This article describes a thorium powered car
I am not sure what happened with the concept, but they said 8 grams of thorium could power the car a 300k miles. My impression is the mechanism was using lasers to create a fission reaction which created steam and ran a turbine in the car. The engine would be about 335HP and weigh 500 pounds.
Do any mechanical engineers, nuclear physicists, etc. have any idea if this idea is possible or affordable?
IANANP but it sounds like the thorium part is almost ready to go. The difficult part sounds like making small fast generators. Go figure. Maybe they could start with trains, ships trucks and planes. I would be great to have a car with a lifetime fuel supply on board. I hope this come down the pike soon. I want a nuclear flying car.
Crackpot and/or Scam.
Ugliest. Cadillac. Ever.
Bob
Article is 2 years old.
Was posted on GE board with comments.
The comments in that article are of roughly the same quality as the comments one sees on YouTube videos.
The original article is unclear on where the energy is coming from. At one point it says that “the thorium is lased…”. When one speaks of “lasing” a material, it generally means that an external energy source is applied to the material to “pump” it, i.e. to drive its electrons into higher orbitals; when the electrons fall back down, they release their energy as photons, which form the beam of the laser.
So WTF is happening in the thorium car? Is an independent laser hitting the thorium, or is is the thorium itself the lasing medium and somehow this causes it (the thorium) to release energy?
Later in the article they refer to a " thorium-fueled nuclear-fission reactor". Are there nuclear reactions involved here? How does lasing (or hitting the thorium with an external laser) induce/accelerate nuclear reactions in the thorium?
Of course, it is already possible to power a car with thorium. You use a thorium-burning nuclear reactor to generate electricity to power an electric car’s batteries. Trying to the reactor into the car would be silly.
The power source in the OP is almost certainly bullshit. Might be a scam, might be an honestly deluded inventor. While it is possible to use thorium to power a fission reactor, it’s nothing like the system described in the article. The article seems to be taking several real ideas - including thorium power and a sub-critical accelerator-driven reactor - and mashing them together. It also makes no sense to speak of a laser that generates heat instead of coherent light. Generating coherent light is what lasers do. If you are bombarding thorium with a particle beam to generate heat, what you have built is not a laser. The inclusion of a Tesla Turbine into the mix is also another strong indicator of woo.
First off, let me observe that it is the atomic number of thorium that is 90, not its atomic weight (which for one common isotope is, IIRC 233). I mention this mainly as an illustration of how confused (and confusing) the article appears to be. If this makes any sense at all, and I am not convinced it does, then what they are saying is that if you shine a high-powered laser at a mass of thorium, some of it will fission, enough to generated power to run a car. I have never heard of an atom fissioning from being shot with a laser; but I am just a poor benighted mathematician. Even so, watch out for the neutrons that will emitted.
It is not an engineer that is needed here, but a physicist. Then an engineer.
One giveaway to junk science/fraud is when a near-miraculous claim is made, and for good measure a second miracle invention is coupled with it. It would be like someone claiming that they’d perfected a Zero Point energy source, and then devised a working reactionless drive to use the energy.