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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6411114" data-attributes="member: 177">Um, no.  That article, and a bunch of others I read in searching around on this topic, are pseudoscientific gobbledigook.  Complete nonsense.  The various articles about the thorium-powered car are not self-consistent, but if I try to piece them together, I get the following:They take some Thorium, heat it up to "energize" it, make it put out laser light, and use that laser light to heat water, and run a steam turbine.  And, while the Thorium is radioactive, they say there is no actual nuclear reaction going on here.So, I ask, where does the energy come from?Can you make a laser out of thorium?  Probably.  You can make a laser out of just about any material.  But lasers are based on a quantized electrodynamic process.  You put some energy in (often in the form of just normal, non-coherent light, but you can use other ways), and excite the electrons in the material.  When the electrons drop down to their original places, they emit very specific frequencies of light, and when one atom does it, there's a cascade so they all do - and you get out a bunch of very specific, coherent light.  But this is just turning some energy put in into a different form of energy out - it is merely conversion.  If you make a laser out of thorium, you still have to plug that laser into the wall, or a battery, or something.  So, what's powering your thorium laser?  Can you make a nuclear reactor that runs on thorium fuel?  Yes.  And there are some reasons why you might want to do that.  But it isn't all that much different from one that runs on uranium - it is still a big old nuclear reactor.  You can't (and don't want to) put one under the hood of your car.  Even if you made it small enough, the reactor would put out some pretty hard radiation that would not be stopped by a few thin layers of aluminum foil.  I am pretty sure nobody wants a car that gives them radiation poisoning or cancer.You can probably also make a "nuclear battery" out of thorium, but those don't have sufficient power output to run something like a car - you typically use such to run the electronics on spacecraft for long journeys.All that stuff about how thorium is dense, and so 8 grams of it can power your car for a century?  That's flimflam designed to sound all sciencey.  Thorium isn't particularly dense - gold and uranium are more dense, for example.  Moreover, grams are a measure of mass. Density is a measure of mass per volume.  8 grams of thorium will be 8 grams, no matter the density!  If it is super dense, it'll take up small space, if it is not dense, it'll take up more space.  But it will still be 8 grams!So, all in all, that Thorium powered car is stuff and nonsense.  Pay it no mind.</blockquote>

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