
Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century - itomatik
http://www.industrytap.com/thorium-fueled-automobile-engine-needs-refueling-once-a-century/15649
======
Tloewald
Ridiculous puff piece. The key component for any of this is a working
accelerator driven thorium reactor which we don't have. Once we have such a
thing, energy ceases to be scarce (at least by current standards). Such
reactors are like fusion, except instead of being perpetually 25 years away
they seem to be 10-15 years away.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_sub-
critical...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_sub-
critical_reactor)

~~~
VLM
"One benefit of such reactors is the relatively short life of its waste
products, which would be in the hundreds of years as opposed to millions of
years for existing nuclear reactors."

This line in the wikipedia is outright false. There's no way for a fissioning
nucleus to magically know if the neutron that hit it came from an accelerator
or another fissioning U atom. Neutron's can't be spray painted green to
greenwash / eco brand them to magically make them better than non-greenwashed
neutrons.

The rest of the article is more or less true. It misses the two most important
uses of accelerator driven reactors. The first is even if you can't generate
primary energy and its a net energy sink, you can still transmute elements. So
if nasa needs more of specific Pu isotopes for a RTG, you can incredibly
slowly create it by burning an enormous quantity of coal without having an
actual reactor. Or you could make a plant that overall eats (lots of)
electricity and squirts out americium for smoke detectors. The second use is
obviously research, you now have a magic machine that eats electricity and
while it eats electricity it creates an environment very much like the inside
of a real reactor, without the costs and size and weight and security concerns
of a normal reactor. Not exactly the same but probably good enough for short
term materials science or other fooling around.

~~~
jessriedel
Um, I have no idea about how this particular tech works, but neutrons with
different momenta can cause dramatically different transitions in the nuclei
they strike. No magic required. Is it clear that these neutrons are supposed
to have the same momentum as those produced in traditional reactors? That
would be surprising.

~~~
VLM
Yes fasts and thermals generally have varying cross sections. The graph of
fission products don't vary much. The "well known" ability to identify which
reactor a used rod came from, is because the fission products themselves react
to neutron flux, and for materials science reasons no one runs rods to more
than a couple percent burnup and long enough to stabilize.

So a rod isn't just 1% used up (a vacuum?) and 99% pure and unused, its first
hour of fission at a certain rate resulted in a certain random distribution of
nuclei which themselves were irradiated for precisely 2345 hours of full power
operation, and then hour two's fission products got irradiated for 2344 hours,
repeat. Its a massive summation. What makes it even more complicated is some
of the product nuclei are themselves radioactive with a pretty short half life
(this is where the ten or so percent of decay heat energy comes from ...) so
if you shut it down from hours 1023 to hour 1025 then the end result product
will be quite a bit different because you're missing two hours of product
isotopes, missing two hours of irradiation for the old isotopes, and the old
isotopes decayed naturally for two hours (perhaps into different isotopes,
some of which might be radioactive).

If you're really bored, and want to run a big numerical simulation, and have
programmatic access to a nuclei table (or just make one up with random data?)
you can have all kinds of fun simulating a reactor and summing, decaying, and
reacting hundreds to thousands of isotopes under varying conditions and then
seeing what you get.

Maybe a TLDR is there are a lot of ways to properly ignite charcoal for a
charcoal grill, but the end result cooked steak tastes about the same in the
end.

------
panzi
Thunderf00t explains why this is BS:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc)

------
gus_massa
I will just repeat my comment from an article about the same car two years ago
(
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879219)
):

This is fake or a scam!

There are same interesting quotes in the original article:
[http://wardsauto.com/ar/thorium_power_car_110811/](http://wardsauto.com/ar/thorium_power_car_110811/)

First, this is not a nuclear reactor: (at the end of the article)

> _This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the
> same state and is not turned into uranium 233, which happens only if thorium
> is sufficiently super-heated to generate a fission reaction._

It says that thorium has a lot of energy, not that they can extract it: (in
the middle of the article)

> _Because thorium is so dense, similar to uranium, it stores considerable
> potential energy: 1 gm of thorium equals the energy of 7,500 gallons (28,391
> L) of gasoline Stevens says._

And the explanation of how it works doesn't make any sense: (at the beginning
of the article)

> _The key to the system developed by inventor Charles Stevens, CEO and
> chairman of Connecticut-based Laser Power Systems, is that when silvery
> metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its
> molecules give off considerable heat._

The entire story sounds very similar to the presentations of the perpetual
moving machines, or the cold fusion: a promise of a lot of cheap energy, but
not a working prototype that produce more energy that it consumes.

------
unmole
One look at the website for LPS and you know it's pure BS:
[http://www.laserpowersystems.com/links/thorium-car/lps-
car](http://www.laserpowersystems.com/links/thorium-car/lps-car)

------
Ygg2
What are security implications of Thorium fueled automobiles?

What if someone places an explosive device in it? Or two thorium fueled cars
crash? What happens to reactor in these cases?

Is there mini Chernobyl everytime (let's say food/water is poisoned for a
month or so) this car collides with something?

I think things like thorium fueled cars would be way more useful for inter
solar travels than as cars (Less chances of causing environmental disaster).

------
xanth
Nope not true;
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc)

------
daniyaln
Seems unlikely...
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568iDYn8pjc)

------
kmfrk
I am not a nuclear engineer, so can someone explain the safety risks in the
event of a car accident?

~~~
VLM
google for accelerator driven reactor. They don't work because its too
inefficient to run the accelerator, aside from the usual squared/cube issues.
I'm sure the first working one will be a fixed station, the next generation
will be an ocean going ship, and maybe then a car. Concept cars are a waste of
time to consider.

Worst case scenario if you literally ground the car into dust you'd release
perhaps ten milligrams of nuclear waste. Why you'd grind an entire car into
dust is a mystery. I suppose fed into a compactor and melted and recycled
without removing the probably mostly unused and valuable fissionables is
possible.

So in an accident would you rather have 10 mg of waste, or 30 gallons of
hyperflammable gasoline, or 1000 Kg of lithium batteries, or ...

You're probably better off in an accident with this.

~~~
userbinator
10mg of radioactive material can cause a lot more trouble than you think...
especially since the hazards are of a less familiar nature than e.g. fire.

~~~
VLM
But the 10 mg of material are contained inside a ceramic rod in oxide form
which won't oxidize because its already oxidized (assuming the designers are
smart) and is somewhat refractory in a fire anyway, inside a thick walled
steel boiler which is inside some kind of containment thingy and its
surrounded by inches (feet?) of metal inside the engine compartment.

On the other hand, 30 gallons of gasoline is in a cheap tank made out of
cookie cutter metal so it tears open in a minor crash and there's a puddle of
it underneath the seat you're strapped into. And it burns. Really well. So a
giant pool of it is currently on fire, underneath your feet. Whoops.
Unfortunately this happens fairly often.

The lithium battery is more complicated to model. They burn, really well, but
if properly vented they can't explode. So its kind of like driving a truck
with 1000 pounds of grilling charcoal in the back... if it ignites, and you
just sit there, you'll eventually be grilled like a bratwurst, but its going
to take a heck of a long time, so unless you're alone and unconscious in
abandoned distant wilderness for 15 minutes you're OK.

~~~
userbinator
Humans are familiar with fire and heat. They are not so familiar with the
effects of radioactivity.

