Thorium Powered Car, Drive 100 yrs on 8 grams of fuel!

how does never having to fill your car with gas again Sound by simply replacing your engine with a system that runs on thorium one of the densest materials known to man you'll only need to refuel

once a century so you want to know the details of these absolutely amazing boreum powered car a car that can run

for over a 100 years on just 8 G of fuel I mean just think about that 8 G of fuel that's 1/5 the mass of a typical

chocolate bar well the details are it's [ __ ] and I'll tell you why typical car engine runs with about 200 horses

under the Bonnet which Clicks in at about 140 KW or14 megaw now according to Mashable this power plant is going to

use lasers to boil water currently the company experiments with small bits of thorium to create a laser the beam heats water produces Steam and Powers the mini turbine there by producing energy and

that's kind of a problem you see this is the most powerful continuous laser in the world it's designed to shoot down missiles and satellites and it can only

put out about 1 megawatt for a minute further this is not just a laser you can plug into the wall it requires incredibly exotic fuels notably nitrogen

Tri fluoride and uyum the idea that you're going to put a laser which doesn't even exist yet in a car that is 17th of the power of a laser designed to shoot down

missiles it's a little optimistic but there are many other reasons why this is [ __ ] but before I get onto those let me just start by chastising Mashable for

not having a clue what density means the specialized element propelling the research is Thorium it's one of the most dense materials known in nature so a tiny amount has the capacity to burn and

emit energy for a long time look I you take a hand-sized pot bottle as a point of reference sized pot bottle contains about 1 liter and if that's full of

water it has about 1 kilo of water in it that is the density of water is about 1 kilo per liter or alternatively if it was full of rock which is about three

times as dense it would weigh about 3 kilos theay Rock has a density of about 3 kilos per liter iron clocks in at about 7 kilos per liter and thorium is

significantly denser still at about 12 kilos per liter but it's still not even remotely the most dense metal I mean things like gold and uranium are about

19 kilos per liter and things like neptunium and plutonium are modestly denser still but density's got nothing to do with this nothing at all I mean

look so what if it's really dense that just means that your 8 G has a smaller volume well so what and if it's not very dense that just means that your 8 GS has

a larger volume so what 8 G of thorium contains exactly the same amount of file material no matter if it's dense or if it's not

dense by simply replacing your engine with a system that runs on thorium one of the densest materials known to man you'll only need to refuel once a century the specialized element

propelling the research is Thorium it's one of the most dense materials known in nature so a tiny amount has the capacity to burn and emit energy for a long time I mean really is this the level of the

scientific literacy here that you think that a pound of thorium weighs more than a pound of thorium feathers and yet it

crops up in story after story after Story thorium is so dense so what okay deep breath let me just start

by saying that I'm a big fan of nuclear power in fact I've worked in three nuclear reactors and this is me putting my iPod in a neutron beam

[Music] that is I think that nuclear power is really the way forwards and that it's had a real lot of negative [ __ ]

scaremongering press and sure this thorium car is positive [ __ ] press but it's still [ __ ] and I'll tell you why look there's one fairly simple

principle that you got to understand here and that's the atoms are made up of nuclei and electrons and when you burn fuel you Shuffle those electrons around they find themselves in a lower energy

State and that releases energy and you can use that energy to run your car and per atom that releases about electron volt type

energies however anytime you smash up nuclei you typically release about a million times as much energy that is you release Mega electron volt energies per

atom and this is why nukes are about a million times more devastating than their regular explosive counterparts it's also the reason why Cold Fusion is

[ __ ] in that even if you could get those particles to fragment or fuse at room temperature that is cold fusion you

still are generating particles with a million or so times the energy requireed to break a chemical bond that is if anyone ever claims to have a press

conference where they have a a stable cold fusion reactor going in the same room you know that they're talking [ __ ] because if they weren't everyone in that

room would have been killed by the radiation to screen yourself from these high energy particles that can break a million or so chemical bonds you need shielding now it's the hope of these

manufacturers that you're going to do that with a few pieces of thin aluminium to which I call [ __ ] look I've dealt with a lot of ionizing radiation mostly

in the form of things like neutrons and we settle for some boron nitride and a couple of feet of concrete cat stray

gamas um but in reality uh gamas can be stopped by electrons and the heavier your nuclei

the more electrons you get so basically it scales with mass The more mass you have the better your X-ray screening so your typical piece of X-ray screening

looks like that piece of a concrete Fusion type nuclear reactions by the very fact that they're producing particles with a million times the energy of a chemical bond that is atom

smashing type energies are always messy messy things there is always some penetrating ionizing radiation that goes with these things mostly in the form of

things like gamas and neutrons neutrons being intrinsic in that if you're going to get any form of stable criticality you're going to get neutrons and the idea you're going to stop those with a

few thin sheets of aluminum is [ __ ] and plus for me for certain knowing that there was 100 kilowatt nuclear reactor just behind the driver's seat and think

