Car Runs 1 Million Miles on 8 Grams of Thorium

reply to post by intrptr


Nonsense article that anyone who has spent more than a cursory glance at the issue would have detected.

Why are you trying to fight nonsense with... more nonsense? You are just as equally clueless as those falling for this hoax.

reply to post by Zaphod58

A byproduct of thorium is also radium 228 which gives off alpha AND gamma.

Thorium-232 has a half-life longer than the age of the universe. Therefore it does not tend to be very radioactive, daughter isotopes created in extremely small amounts. Discussing the details of the daughter isotopes is something that is therefore irrelevant.

Nuclear fission produces extremely intense radiation. Also the fission products are extremely radioactive.

reply to post by AliceBleachWhite


This car is pure fantasy as others have described. You cannot induce nuclear fission with a laser.

reply to post by intrptr

A boiling water or pressurized water reactor, correct. The same principle is currently used in Nuclear powered submarines. Except decay heat from uranium is used to heat water, not Thorium.

In a PWR or BWR uses nuclear fission to boil water. Various nuclear wastes that build up within the fuel as it is being used created decay heat, which peaks at around 10% of reactor output power. Uranium and Thorium themselves create very very very small amounts of decay heat that can be considered negligible

reply to post by intrptr

More than a little effort would be required to refine the material, cast it into useable core elements of a nuclear weapon. However, enriched clouds of Thorium dust floating down main street would ruin things for everybody.

There is literally no such thing as enriched Thorium.

reply to post by Zaphod58

You could do it with a fairly normal lab setup. Which is the point of one of the articles I posted. The IAEA would never know you were doing it, and it wouldn't take a lot of thorium to get the amount required.

A research reactor (or neutron source) designed to irradiate over one metric ton of metallic thorium is something that can hardly be considered a normal lab setup.

reply to post by Restricted

The half-life of thorium is 14 billion years. Great idea that.

You realise the longer the half life is the less radioactive it is?

reply to post by intrptr

If all that were true, they would have done it already.

LOL.

So technology doesn't ever change, it's just been constant forever right?

Look at where the industry has taken us so far:

Which has very little to do with Thorium? You're deflecting (nice try) and creating a straw man.

Scrapping an entire industry and switching to Thorium reactor technology, for instance (that doesn't exist yet) would involve enormous cost to the consumer,

Over time power stations get replaced. Old models are upgraded to newer ones. Then again you were saying technology is constant, so that's not surprising.... were you also against email because it would put the post man out of business?

not considering cleaning the mess up from the existing industry.

Irrelevant.

The Nuclear Power companies have all their eggs in one basket and haven't changed that much since its inception. The reactors in place around the US for instance consist of older GE Mk1 BWR design, the same as the ones in Japan

Do you just make this up as you go along?

The most common type of reactor in the US is the Westinghouse PWR. Followed in (no order) by Combustion Engineering PWRs, Babcock & Wilcox PWRs, and GE BWRs. That's two kinds of reactors made by four different companies, each making a number of iterations per design type.

Japan itself uses a similar mix of designs.

. All the waste from the reactors (spent fuel rods) are still inside the respective buildings there from the beginning of operations.

Some of the waste is in dry-storage. Moving the fuel into dry storage should be accelerated. I'm not upto speed on things but last I heard this was what was happening.

C0bzz
A research reactor (or neutron source) designed to irradiate over one metric ton of metallic thorium is something that can hardly be considered a normal lab setup.

Go tell that to these guys.

The chemical processes that are needed for protactinium separation could possibly be undertaken using standard lab equipment, potentially allowing it to happen in secret, and beyond the oversight of organisations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the paper says.

phys.org...

reply to post by trollz


my bad sorry

reply to post by C0bzz

Nonsense article that anyone who has spent more than a cursory glance at the issue would have detected.

Thorium reactors are nonsense (non existent), your point?

Why are you trying to fight nonsense with... more nonsense? You are just as equally clueless as those falling for this hoax.

I know the concept car is nonsense... its based on nonsense technology (thorium reactors) that advocates of nuclear power hold up as a never realized solution.

But like sustained fusion reactor dream you probably want to pour more money down that bottomless pit, too.

The price per Kilowatt hour is rising. Ask the Japanese about safe, efficient, cheap, slag "piles".

reply to post by C0bzz

If all that were true, they would have done it already.

