Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't

[bananas]

http://thebulletin.org/thorium-wonder-fuel-wasnt7156

Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't
Robert Alvarez
05/11/2014 - 20:56

“Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century,” reads the headline of an October 2013 story in an online trade publication. This fantastic promise is just one part of a modern boomlet in enthusiasm about the energy potential of thorium, a radioactive element that is far more abundant than uranium. Thorium promoters consistently extol its supposed advantages over uranium. News outlets periodically foresee the possibility of "a cheaper, more efficient, and safer form of nuclear power that produces less nuclear waste than today's uranium-based technology."

Actually, though, the United States has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for some 50 years and is still struggling to deal with the legacy of those attempts. In addition to the billions of dollars it spent, mostly fruitlessly, to develop thorium fuels, the US government will have to spend billions more, at numerous federal nuclear sites, to deal with the wastes produced by those efforts. And America’s energy-from-thorium quest now faces an ignominious conclusion: The US Energy Department appears to have lost track of 96 kilograms of uranium 233, a fissile material made from thorium that can be fashioned into a bomb, and is battling the state of Nevada over the proposed dumping of nearly a ton of left-over fissile materials in a government landfill, in apparent violation of international standards.

<snip>

[yurbud]

1. another one bites the dust--spend that research money on putting up solar panels & wind turbines

[packman]

2. From a long-ago Post on Thorium

I still like this car - good for 100 years on one charge.



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Longer article about the Thorium car and more photos:

http://www.shuffletrends.com/thorium-car/

[kristopher]

3. "good for 100 years on one charge" = Bullpuckey

[packman]

4. BULLPUCKEY-you say

Now, an article about it says it will-so it must be true.

"Current models of the engine weigh 500 pounds, easily fitting into the engine area of a conventionally-designed vehicle. According to CEO Charles Stevens, just one gram of the substance yields more energy than 7,396 gallons (28,000 L) of gasoline and 8 grams would power the typical car for a century.

The idea of using thorium is not new. In 2009, Loren Kulesus designed the Cadillac World Thorium Fuel Concept Car. LPS is developing the technology so it can be mass-produced.
"

[bananas]

5. USEING HELYXZION TECHNOLOGY WE CAN CURE “ALL” DISEASE

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=310925&mesg_id=310931

[caraher]

6. BULLPUCKEY was too polite

Last edited Fri May 16, 2014, 06:02 PM - Edit history (1)

Evidently the fantasists who made up the thorium car couldn't even get their arithmetic right:

A quick trip to Google tells me that a gallon of gasoline, perfectly burned, yields 114,000 BTU. Use Google to convert that to more common physics terms, that’s 120 MJ, or in electrical terms, 33.3 kWh. A gallon of gas is enough to drive a car about 30 miles, on average.

An equally quick trip to the Wikipedia to look over thorium reveals that it releases the energy in its decay chain over an extremely long period of time, just longer than the lifetime of the universe actually (yes, really), and gives off a total of 42.6 MeV. MeV’s are extremely small units, converting that means every complete decay would give off 6.8 x 10-18 MJ, or 2 x 10-18 kWh. That’s small.

Now that energy will, eventually, be released by every atom in that 8 grams of fuel. The number of atoms in anything is a basic relation between the atomic and measured weights. In the case of thorium, that means there are 2.6 x 1021 atoms per gram. Again, the Wiki and Google has all of this at your fingertips. So you simply multiply the two to find that a single gram of thorium contains 17,680 kWh of energy. Eight of them would give off 141,500 kWh. That’s a lot.

Ok, so if a car can go 30 miles on 33 kWh, and we have 141,500 to burn, that means the car could go maybe 128 thousand miles…

[packman]

7. Another post destroyed

by logic and arithmetic - some guys suck all the fun out of life

[caraher]

9. Well, there is one possibly important flaw in what I quoted from the other site

Since an internal combustion engine in a typical car converts maybe 20-25% of the energy into moving a car down the road, the same energy in electrical form could yield maybe 4-5 times as many miles of driving for a vehicle of comparable performance. But there's also a lot of magic left unexplained in how the thorium car gets energy to the wheels, and if any of it involves a heat engine (and certainly for current fission reactors that's the case!) then the original comparison is fair.

And even 500,000 miles is still a lot less than 100 years of typical American driving!

[cqo_000]

8. China investing in thorium nuclear energy

Reports have surfaced that scientists in Shanghai have been told to bring early fruition to plans to build the first fully-functioning thorium reactor within ten years, instead of 25 years as originally targeted.

Some have described a situation where researchers are working under "warlike" pressure to deliver. Proponents of thorium power are elated with the vigour shown by China. Some hail the concerted move by China as doing the world a big favour. They may even help to close the era of fossil fuel dominance. The West risks being left behind, still relying on the old uranium reactor technology that was originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s.

http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/a-nuclear-solution-to-smog-1.574035?PageSpeed=noscript