Thorium laser car. Yeah, right.

Looks can be deceiving.

I never cease to be astonished at the total bologna that gets the bloggers all a Twitter.

Oh I know all about link bait and click throughs and all that garbage, but still, don’t you want to avoid looking like a complete idiot?

Well apparently not, because the entire technosphere was blogrolling a story about a thorium powered car that never needs fuel, ever!

Riiiiiight…

Blogroooooool!

All the stories are exactly the same, as they all simply re-write each other, so I’ll just pick one representative sample. Our target for tonight is one David Schilling, who lists on his impressive blogging resume as “visiting MIT”. Sadly, actually attending MIT isn’t on there, which is too bad or maybe he’d realize it was a complete line of BS that he was regurgitating with the breathless anticipation of a prom queen.

He’s not the only one of course, over on Mashable, liberal arts major Colin Daileda weights in with his identical version, while MSN, wisely, chose not to list the author of their photocopy. There are hundreds of examples, pick yer favourite.

And it should become obvious something is amiss if dig into it a little. Because then you’ll find that the exact same story was floated around the ‘net before, with equally sad results. For instance, here’s the same story in a 2011 post.

Genesis

So if you want to see how completely bogus this story is, you need to go back to its real origins, in 2008.

You see that fancy picture up at the top of the article? That’s what LPS says it wants to build. And where did that come from? It was an art project.

That’s right, an art project.

Cadillac originally formed back in 1902, and for their 100th anniversary celebrations, they commissioned a series of advertising and art projects over the next couple of years.

Loren Kulesus, a designer of super cool skateboards and guitars, drew up the design for the “World Thorium Fuel” concept car, which looks super cool like the rest of his work.

And to go with it, he said it would be really neato if the car lasted 100 years, you know, because it’s the 100th anniversary. So he put together a bunch of technobabble words like “thorium” and “laser” in the write-up.

That’s it. He just made it up. And it’s not like anyone hid this fact, and tried to pretend it was real or anything. It was clear right from the start this was just an art project.

Consider the acronym. That’s the Cadillac WTF.

And then…

So then, to LPS…

Ok so this guy Stevens comes along, takes the art project, re-writes it to pretend he’s building one, and launches a web site.

That’s it, that’s the entire story.

And people actually believe it. Not just believe it, go into forums and defend it! Gebus!

It’s clear no one did the slightest checking on Google before publishing their BS stories, because they would have found that the good doctor’s entire resume consists of a piece of 3D modelling software, which, in spite of claiming to be “revolutionary”, has exactly one mention on the web – the self-published press release that says it’s revolutionary.

What’s amusing is that if one simply takes a trip over to Stevens’ Laser Power Systems web page, you’ll find it’s even less well presented than this one. It consists almost entirely of technobabble, bad 3D modelling and links to random web pages about 3rd party software.

Then there are the various grandiose claims about how they will “provide a growing tax base for the expansion of local infrastructure”, that they will “create an industrial base that will impact the world economy”, and, in the poorly formatted text at the bottom, that their “Research and development is powered by a engineering community of more than 8,000 highly skilled technical experts around the world.”

Better yet, check out his linkedin page, where he claims to be the “chairman of the board” of a one-man company and that he claims some sort of connection to “NFO, CIA, Darpa”. He fails, however, to mention where that doctorate comes from, and no one else has found it either.

None of this set off alarm bells in anyone’s mind?!

Do the math

Anyway, back to Schilling… let’s examine a typical bit of the technobabble he happily quotes:

According to CEO Charles Stevens, just one gram of the substance yields more energy than 7,396 gallons (28,000 L) of gasoline and 8 grams would power the typical car for a century.

That sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well you know what I like to do in these cases, you do the math.

No really, do it

A quick trip to Google tells me that a gallon of gasoline, perfectly burned, yields 114,000 BTU. Use Google to convert that to more common physics terms, that’s 120 MJ, or in electrical terms, 33.3 kWh. A gallon of gas is enough to drive a car about 30 miles, on average.

An equally quick trip to the Wikipedia to look over thorium reveals that it releases the energy in its decay chain over an extremely long period of time, just longer than the lifetime of the universe actually (yes, really), and gives off a total of 42.6 MeV. MeV’s are extremely small units, converting that means every complete decay would give off 6.8 x 10^-18 MJ, or 2  x 10^-18 kWh. That’s small.

Now that energy will, eventually, be released by every atom in that 8 grams of fuel. The number of atoms in anything is a basic relation between the atomic and measured weights. In the case of thorium, that means there are 2.6 x 10²¹ atoms per gram. Again, the Wiki and Google has all of this at your fingertips. So you simply multiply the two to find that a single gram of thorium contains 17,680 kWh of energy. Eight of them would give off 141,500 kWh. That’s a lot.

Ok, so if a car can go 30 miles on 33 kWh, and we have 141,500 kWh to burn, that means the car could go maybe 128 thousand miles…

Hmmm, things are sounding funny already, that’s the number of miles that would be driven in 5 years, not 100.

But wait one second…

No, actually, wait 4.4×10¹⁷ seconds. That’s because that energy will take an average of 14 billion years to come out of the thorium – actually that’s the time to get only half of it, but I’ll ignore that quibble for now.

So if we take that 141,500 kWh, and divide by 1.2 x 10¹⁴ hours, that’s 1.17×10^-9 kW per hour.

You can convert Watts to horsepower by dividing by 750 (basically), so this is 1.5 trillionth of a horsepower.

Talk about pimping your ride!

But wait!

Now the thorium loving crowd reading this (all two of you, running the numbers) will complain that you don’t have to use natural decay to get the energy out – you can use simulated decay as you would in a nuclear reactor.

Sure, that’s true, but that’s not what the web site says. The web site basically invokes magic, saying the thorium powers a laser which heats water. That’s the entire description. Ummm, ok.

So to those people, would you like to see thorium reactor powered cars? Do you think such a thing is possible? Ok fine, do the math!

So, to conclude:

This story is complete BS, and the web page in question is precisely what it appears to be – personal blog posts by a not particularly talented 3D artist who can’t figure out how to turn on his spell or grammar checking software, let alone the anti-aliasing feature of Autodesk.

There’s a whole lot of BS in the world, don’t get me wrong. And with the internet at our fingertips that BS gets spread around the planet in seconds. But that doesn’t absolve everyone of putting even the slightest effort into trying to figure out if the stories are true or not.

I did the math, but honestly, you don’t have to, just look at the LPS web site for 30 seconds and decide for yourself.