TV: The Thorium Dream. Chances are you are reading this and watching the video above on Mac or a Windows computer, or maybe on an Android or iOS device, or maybe even Linux or BSD.
Those obvious possibilities represent only the tail end of many not-so-obvious choices, the ones that determine, for better or worse, the direction that technology takes. Some things win and other things lose; some operating systems succeed, building on previous ideas, and others end up in the trash can of history. Or, in the case of Windows (which Apple once claimed “stole” the idea from Mac OS), the Recycle Bin. The trash is where Xerox’s Alto operating system ended up after inspiring both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to develop their own graphical user interface, the front-end of computers that we now take for granted.
There’s much to take for granted in the evolution of technology, or at least in the way that technology appears to us today – refined, perfected, ever cutting-edge. Thorium, the Next Uranium. 8 grams of thorium could replace gasoline in cars. The price of oil is on an upward spiral due to increasing demand and diminishing supplies. Short of finding vast new untapped reserves buried somewhere under out feet, we need to find an alternative sooner rather than later. Unless you have a lot of money to spend on an electric vehicle, everyone who drives a car today relies on oil for the gasoline that keeps it running. Although replacing the petrol engine with a battery and electric motor seems to be where we are heading, it only really shifts the problem to the power stations rather than the fuel pumps. There may be another way to power our cars, however, and it would mean never having to refuel you car–be it with gasoline or an electric charge.
Charles Stevens is an inventor and CEO of Laser Power Systems . Thorium is abundant and radioactive, but much safer to use than an element such as uranium. Stevens has worked out you’d require a 227kg, 250MW thorium engine in order to power a typical road car. Read more at Wardsauto.com. U.S. Researcher Preparing Prototype Cars Powered by Heavy-Metal Thorium. A U.S. company says it is getting closer to putting prototype electric cars on the road that will be powered by the heavy-metal thorium.
Thorium is a naturally occurring, slightly radioactive rare-earth element discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. It is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about three times more abundant than uranium. However, the use of thorium is controversial because, as with uranium, it is used as a nuclear power source.
Indeed, the internal heat of the Earth largely is attributed to the presence of thorium and uranium. The key to the system developed by inventor Charles Stevens, CEO and chairman of Connecticut-based Laser Power Systems, is that when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, becomes it is so dense its molecules give off considerable heat. Jim Hedrick, a specialist on industrial minerals – and until last year the U.S.