energetic level with predictable effect.
Thorium has the added advantage of producing much less “waste” than uranium based reactions, and in fact, “burns” the waste from spent or depleted uranium nuclear rods, which present a continuing problem with storage at existing nuclear plants.
The time to move to this power source is fast moving beyond the theoretical and experimental to the practical engineering applications. Its adoption may also lead to a decentralization of the power grid, with the power plant moved much closer to the point of electrical consumption. Individual power plants would be both much smaller than an equal amount of power generation potential from uranium-based nuclear power, and pose much less hazard to the immediate locality.
Years ago (1958), Ford produced a non-operative concept of just such a vehicle, the Nucleon, but it never got beyond the model stage. The original idea was to use uranium as the power source, but thorium would work so much better in this application.
When Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed you could build a nuclear reactor using thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, that could have resulted in a very safe form of nuclear power that could power US energy needs for thousands of years. The only reason why it wasn't developed further was because it couldn't make plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons.
That sounds great, especially the part about decentralized power generation.
The result of liberal public school education:
A small sample of it packs 20 million times more energy than a similarly-sized sample of coal
It comes from the planet Krypton, ergo each car power generator will cause the cost of new cars to be in the $2M range for the economy model but not to worry, government financing is available if you are a Democrat and have an RFID implant with GPS enabled.
Break-even, cost-effective controlled fusion has been 25 years away for the last 60 years...
“Imagine you are a cop, fireman or EMT dispatched to a Thorium-powered car crash”
I believe that plutionium-powered coffee pots were proposed in the early 50’s...
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