Slashdot Mirror
Iceland To Drill Hole Into Volcano
G3ckoG33k writes "BBC reports that Iceland will drill a hole into a volcano so it can tap heat from it, which eventually is hoped to produce commercially available energy. From the article: "Twenty years ago, geologist Gudmundur Omar Friedleifsson had a surprise when he lowered a thermometer down a borehole. 'We melted the thermometer,' he recalls. 'It was set for 380C; but it just melted.'". Excuse me, Gudmundur, but how could that ever have been a 'surprise'..."
Don't they realize that Volcanic Energy has directly caused more deaths than Nuclear Energy?
When will people learn that there is no safe form of energy?!
The volcano gods are gonna be so angered when they find out Iceland is mooching the heat. If I know my mythology, nothing (and I mean nothing) pisses a god off like free stuff for humans. We should just rename Iceland to New Pompeii right now.
My work here is dung.
If you ever drop your car keys in lava, forget it man, they're gone.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Do they not watch Doctor Who in Iceland?
It'll be green skinned monsters and parallel universes before you know it!
I took a field trip once to the local hydroelectric dam and learned all about how hydro is safe and clean and provides a large recreational grounds after the water has accumulated behind the dam. It was pretty cool.
Now if they can build a geothermal plant that actually improves the landscape, I think they are on to something. Free energy ceases to be free when you ruin the surrounding area with ugly power plants.
In other news, Icelandic scientists have set up a network of precisely timed explosive devices in a tunnel into the heart of the volcano in order to harvest billions of dollars worth of "blue diamonds" extremely useful for use in electronics.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
hahaha April 1st is a bit early this year, eh?
What's next...send a "man to the moon"
or maybe "cure smallpox"
hahahaha
You technology-worshippers make me laugh.
btw, I'm posting this using Gods own tools: sticks, bits of bone fragments, and moss.
It was a surprise because his hypothesis was that they would find thetans living there.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
It's quite warm for boiling water...
I tagged this as "iceland" and "boring"
Here's a transcript from the experiment:
Leela: OW! Fire hot!
Farnsworth: The professy will help. AAAH! Fire indeed hot.
He should have known better than to try to take a volcano god's temperature rectally.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Oh, yes, they /say/ that it's for an energy source.
I have a feeling they just want to create an evil lair.
Arrrrrrr
Iceland might be a small island with a pithly 200 000 people and super-expensive beer, but they sure have plenty of energy. No wonder they do energy intensive things like process aluminum and grow lots of vegies in greenhouses.
Wouldn't want to live there tho.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Ok so how long before the volcano erupts and utterly destroys a multi million dollar power plant built on its side with earthquake action/lava flow/pyroclastic flow? Even if this were an inactive volcano, those things can randomly become active, spelling doom for the poor saps who would be staffing the power plant (not to mention the millions of dollars down the drain when your spiffy new power plant goes up in smoke, literally). This is your power plant *shows picture of power plant* This is your power plant on a volcano *shows picture of puff of smoke* Questions?
Chums up, let's do this!
Nation to drill a hole in a volcano. Lava discovered. News at eleven!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Doctor Evil did it.
Yeah, its all fun and games until somebody loses an eye! to searing hot magma no less.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Wear eyepatches! Remember, UNITY is strength!
Trouble with extracting geothermal energy is that rock is a pretty good insulator. Once you get the first enthusiastic bout of steam and have cooled a few feet of rock around your pipe, the heat leaches back in very slowly. Unless they can create and sustain a lava tube that is constantly eroding in the presence of circulating magma, (or use a heat exchanger in constantly circulating hot water), this is unlikely to be successful.
In other news, scientists in New Zealand were surprised to discover that a moisture probe the had developed capable of measuring humidity from 0-90% malfunctioned after being lowered into a mysterious salty substance found at the edge of the island.
Due to the malfunctioning instrument, scientists are still unsure about what this salty liquid mixture could be.
If they perfect this in Iceland, perhaps the UK government could look into converting some mountains into Volcano's... it may be a solution to keep all those mountain folk who don't want Wind Turbines in their back yard off their backs!
I can attest to this..... Growing up, I didn't take the best care of my teeth, but lived on an older house with a well system that didn't have the best water softener system (tubs had rust caked on, the water smelt like sulfer). The thing is, I never got a single cavity. With how I ate, that is the only way I can explain my lack of cavities.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
...Waterland
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
volunteered to lead the team for personal reasons.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Volcano in Iceland?... sorry... Drill in Volcano?
