Apparently you need to mine somewhere in the range of a few hundred tons of rock to get a gram or so of thorium.
If that ever took off, you could expect every single square inch of the desert in the USA turned into a giant strip mine.
Thorium is only found on the Earth in trace amounts, parts per million.
If it helps, some people are claiming that lithium battery technology has recently doubled in capacity.
US Department of Energy doubles lithium-ion battery capacity with spongy silicon
The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has created a new variety of lithium-ion battery that can store at least twice the amount of energy found in your conventional smartphone or laptop battery. Unlike some other battery advances that won’t see the light of day for years to come (if at all), this energy storage breakthrough could actually find its way into commercial devices fairly soon. As is fairly normal nowadays, nanotech is the magic ingredient; nanostructured silicon sponges to be exact.
Basically lithium is the technology used in Electric cars.
I was reading the other day that the newer electric cars have a battery fast charge rate that compares to the time spent physically pouring gasoline into your cars tank.
The numbers to my memory were something along these lines.
A car take 9 minutes to fill with enough gas to take it 28 miles.
A fast charge pump in 9 minutes will fill with enough energy to take it 10 miles.
So electric technology is catching up.
I wouldn't hold your breath for thorium to take off. I imagine that the side effect of a breakdown of one of those devices would probably be a nuclear event.
Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if someone builds a space elevator to the moon to harvest the abundant amount of helium 3 from its surface happens, before the earth is turned into a giant strip mine to get thorium.
Think of it this way, if you need to move a few hundred tons of rock to get a usable amount of thorium, you seriously need to consider that gasoline, and coal are not viable options to power gigantic strip mining operations.
So you can see in that chart, that in a best case scenario, you are looking at some properties carrying 10 parts per million worth of thorium. So if you want 1 ton of thorium, you need to move 0.1 million tons of rock, and you need to crush the rock, and shift it, and process it.
In the video he claims that the worlds energy supply for a day could be met by a single 1/2 barrel of rock. I believe he has seriously misunderstood things, and is referring to 1/2 barrel of thorium. Which probably weighs close to a half ton or ton. So...
How much gas do you need to move 0.1 million tons of rock? Or 100,000 tons.
As you can see, the largest dump trucks carry about 400 tons... 797F class...
https://mining.cat.com/products/surface-mining/mining-trucks
So that at the very least means 400 trips with a giant dump truck, plus the digger, and the crusher... that's probably an insane amount of energy at use...
http://xml.catmms.com/servlet/ImageServlet?imageId=C639683
It's fuel tank alone costs 1,000 gal. Which is what? A 5,000 dollar refill, and I will guess it takes more than one tank to make 400 trips...
Maybe it is cost effective on a large scale, but yeah, it looks really really expensive...
From this article on Thorium...
As far as fuelling a car goes, it could run for 100 years on just 8 grams of fuel. A company called Laser Power Systems has been working on creating an emissions free turbine/electric generator powered by nuclear thorium lasers. Charles Stevens, CEO and chairman of the Connecticut-based company claims that one gram of thorium yields the energy of 7,500 gallons of gasoline. The energy is harnessed by heating the thorium with an external source, which then becomes so dense that its molecules emit heat.
So 8 grams for 7,500 gallons of fuel. You are easily burning up that much in gas in one dump truck alone. There are alot of grams in a ton though.
(1 short ton) / (8 grams) = 113,398.092 cars fueled per ton...
3 tonnes of rock per cubic meter of earth, means you need to mine about 20 miles of earth to get one ton. You need 100,000 tons of rock mined to get one ton, and there are 3 tons per cubic meter of earth.
With an estimated 143,781,202 cars in america, and 113,398.092 cars fueled per ton, that's 1267 x 20 cubic miles.
Which means to fuel every car in the USA, only cars, not trucks, or planes, you need to mine about 25,340 cubic miles of earth. So you need to dig out a portion of the Earth that is equivalent to a small USA state, or maybe 1/3 of Texas.
I am not claiming 100% accuracy on those numbers, they are only ballpark figures. So when the guy in the video says you can power the world for a day on 1/2 barrel of rock, there is obviously something very wrong with their thinking.
I mean the world is resorting to strip mining Alberta for oil... that is how much of an energy crisis we are approaching. Japan has already started looking into Methane Hydrate mining as an alternative fuels source.
So, the main issue is the environment. (wait a second that can't be right... I am double checking... I misquoted, 1 gram of thorium for 8 grams of thorium, so yeah, cars alone, your probably looking at moving something like 1/10th of Texas... quick check says passenger cars amount for 40% of the worlds gasoline use... so... hey, maybe 1/5th of Texas for 100 years of fuel replacement, today, not 20 years from now... and they are always optimistic with their numbers so, I'd say 1/3 of Texas is probably reasonable...) So obviously they are going to strip mine Canada if that ever takes off...
If you love the sound of nuclear though, this is the giant project in the works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
ITER (originally an acronym of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and Latin for "the way" or "the road") is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject, which is currently building the world's largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor adjacent to the Cadarache facility in the south of France.[1] The ITER project aims to make the long-awaited transition from experimental studies of plasma physics to full-scale electricity-producing fusion power plants.
The project is funded and run by seven member entities — the European Union, India, Japan, People's Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The EU, as host party for the ITER complex, is contributing about 45 percent of the cost, with the other six parties contributing approximately 9 percent each.[2][3][4]
Yeah, it's amazing how over the last century or so oil booms have come and gone in entire areas.
Love to see what happens when they decide to strip mine every last inch of earth for 10 parts per million, if they are lucky.
Fairly sure they are serious about this idea...
China's President Xi Jinping has said he wants China to establish itself as a space superpower. The mission has inspired widespread pride in China's growing technological prowess, with a goal of sending a human to the moon some time after 2020. Chinese state-run television broadcast footage of the rocket’s perfect launch and ascent into space, where the Chang’e-3 craft set off toward the moon.
Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, was quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon for future mining of Helium 3: "There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
You never know.... sounds possible, I guess... I am not a materials engineer...
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/life/science-and-technology/2012/02/23/332446/Japan-firm.htm
TOKYO--A Japanese construction firm claimed Wednesday it could execute an out-of-this-world plan to put tourists in space within 40 years by building an elevator that stretches a quarter of the way to the moon.
I think I remember reading that was a publicity stunt, but hey, you never know...
Things along the lines of an electromagnetic rail-gun have long been seen as one of the most efficient ways of, in terms of fuel price, putting large amounts of equipment into space. I think a space elevator might be a bit whacky, but a space train or space ramp seems within the bounds of possibility. Anything that would make staged rockets redundant would be amazing really.
I won't be satisfied until we have single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft as standard though.
Fuck the ISS too.
Side effects include increased likelihood of possible spinal injury, risk of your vehicle hurting someone without you steering it, and dealing with the fact that your vehicle of choice has feelings, fears, can run away, can rebel, can get sick, can be stolen without hot wiring or stolen keys, and lacks a conventional off switch.
Fix the injury risks and rid them of emotions to the point of machine-like behavior and yes, they'd make a proper vehicle. Bringing the horse back otherwise offers many complications in today's world. Lets not even get into how this would affect people who rely on public transportation, people who live in apartments within crowded cities, or people with disabilities or age related weaknesses. If every person felt as entitled to having a vehicle with horses as they do these days with cars, that itself would have a staggering effect economically and spatially. Then there's the costs of converting from one lifestyle to another, plus the challenge convincing people to adopt a new way of thinking, what issues will come up if there's just as many cars being driven as horses being ridden, how this would change how freeways work, dealing with it being more difficult to repair a horses legs than repair a car...
There's also the smell.