I'll pass on that one thanks and then there of course there's the trivial point that pretty much any neutron-based reactor can be trivially repurposed to

make a dirty bomb also just because you have enough energy in your thorium to run your car for 100 years doesn't mean you can run your car for 100 years look

you can get about as much energy from fusing the hydrogen in just half a gram of water as you can get in your 8 G of thorium that least your one lit bottle

of water contains enough energy to run your car for 200,000 years all you need is the magic of Mr Fusion oh wait hang

on one second let me add the uh thorium laser speak star tres to convince the easily Bamboozled hydrogen is this amazing element that powers the sun in a

process called Fusion and the great news is that 2/3 of the nuclei in regular tap water are hydrogen how cool would that

be to power your car of regular tap water so we in this concept car are going to use Nano particles with specially designed enzymes to create a

functional Quantum density field timey wiing thing which will combine with an inverse tetrion pulse from the flux capacitor to catalytically fuse these

nuclei and release the awesome power of the hydrogen atom which will be able to run this car for a 100 years on just 25

drops of water sorry just because the energy is there in principle doesn't mean that you can use it and saying that magic sorry thorium lasers will make it

happen is just not going to cut it so you get these higher energy particles out of your thorum reactor which they typically used to make things hot and that can then produce steam which can

then be used to drive turbines and generate electricity and that's how your typical nuclear power station Works however there's no way you can fit all of that in a car and no sane person

would drive around with a stable criticality giving off .1 megawatt

around a populated city well with the possible exception from Batman make batteries to power turbines to

speed ready to move off borium reactors by their very nature are not very throttleable well they are just the time between when you put your foot down and when the car starts to accelerate

because of the increased energy output of the thorium reactor will probably be between weeks and months this basically means that the only way around this is

you have the car constantly running at about 100 KW and dumping that spare energy into the atmosphere that would be a 10 times increase of the average

energy consumption of your typical American now again this is just a really bad idea now in principle you could use a radioisotope generator or a

thermoelectric generator of the type used to power the Curiosity mission on Mars so basically what you do is you get the heat generated from the decays of unstable nuclei and then you add some

cooling fins to generate a temperature gradient which you then use to run a Peltier effect type device to generate electricity but again look at the

details you have about 5 kg of plutonium here and it's only generating 2 kilowatt of energy and remember you're looking to

generate 150 wat to run a relatively small car and again this unit is not throttleable it generates that constant power whether you use it or whether you

don't don't then comes the really stupid bit that you're going to use this energy to drive lasers to boil water and run turbines currently the company experiments with small bits of thorium

to create a laser the beam heats water produces Steam and Powers the mini turbine thereby producing energy oh come on first of all the only lasers we have

powerful enough to run this run on extremely exotic chemicals not heat secondly if you did have a megawatt type

laser that you could use to run a car or shoot down cruise missiles or satellites would you really want to manufacture millions of them and put them in cars

the bottom line is that unless you're Darth Vader lasers are simply a really shitty way of moving energy around and

that's why Star Wars failed and I mean Star Wars failed not Star Wars failed and thirdly are you serious the more components you add to this system the

less efficient it will be if you using the heat of your reactor to power a laser well why I just use that heat to heat the water why add the extra

component and make it less efficient and no you can't just power this laser off electricity remember because at the moment all you've got is a hot lump of material and you want to turn that heat

into something useful and then of course lastly thorium lasers don't exist nor is there any conceivable way for them to to exist remember the Decay events that

you've got off here are giving off about a million times the energy of a chemical bond or in simple terms if you could turn that into photons they would be in the gamma ray region and gamma rays

would go straight through the heating chamber straight through the car irradiate the driver losing a bit of energy each time along the way and then just irradiate the environment that is

gamma rays would be a really lousy way of heating water because most of them would just go straight through the car and out into the environment put simply

yeah this car looks cool but it's [ __ ] and even if it did exist it would glow in the dark look I've seen nuclear reactors both inside and out and

the bits that really do glow in the dark and I can say without hyperbole that nuclear power is the way forwards sure there are hazards but there are hazards

with all power sources and once you understand those hazards and can minimize the risks it's like flying sure there are real hazards to Flying being

up at 30,000 ft and traveling just under the speed of sound is a rather dangerous place for a human to be in but oddly enough once youand all of those hazards

and have minimized the risks this is what has made flying one of the safest forms of Transport but I can hear you say well what about the plane crashes um

sorry what about the nuclear disasters what about safield 3 m Island Chernobyl and Fukushima well what about them three out of the four of those reactors were

essentially built before man walked on the moon and one of them was built in a simple race to develop nuclear weapons where safety was a secondary consideration and one of them was built

without a hard containment vessel and one of them was due to an earthquake that killed 15,000 people none of them died from a

radiation from the reactor 15,000 died as a result of the earthquake and looked at like that you have to Simply Be Honest that living in an earthquake zone

is a bigger Hazard than living next to a nuclear reactor or another way of looking at it France generates about 80% of its electricity from nuclear power

and has done so for many years and just think about how technology has changed over the last 30 years all modern power stations are designed mind to fail safe

that is just like cars and planes have gotten so much safer over the last 30 years because we understand the risks and we have the technology to design

better systems so the nuclear reactors are now much safer than ever they used to be and they're far more elegant beasts than their clunky

[Music] predecessors [Music]