By George Kennedy 5 hours ago
Posted on 03/14/2014 12:42:38 PM PDT by ckilmer
A car that could run for 100 years on one tank of fuel? It sounds like a far-fetched idea, but it is just what a company is apparently claiming possible with the use of an atomic fuel that was abandoned during the Nixon administration. We’re talking about the sounds-too-good-to-be-true substance called “Thorium.”
Thorium is a naturally occurring radioactive element. It was discovered in 1828 by a Norwegian mineralogist and identified by a Swedish chemist, who then named it after the Norse god, Thor.
ATOMIC CARS: See Photos of the 1957 Ford Nucleon Concept
According to this video from The Young Turks (which is informative, if a little low-rent at times), if put to use properly, would be low pressure and have lower chances of danger to the environment and humans than a uranium-based reactor. The thorium reactors can be much smaller too. Like a conventional reactor, the heat produced would create steam that would power a turbine:
The report claims that small amount of the dense thorium could produce tremendous amounts of heat. A company called Laser Power Systems is attempting to employ this power source in a vehicle. The company claims that: “1 gram [of thorium] yields more energy than 7,396 gallons of gas.” By their math, 8 grams of the substance could power a thorium turbine car for a century. This is not the first time this fuel has been suggested for cars. The concept of an automobile use was brought up in the 2011 documentary “The Thorium Dream”:
RELATED: See Photos of the 1963 Chrysler Turbine
It has also been envisioned as a power source futuristic-looking designs like the Cadillac World Thorium Fuel Concept, shown here.
PHOTOS: See More of the 2009 Cadillac World Thorium Fuel Concept
Could this be a viable fuel for car? The testing in the 1960s found that the Thorium tetrafluoride used in a molten salt reactor was easier to process and quicker to stop a chain reaction, but light water reactors are far more common. In the LWR, thorium produces the same levels of toxic waste as our good ole’ uranium reactor. So there still may be a long way to go before we’re driving atomic cars.
If you could build a reactor small enough for a car, seems it would make more sense to build one that was house-sized.
Then you could maybe sink it into the ground in the back yard for easy shielding, and you wouldn’t need to worry about crashes.
If we all had small power plants in our homes, then electric cars might not be so impractical.
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That is already being done. There are town sized reactors being built in Texas. Great option for communities.
This guy's family had one of the prototypes for a few months:
Thorium is a naturally occurring, slightly radioactive metal. It is estimated to be about three to four times more abundant than uranium in the Earth’s crust. Prices aren’t available as it’s not for sale.
Coleman no longer uses thorium in their product, but I'd bet the cheapo replacement ones do.
Like this? Small Modular Reactor
(unfortunately, the project has been shelved)
Can you give us a hint where these town-sized reactors are being built?
The thorium molten salt reactor would work very well for highly localized power production, making it possible for the immediate area to be taken off the grid if massive power failures should occur. For those industries, or otherwise isolated complexes, that cannot be allowed to lose power flow, in the event of grid failure, it may be far the best solution, much more economical in the long run than standby Diesel generation plants.
You can’t turn it off.......................
The photo didn’t come through on my browser....
The company was out of texas. I have been following them for a few years.
Hmmmm, maybe the return of the steam locomotive.
If you can’t beat it, ban it.
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.....
Just a few problems here. First, thorium is not fissile, which means that it does not fission when it absorbs a neutron (to be a little more exact, it fissions only if it absorbs a fast neutron), so, to be used in a reactor, it must be seeded with a fissile isotope, like uranium-235, uranium-233, or plutonium-239. The idea behind thorium reactors is that the thorium absorbs a neutron, becoming thorium-233, which then decays to uranium-233, but you’ve got to put up some initial U-233 (or U-235 or Pu-239) to get the reactor going.
The other problem is that the author of this article does not understand the concept of critical mass. To sustain a chain reaction, one must have some minimum mass of a fissile material to make it work. The mass depends on the geometry (a sphere of plutonium-239 roughly the size of a baseball and weighing a few kilograms makes a dandy critical mass as was demonstrated several times in 1945 - on the other hand give me tons of Pu-239 in a sheet ten feet wide and an inch thick, and it will never acheive a self-sustaining chain reaction, regardless of long the sheet is). For normal purposes, the critical mass of an isotope is measured in kilograms, not grams.
I wouldn’t pre-order a thorium-powered car any time soon.
Take it out of solution ($65 for 1,000 ppm in 500 ml of 2% HNO3), and you can get 8 grams for a whole lot less than gasoline for life (challenges ignored intentionally).
The people who make mantels for gas lanterns buy the stuff.
"Today, thorium is relatively expensive - about $5,000 per kilogram. However, this is only because of there is currently little demand for thorium, so as a specialty metal, it is expensive. But there is 4 times as much thorium in the earth’s crust as there is uranium, and uranium is only $40/kg. If thorium starts to be mined en masse, its cost could drop to as low as $10/kg."
$40 at today's prices...
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