I forgot to be anonymous.
This reminds me of the Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri improvement of similar name. The idea for that was to drill a hole deep into the earth and harvest the metals and massive heat energy.
I guess I'll keep in the mood then:
The thermometer must have tickled the gods
Does anyone else notice that there is a unusually high proportion of funny comments to not funny comments at 5:30 in the morning? Correlation? Coincedence? ??? Maybe I'm tired.
Finally scientists prove that drilling a hole inside the volcano might somehow get us to the center of the earth!
Okay. Everybody's joking about it, but here's the solution to the puzzle of the "surprising" heat: that's 380+ Celcius *WATER*, not lava. The area being studied is on the sea floor or kilometres beneath the land surface, and the water is under great pressure. As a result, it gets much hotter than surface water, without boiling. Sometimes the "water" in the sea floor close to these volcanic areas is a supercritical fluid -- beyond the temperature-pressure conditions for distinct gaseous and liquid phases.
Supercritical water is pretty exotic stuff in power systems. There are some advanced fossil-fuel power stations that use it, and supercritical nuclear power systems are being developed. They offer higher thermal efficiencies. In Iceland, they might be able to get the same thing going, but with renewable geothermal sources, which would be great, but first they have to tame some pretty extreme conditions in the boreholes.
Someone should tell them, Jules Verne wrote fiction...
What could possibly go wrong?
There must be loads of energy inside a black hole, we just need to send in a spaceship to go get it.
Task Mangler
Do they not watch Doctor Who in Iceland?
It'll be green skinned monsters and parallel universes before you know it!
The Icelanders already have both of those, the green skinned monsters work for the local Internal Revenue Service and the Parallel Universe management is handeld by the state Lutheran church.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
In Soviet Russia, temperature measures YOU...
Thanks for bringing this up. I'm sure they never thought of any of these points.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The summary is bullshit, even by /. standards. They were drilling for conventional geothermal energy, that is water heated by a lava flow nearby (extremely common in Iceland). Given the high pressure they were expecting high temperatures (the quoted 380) and still liquid water (due to the pressure). What was surprising is the fact that the water was probably more than 500 and actually melted the thermometer. Given this discovery (aka The water in this depth is much hotter than previously calculated) it makes perfect sense to a) explore the reasons for the higher temperature and b) use that for a more efficient power plant. There's no volcanoes involved at all.
Hopefully, if this works, we will start more taps in wyoming/montana around Yellowstone park. I realize that some will worry that we would tap too much heat out, but if we work from the outside, it is doubtful that we could change Old Faithful. It is time that we take advantage of none destuctive alternatives such as this (as well as nukes).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://www.epa.gov/cleanrgy/renew.htm#geothermal land can sink in
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/ the core could stop rotating
Personally, the one lesson I've learned in life, is that NOTHING is without consequences.
Make a simple change to make something easier, you may find you've made something else harder...
The fact is, nothing is 'without' issues.. they just may not be readily apparent before they are present.
and they may be disasters....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Foolish scientists! Don't they understand what sort of fury they'll unleash?!?
This guy's the limit!
I wasn't aware that people were running geothermal power stations but I guess I don't spend quite enough time reading popular science or watching Discovery. Up into this article I thought Geothermal energy use was just something they did on one Stargate Atlantis episode. *sigh* I need to catch up.
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
Feel free to mod this off-topic, but... can't we *please* try to get the names right? The man's called Guðmundur Ómar Friðleifsson, not Gudmundur Omar Friedleifsson. (I've written about this before, too.)
...OK, I give up, I can't say that last line without laughing. But jokes aside, it still would be nice if the editors actually took the 30 seconds it takes to, y'know, *edit* a story.
Yeah, I know, the summary's just copied from the BBC article, and the BBC makes the same mistake (and even calls him "Friedleifsson" instead of "Fridleifsson"), but shouldn't Slashdot try to maintain a higher standard of quality than the BBC?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
As is clearly shown here... all who dare to defy Xenu shall be subsumed by a wave of his volcanic wrath.
s t.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu
Tom Cruise respects the power of Xenu.
John Travolta respects the power of Xenu.
Sonny Bono respects the power of Xenu.
http://www.adherents.com/largecom/fam_scientologi
Björk also shall join this venerated list....
It is only a matter of time.
