Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century
industrytap.com
industrytap.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_sub-critical...
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.
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.
This is fake or a scam!
There are same interesting quotes in the original article: 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.
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).
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.
And yet, it's still in pretty much every car. So I think we can probably handle some thorium, too.
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.