Thorium vehicle will run 100 years on 8 grams of fuel

[muriel_volestrangler]

37. Thanks - that gives us a theory that the laser is relevant

So it presumably speeds up the decay from Th-232 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain#Thorium_series .

However, even if you could use a laser to get that to happen as fast as you want (Th-232's half life is 14 billion years, so it's got to speed up a lot ...), that says the total energy released from the series is 42.6 MeV.

42.6 MeV = 6.83 e-12 J
a Th232 atom weighs 232 * 1.66e-27 kg/AMU = 3.85 e-25 kg
So that's an energy density of 1.77 e13 J/kg = 17.7 terajoules/kg - about the same as the 20 TJ/kg in the post above for uranium. And he thought the claim was for something 50 times more energetic. Though 400g of thorium for a 100 years wouldn't be too bad, I suppose. More calculation seems to show he's claiming about a tenth of the mass of the thorium would be converted to energy.

I still don't think for a moment the LPS guy has even attempted to do what the scientists who wrote the paper you quote have done. His website - http://www.laserpowersystems.com/ - appears to steal almost random web content from other sites and put it in a frame. I can't imagine why anyone has bothered to repeat what he claims, if they've seen that.