I wonder if they will be surprised when the drill begins to melt? :-)
Seriously this just sounds like a bad idea if there is significant population anywhere near there. I'm not a geologist, but I'm not impressed that they were suprised by the thermometer melting either. (Perhaps thats just bad reporting/translation.)
Think Deeply.
Gudmundur
We icelanders have been using geothermal energy for ages, so this won't be a _huge_ leap.
Oh, and about that Blue Lagoon monster pic in the article. I've been getting worried about that. How will we continue our energy-production methods if all the hot water is being hogged by these blue-skinned creatures?
Tourism in Iceland is very safe. So safe, in fact, that we have tour buses going to the Blue Lagoon for the sole purpose of visiting these blue-skinned water-dwellers. Reports of visitor's disappearances have been greatly exaggerated.
cool to think that you can tap volcanos for energy. question is, if you're drawing off that energy, might you not also be reducing the likelihood of a catastrophic eruption? i am a simple caveman lawyer who does not understand your modern ways, but that would be pretty neat.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Start the reactor. Free Mars. I mean Earth, that's it, Earth. Yes. Free Earth.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
... on last season's Stargate Atlantis?
At depth, the groundwater is way over 100C, but the pressure keeps it liquid. As Dr Friedleifsson puts it: "On the surface, you boil your egg at 100 degrees; but if you wanted to boil your egg at a depth of 2,500m, it would take 350."
Sorry, but I HATE stupid analogies that only help make stupid people reading them, dumber. It would take 350C for the water to boil, but non-boiling 100C water will "boil" and egg just fine. It is a good thing that 340C water isn't hot enough to burn you down there, because it isn't "boiling". Sheesh....
Lets see, pressure of water to boil at 350C is around 1100 psi (guess from extending this chart). So the question is, can an egg in a shell withstand 1100 psi to even be boiled?
Supercritical water is NOTHING new to power systems. Its used all the time in conventional steam-powered coal power plants. They heat the steam to what they call "dry steam" (supercritical) and then run it pressurized through massive turbines. These spin and create electricity. Doesn't sound exotic to me.
... hence the amazement that the water was at the temperatures that melted the thermometer.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Let's just hope the lead scientist on this project is not Stephen Sorenson instead. Yikes!!!!!
i have no idea why this made me spit my coffee onto my monitor laughing, but it did.
now my xml is all caffiene-y
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
I'm not sure of the cause, as IANADentist, but it may have something to do with genetics, or something else, who knows...
Yes, some persons are simply genetically predisposed to having very strong tooth enamel, naturally more resistant to cavities over other peoples. They also may have a better immune system to fighting off the mouth bacteria that colonize the dental plaques which actually make the acids that attack the tooth enamel surface too. Without those bacterias in large concentrations, there will be no dental cavities also.
Addtionally, I don't have a link for it, but sometime geothermal stations a reported to produce a constant low rumbling sound. I would have to imagine it would have to be a pretty quiet area in order to notice.
But forget that, great job getting a reference to "The Core" in there.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
nt
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...but how does this relate to Ubuntu, city-architecture and cancer?
What if there are elves inside the volcano? How would you like it if an alien race drilled through your house? The people of Iceland are so insensitive.
See steam tables.
At 1100 PSI, the boiling point of water is about 291C.
As long as Kevin Costner doesn't star in the movie version of Waterland...
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
What about Krakatoa? What about Pompeii?! What about Asian Tsunami? History has shown us the terrible dangers of geothermal energy! Geology has killed far more people than even the satanic nuclear power!
How do we know that careless drilling into the molten subsurface of the Earth will not cause Iceland to explode in a fiery, flaming, orgy of death that will make Krakatoa look like a birthday candle? How do we know that it won't trigger some subsurface earthquake, and create a tsunami that will destroy the shoreline cities of North America and Europe?
This is the same kind of careless arogance that cause disasters like Chernobyl to happen! 3-Mile Island should be a warning to us all! Please, think of the children, and stop this madness before it is too late! I am going to write a letter to the UN, the EU, and to Greenpeace, and tell them that this kind of reckless endangerment of the enviorment and or people should be banned, worldwide! There can be no compromise! There can be no middle ground! This kind of geo-thermal-terrorism must be stopped!
"Wouldn't want to live there tho."
Have you SEEN the women in iceland? Not to mention the haunting arctic landscapes...
