In Where I Hammer Thor...ium, Again

So, once again, I am being sent links from advocates about thorium.  This time, though, it's not about the LFTR or breeder reactors or anything related to that.  This time, it's a little weirder...  it's about a Thorium-powered car.  Now, I am not strictly ruling out the theoretical possibility of such a car just based on that description alone.  One of the nice things about thorium is that you can breed U-233 out of it with relatively low-energy neutrons.  Also, the part about making a thorium reactor small enough that it can fit inside a car is conceivable in principle, although what you'd have is many times more massive than a traditional ICE.  However, there are practical barriers to using it in a car, not the least of which include the public fear of nuclear anything (and no amount of reason or factual knowledge can possibly weigh in).  More than that, the mechanism by which nuclear actually does its thing is tremendous heat output, and it's a fairly huge challenge not just to carry that heat away, but in a car, you also have to prevent the transmission of all that heat to the passengers and also to just about anywhere else within a few inches of your core.  That's not easy.

Using steam to generate power in a car is not an entirely new concept, mind you.  BMW toyed with the idea of using a water-alcohol (vodka?) coolant to draw excess heat away from the ICE's exhaust gases to drive a small steam turbine.  Although it was providing power assist and not generating electricity, it worked in practice, but current hybrid technology probably yields better results overall.  With a nuclear source, though, you pretty much have to generate electricity, and you can generate lots of it on relatively little fuel.  The actual press release as well suggests that start-up times are around 30 seconds, which sounds reasonable to start superheating steam from a dead cold state.  Nonetheless, as you read into it, it's pretty obvious that it's a big fat hoax, and it turns out that all these claims go back a few years as it is, and they've unsurprisingly gotten nowhere.

So what was the obvious problem with it?  Well, that comes when you get a little more specific about the actual claims made.

Bow Before The Mighty Thor!... ium.

Recently, a friend of mine posted a video which featured a series of clips of Kirk Sorenson selling his LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) concept to the masses.  I had made some fraction of a response based on what I'd seen in the video at the time.  Nonetheless, I felt it merited further study, so I looked a little deeper into the literature and now have the need to write a little more on the subject.

I do have to admit that a lot of what I hear Sorenson say sounded more like shpiel appealing to the masses rather than hard science, but that's not to say he doesn't know the science.  In fact, I'm fairly sure he does.  But since the video clips came from public speeches, he's playing to a crowd who really don't know much about the subject.  He focuses a great deal on the shortcomings of the current technology and a lot on the strengths of the LFTR design in terms of efficiency and safety and so on.  The numbers he quotes sound incredibly exaggerated on the face of it, but in fact, they are mostly accurate, if a little misleading.

In reference to this subject, though, I suggest that people watch both Kirk Sorenson's TEDxYYC talk on the LFTR and Bill Gates' TED talk titled "Innovating to Zero," during which he evangelizes the TWR (Traveling Wave Reactor) design.  I don't particularly favor one idea over the other, but I think having the combo of those two videos at the very least helps put some things into better perspective.