LOL.

So technology doesn't ever change, it's just been constant forever right?

No, "technology" (highly educated egotists) definitely took a dumb down turn by inventing nuclear power.

Defending same is worse than moronic. At least morons don't irradiate the world.

In regard to cost in terms of both environmental, ecological and financial cost. There has been no disaster greater than coal and oil. End of conversation. All of the nuclear incidents combined including bombs do not amount to the same level of damage caused and is still being caused by coal mining and oil processing and use.

Fukashima required a enormous natural disaster to cause it to fail. To me from a standpoint of reality, I would say that makes it pretty damn safe.

C0bzz
This design is a hoax. The technology is non existent. Also the sources make basic mathematical errors.

Aside from that, do you think I should put my life savings into it?

reply to post by ErosA433


I guess the point is that underground resources require and cause conflicts, wars, and excessive green in the energy industry, whereas Nuclear and chemical power is very useful for high power demand and even space travel.

Granted there has likely been many more ecological disasters effecting more people than radiation accidents, but then Nuclear power technology has not been around for very long.

The problem with radiation pollution though is that is simply cannot be "cleaned up". Its sticks, and nothing can stop it spreading, although some materials can slow it down, and then you'd have to wait at least 600 years for affected areas to be safe for habitation after the each radiation particle's half life expires.

mrbeardo42
The problem with radiaton pollution though is that is simply cannot be "cleaned up". Its sticks, and nothing can stop it spreading, although some materials can slow it down, and then you'd have to wait at least 600 years for affected areas to be safe for habitation after the each radiation particle's half life expires.

Question. Can, for example, mercury and lead pollution be "cleaned up"?

What's the difference between that and radioisotope pollution?

AliceBleachWhite


That may be so, or not, but, too much protest against the development of a cleaner, safer, more sustainable, and altogether less expensive nuclear power solution that can even be facilitated to destroy and clean up the waste we already have on hand, well, too much protest against it strikes me as a little suspicious.

edit on 10/21/2013 by AliceBleachWhite because: (no reason given)

I'm all for transuranic burnup for waste processing (note it makes waste more radioactive in the short term like 500 years but less in the long term like 10,000 years).

There's nothing particularly magic about thorium---it's just lots and lots of neutrons. A spallation neutron source can do it too--Carlo Rubbia has advocated these.

About thorium reactors, do you realize that most thorium reactor designs as planned require intensely radioactive chemically caustic liquids to be circulating? In a normal reactor that's called a meltdown and is a catastrophe.

Every thorium reactor of this design would have to have the technology similar to the very dirty plutonium reprocessing plants---handling very radioactive liquids remotely, except that reprocessors aren't as radioactive because the waste is a few weeks/months past the time it was being fissioned in the reactor. Valves, pipes, pressures---There Will Be Leaks.

I do NOT want my utility to be dealing with radioisotopes in liquid form in any circumstance!! By contrast in a PWR the nuclear isotopes are contained within solid pellets encased with very strong zirconium steel.

I'm not against thorium reactors. I'm against mixing radiosotopes and liquids.

Zaphod58
The actual article title is "Thorium-powered car COULD drive a million miles before refueling". There are quite a few issues with Thorium that have yet to be worked out.

I imagine the issue is fitting a nuclear reactor under the hood of a car. Functional thorium reactors have been built in the past, the concept is valid but uranium reactors are simply more profitable.

reply to post by ChaoticOrder


Getting one small enough with the required safety features is a big problem. You can only make them so small and still fit safeguards into them (although they've gotten pretty damn small).

a reply to: Zaphod58

Safety is going to be the largest hurdle. You can make reactors REALLY small, the problem is what happens to the reactor when it's smashed into another reactor at a combined force of 150 MPH. Or what happens when that reactor drives off a bridge and into a freshwater reservoir. Or what happens when some religious extremist loads the reactor with a few dozen pounds of explosives and drives it into a school.

Even in small reactors, thorium byproducts can be dangerous contaminants to the environment.

Until these reactors are basically made "human proof", I don't expect any small-scale reactors to be used in vehicles or to power homes.

originally posted by: ScientificRailgun
a reply to: Zaphod58

Safety is going to be the largest hurdle. You can make reactors REALLY small...

Well, not lower than a critical mass. Because below that, they're not a reactor, they're a lump of radioactive crap.