[El Gato]

I'll believe the battery thing when it happens. Liquid fuels are excellent for storing large amounts of energy. Batteries can do that, but they tend to be even touchier than the liquid fuels.

But your reactor could power the process described, or other processes for converting natural gas to liquid fuel. For the trains, and lots of other things, electricity is great, if it's cheap enough. But "go where you want to go, when you want to go there" mobile power is probably not one of them, except in hybrid power trains which take much less battery capacity.

[RayChuang88]

Once we start to commercially scale up the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, we could generate such a gigantic excess amount of electricity that suddenly, things that require a huge amount of electricity such as electrifying our rail lines, large scale seawater desalinization, and large-scale implementation of electric car chargers become economically viable. After all, at the beginning of the 20th Century our petroleum infrastructure was primarily for the distribution of kerosene for lamp fuel, but technological developments within 20 years made it possible to distribute gasoline for the fast-growing fleet of automobiles by 1920.