Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't

[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…