What is "thorium laser power"?

[NeilBlanchard]

Hello,

A friend just sent me this link, and at first glance it seems to come under the heading of "too good to be true" -- is it legit, or pie in the sky?

http://www.laserturbinepower.com/

[KarenRei]

I can't tell why they're bringing up lasers from that webpage; they're not very clear. Thorium is indeed an extremely power dense energy source -- but do you really want a fission reactor in your car? In every car on the road?

If you want to get fission-powered cars that aren't an unreasonable environmental/safety risk -- thorium or otherwise -- you're going to need to have a reactor that burns waste pretty much as fast as it creates it. There are low waste reactor techs out there, but none near close enough to "waste free" at this point. And you'd need to shield the reactor to heck and back... but in a car? How do you do that? Your reactor would have to have an extremely low neutronicity and gamma component to boot.

Update: Hmm -- let's go off on a wild, futuristic tangent here ;). Anyone know whether neutrons being released by relativistic particle fragmentation tend to keep their parent particle's velocity vector? I'm thinking of the following. The Riken Nishina Center has a super-powerful neutron beam based on generating a Ne-32 neutron source from stable Ca-48, which is accelerated to several hundred MeV. Laser wakefield acceleration could get those kind of energies from a very small unit (although, to be honest, I don't know how fast fragmentation/decay occurs in this case, and thus whether such a small linear accelerator could do the trick). If you could get a powerful neutron beam in the vehicle that's not too energy-consuming to produce, you could breed a fission target for net energy production while keeping that target far from critical. If you choose a target that has little neutronicity all the way down the chain (since it doesn't need to be able to reach criticality, you don't need a lot of high-energy neutrons), and since you could theoretically eat away the gamma emitters (or avoid them altogether) by careful target selection, neutron moderation, and system setup, your whole reaction could have quite low radiation exposure and little danger from fires or rupture. Your neutron beam would of course be extremely high radiation -- but if it's confined narrowly enough (i.e., the velocity vector question), you could just have a long, narrow cylinder of a safe neutron absorber past the target. :) Or even potentially *as* the target.

[randyd]

Update: Hmm -- let's go off on a wild, futuristic tangent here ;). Anyone know whether neutrons being released by relativistic particle fragmentation tend to keep their parent particle's velocity vector? I'm thinking of the following. The Riken Nishina Center has a super-powerful neutron beam based on generating a Ne-32 neutron source from stable Ca-48, which is accelerated to several hundred MeV. Laser wakefield acceleration could get those kind of energies from a very small unit (although, to be honest, I don't know how fast fragmentation/decay occurs in this case, and thus whether such a small linear accelerator could do the trick). If you could get a powerful neutron beam in the vehicle that's not too energy-consuming to produce, you could breed a fission target for net energy production while keeping that target far from critical. If you choose a target that has little neutronicity all the way down the chain (since it doesn't need to be able to reach criticality, you don't need a lot of high-energy neutrons), and since you could theoretically eat away the gamma emitters (or avoid them altogether) by careful target selection, neutron moderation, and system setup, your whole reaction could have quite low radiation exposure and little danger from fires or rupture. Your neutron beam would of course be extremely high radiation -- but if it's confined narrowly enough (i.e., the velocity vector question), you could just have a long, narrow cylinder of a safe neutron absorber past the target. :) Or even potentially *as* the target.

And if some one pisses you off with the way they are driving, you could just point the neutron beam their way. I LOVE IT!

Got a patent attorney you like? ;)

[Grendal]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

A blast from the past.

[Telchar]

A similar thing, I think, was the topic of a presentation last month at UVA. Here is a blurb about it from a professor I had. I don't know the title of the talk, but the subject (IIRC) was on accelerated proton-pumped thorium reactors:

"As the title of his talk indicates, he will focus on the use of particle (proton) accelerators in the nuclear power cycle. In one application, an accelerator-based spallation source is used to provide a flux of neutrons to seed nuclear reactions in an always sub-critical reactor. Approximately 5% of the generated electricity is required to drive the accelerator while 95% is delivered to the grid. A particular attraction of this approach is the ability to use thorium as a fuel. Not only is thorium abundant and cheap, but its reaction products are very difficult (nothing is impossible) to weaponize. The second application is the "burning" of actinides, the radioactive debris from conventional reactors, which greatly alleviates the waste disposal requirements.

These accelerator driven systems (ADS) are not new ideas, originating during the 1950's in Chalk River (Ontario, Canada). Carlo Rubbia picked them up and began championing them in the 1990's. However, they have only recently become practical with the development of highly efficient superconducting rf technology. It is becoming increasingly clear that this approach will play a major role in nuclear power generation in the coming decades. It has the potential to have a huge impact on the cost and safety of electrical power generation, the nuclear waste disposal issue, the nuclear proliferation issue, the atmospheric CO2 problem, and the issue of national energy independence.

This approach is being pursued at various places: Europe, India, China, etc. India is very interested in exploiting its abundant thorium reserves, and the ADS are the most effective means of doing it. The Indians already have a conventional reactor using thorium and are very interested in contributing their expertise with thorium burning to a joint India-US collaborative effort to develop ADS-thorium technology. JLAB is the American center of superconducting rf development and will play a leading role in the evolution of ADS in the US. Independent of whether UVA ever plays any role in these developments, they will be taking place nearby and almost surely will have a significant impact on the energy question in the coming years. Accordingly, Dr. Banerjee's talk promises to give a glimpse into at least part of our energy future."