It's only the thing protecting us from the murderous intent of cosmic rays, but what the hell.
Even if this plan succeeds 100%, they won't have even reached the mantle, let alone the core. This is not going to interfere with the magnetic field at all.
At these depths, the heat of the surrounding rock can hit temperatures of around 500 degrees Celsius – enough to transform any liquid water pumped down there into a vapor-like supercritical state that's perfect for generating electricity.
That's called superheated steam. It's kinda spooky because a jet of steam at that temperature will be invisible in air, but will melt the flesh off your bones.
By 2028, the company hopes to be able to take over old coal-fueled power stations, transforming them into facilities powered by steam instead.
Umm akshually, coal power plants already use steam turbines; only the heat source would be different.
BTW I like this plan to extract geothermal energy from Yellowstone. It would make 6 GW of electricity and possibly prevent an eruption.
It is funny that just about every form of power generation is ultimately just, "we're goint to use a bunch of water moving to spin a big magnet." Wind is just that but air, so the only one I can think of that's really different is photovoltaics. Even solar mirror plants use mirrors to focus light to make steam to spin turbines.
the coolest form of generation is heating up a fluid (like a molten salt) and causing it to flow in a coil faster and faster, generating it's own magnetic field. cuts out some of the energy waste and moving parts. magneto-hydrodynamic power generation.
That's the kind of awesome plan a New Deal 2.0 (or even better, a socialist US) could do. Make the Hoover Dam look quaint by comparison.
team at that temperature will be invisible in air
really? why?
Regular steam ("saturated" steam) has little droplets of water floating around it it, because it's just barely hot enough to vaporize and some of it will condense in the air. If you have a kettle or a pressure cooker with a small vent you can see this in action: the jet of steam will only be visible after it's gone a few mm out of the vent, and those first few mm will be invisible superheated steam. If it's hot enough (like 500C, so hotter than in your kitchen) it will dissipate before it has a chance to condense. You usually need a high-pressure boiler for this, or a secondary heat source like in the video that bentwookie posted.
Superheated steam was first used in steam engines because it wouldn't condense inside the cylinders, so you don't have to drain water out of the engine or worry as much about it rusting on the inside. It's also good for turbines because those water droplets would run into the turbine blades at high speed and cause pitting and damage over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheated_steam
Water vapour itself is invisible in air, we just call it humidity. What you see as steam is when the water vapour condenses out of it. IDK why superheated steam wouldn't condense but probably something to do with the high temps increasing the saturation point of the air around it.
It’s only the thing protecting us from the murderous intent of cosmic rays, but what the hell.
Huh? What, the magnetic field generated by the solid iron core rotating? They're only trying to get 12 miles down. There's not enough fissile material on this earth to blow the core of the fucking earth apart, even if you dropped a direct nuke through the mantel somehow....
The fastest we can make something go with gravity assists in the Solar System is something like 2-3% of the speed of light before the object permanently escapes the Sun's gravity.
Would making a stream of nukes 2-3% of the speed of light help drill to the center of Earth?
Umm - this article doesn't belong in c/science.
Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth's crust than anybody has dug before.
That's the first sentence and that's all that I read. Not only does Quaise not have a Wikipedia page - when you search for it at Wikipedia you effectively get zero results.
I don't know what sciencealert.com is but it appears to be total garbage.
I think what he is trying to say is that it's a tech bro junk science article. Maybe the dunk tank com would have been a better fit.
Fun fact: deepest borehole ever drilled into the earth was the Kola Superdeep Borehole, in the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
Remember the urban legend about the screams from hell they heard coming out of that hole?
That is a badass plan, but geothermal (and that's what this is) always falls through on a large scale because if you're drilling it's a lot cheaper to drill to oil or natural gas (usually both) and transport it than to drill to hot rocks nearby.
"Unlimited" means "scaling up the CONSOOMING until it is quite limited and even more destructive than before."
Every time fuel consumption gets more efficient, the amount of fuel consumption actually goes up under capitalism. It's been a known thing for a century.
similar order of magnitude to getting energy from the sun, its way way more than humannity can extract in thousands of years, and like the sun any small amount we would extract is tiny compared to what is radiated away into space and lost, also its still replenished by radioactive elements within the core
Geothermal is infinite for most plans on the scale of ~millions of years, and that's not because we'd extract all of it, it's because the source may move due to plate tectonics and mantle movements over tens or hundreds of millions of years. The issue is that you can't do it everywhere. Or, well, you can, but to do it efficiently (both in an economic sense and in the regular sense of like, mining and laying the pipes and all that without it taking forever) you need an area that's already hot fairly close to the surface. Iceland is a great example, as is some countries around the East African Rift. I imagine many, even most countries have localized upwellings of heat that could supply a big geothermal plant or two without it being prohibitively expensive, but you'd need other renewable energy sources to supplement it unless you planned on turning Iceland into one gigantic geothermal plant for the whole world or something.
unless you planned on turning Iceland into one gigantic geothermal plant for the whole world
:I-was-saying:
