Posted on 08/13/2011 7:13:31 PM PDT by Oiao
A U.S. company says it is getting closer to putting prototype electric cars on the road that will be powered by the heavy-metal thorium (Steam Electric 250MW)... with prototype in two years....never needs refueled.
(Excerpt) Read more at wardsauto.com ...
I think you're right. Most likely this company is running a scam.
LOL. It kinda looks like a “car of the future” from the 1950’s. Fins and all.
Challenger really spooked them. That was the day I realized the basic premise of Space:1999 was never going to happen.
The original purchase price of a horse is the cheapest part. From that point forward they’ll gallup you to bankruptcy court.
if it saves almost the entire weight of the engine,
they can afford to give it great protection.
...and some of the natural gas and hydrogen have it stored under HUGE pressures. could probably use those designs almost stock for the protection design.
and it’s a small amount of thorium. should be easy.
and $100 of thorium to replace a LIFETIME of gas ?!?
a barrel of oil would drop to $50, and break the backs of the Muslim oil companies overnight. (and Russia...)
and talk about stimulating the economy !!!
the cost to business with big transportation costs...
not to mention giving EVERY family with a car,
a HUGE increase in discretionary income...
it would create immediate demand for products,
causing an immediate increase in hiring.
which is precisely why Obama would NEVER support this!
this low pollution energy independence that creates jobs,
is the exact opposite of what his vested interests want.
I found this comment on one of the website reporting on this to be more credible than the claim:
“What utter twaddle....this has scam written all over it.
First, Thorium isn’t a material known to lase - and “heat surges” (whatever they may be) are nothng to do with lasing. Nor is persuading a material to lase a net creator of energy - the total energy of the emitted photons will always be less than the energy required for “pumping” - in fact, most lasers are extremely inefficient, converting at best a small percentage of the energy input.
Second, stimulating alpha and beta emissions/decay isn’t something you can achieve by doing anything to do with lasers - nor do alpha or beta particles play any part in a nuclear chain reaction (neither is absorbed by other nuclei). That requires neutrons and fission reactions.
There are about a dozen other obvious gaping holes in this (work out, for example just how much surface area you’d need to remove 250MW of heat from this unit at (say) 700-800C - then compare it to the surface area available in the “car engine” sized unit). For comparison, the gas-turbine engines used in Concorde produced about 37MW each.
For a website that claims to be looking at what engineers come up with, you don’t seem to have applied even the smallest amount of the sort of analysis that an actual engineer would immediately think of.”
http://www.crazyengineers.com/thorium-powered-cars-could-become-reality-786/
I think this is even less credible than Rossi’s cold fusion claims.
bflr
“India just brought a thorium reactor online. We should be leading the way on this. We invented it at Oak Ridge back in the 1950’s.”
This is disgusting,we were fed the “Too cheap to meter” Crapola back in the day and the world uses our technology while we pay through the nose for windmills and assorted Garbage!
No sweat.... They will make em out of the same crap the FAA uses in the flight recorder aka black box.
Invest in unobtanium NOW !
But... but it was only off by a factor of a thousand! :)
I did a google search and it’s amazing how many sites regurgitate that number without the slightest questioning.
Any claims on the internet must be taken with a ton of salt! (followed by an hour or two of independent research).
Yeah, nice dream, but the thorium reactors aren’t quite small enough for individual use.
But someday they will be.
It’s not encouraging when
an article on an engineering breakthrough
gets their units wrong...
Warning
The Original Linked Compant Site
http://www.laserpowersystems.com/
Wants to download a little gift...
IETAG.DLL
marking...
This is probably a scam! Read the comments to this article for some great insights why.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/13/hey-how-much-thorium-you-got-under-the-hood/
I won’t doubt that it is a scam but I also believe that we should be investing and pushing thorium as an electrical fuel with everything we can muster.
It is an incredible opportunity and those above who said that thorium should have been our choice for nuclear power over uranium/plutonium were absolutely correct. It is much safer, cheaper, and easier to use. The downside is that it does not produce weapons grade material.
Somebody is going to get thorium correct one of these days and I hope that somebody is an American company.
*Ping* Thought you might be interested in this. Interesting that it comes from Wards Auto World; of course I can’t vouch for the technical claims, but Wards is an industry-standard type publication for those of us working in the auto industry. So this is getting some major attention.
If they can use it in it’s natural state it is low level radiation that just needs aluminum foil wrapped around the collision,lol.
Not dressed like that!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.