Yeah the winters there are brutal. The beer on the other hand isn't so bad, mostly lagers. Viking Beer was cheaper then soda out in the boonies.
I can imagine the poor guy trying to explain that to his wife.
"Yeah Honey, I was just standing there, and some weird shriveled old bald guy bit it off my hand, and then he fell into a lava pit......I know it sounds weird. Why was I by the lava pit anyway?.....No, there were no women around there......Well yeah I had been drinking and eating some Elven bread and liquor...The broach?....That was just a present... Well she's the Elf Queen.....Well no, She's not married.....Yes, she gave me the cloak too.... What do you mean I have to sleep outside tonight?"
..........FULL STOP.
I was just there last fall and 70% of the country's energy needs are provided by geothermal. Seems to be working pretty well to me. I realize it's harder than it looks, but geothermal is certainly viable. I even swam and bathed in the runoff from one of the powerplants. Quite enjoyable, actually :)
Cheers.
Obviously the thermometer is not compatible with the volcano.
Must be a volcano which uses Fahrenheit.
'It was set for 380C; but it just melted.'
;^)
I guess he should have bought the thermometer that goes to '11'.....
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088258/
I always suspected that Icelanders were boring. Surely it is possible to find a place between the surface and the magma where the temperature is consistantly around the temperature we use in other power plants. We could just pipe water from that depth up to a conventional Steam Generator and create steam in the second loop. This would not require exotic materials or open us up to triggering a volcanic eruption. Beyond this guy being surprised by the water temperature, I don't see anything here that is exotic or unusual. Honestly I am still amazed that we don't use more thermal energy to power the grid... Germany could buy their electricity from Iceland instead of the French who produce it with Nuclear plants across the Rhine from them since they don't want any nukes IN Germany.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
Are you sure you didn't miss the GP's reference? :)
It's generally safe, but I'd hate to be downstream if there's a major earthquake that's stronger than what the dam was designed for.
There's also the terrorist angle, and the war time target angle. A German dam was the target of Allied operations during WWII.The mountain called monkey had spoken.
There was only fire.
And then,
nothing...
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
only his creations do...
Hey Torfi, hold my Glögg and watch this . . . [lifts huge drill]
You're one of those people who likes to take all the fun out of situation aren't you ? Name isn't Norman is it ? ;-)
I have an a**hole that is following me and nails me whenever they can. Obviously, they went after you just for giggles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Stargate_Atl antis)
Wow, sounds familiar....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
...why is there a picture of a girl who either just finished 10 boxes of KrispyKream or just finished shooting a porno?
The Age of Legends is seen as a utopian society without war or crime, and devoted to culture and learning. Aes Sedai were frequently devoted to academic endeavours, one of which inadverdantly resulted in a hole - 'The Bore' - being drilled in the Dark One's prison. The immediate effects were not realised, but the Dark One gradually asserted power over humanity, swaying many to become his followers.
You can't add pianos and telephones.
when in so simple a thing as an admission of guilt, in a setting where it doesn't matter for shit....
there is no job on the line, financial ruin threatening, criminial proceedings in condsideration...
if the developer of the geothermal system being installs discovers an 'error' or problem in the process do you, ricthofen80 think he will say
"never mind, I'm sorry, I made a mistake, this is a bad idea to implement?" or do you think he'll gloss over that, change the subject a little and carry on...
In the world of Slashdot, you accused me of 'trollish' behavior, and claimed my citation did not carry the content I claimed it did.
I pointed out you were 100% wrong, and asked not for seconds at sunrise, but for an apology..
look what I got..
and you expect me to have faith in people, that if a multi-million dollar project starts to look bad, we'll find out before it's too late.
welcome to my foeship... you didn't earn it until you refused to acknowledge your mistake.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
the drilling machine was named Wilson and it brought back memories of a long lost buddy from a time when he was marooned on an island.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Hey, everybody knows that it's not even really that hot below Iceland; a man could descend right down to the center of the earth!
I'm not even sure where you found all those funny little squiggles to put over the letters .. sheesh, just lets convert the world to English (British English please) then I can be lazy and ignorant in peace :-)
Oh, please! Go back and take a high-school physics course. And please PASS it this time.
Let's see YOU build a supertanker that'll hold several million litres of liquid hydrogen.
There's better things we can do with all that wasted energy.
Stop driving your SUV and buy, no, STEAL a bicycvle fer chissakes... f*%$#@ !!
.
- aqk
F U
In Soviet Russia, volcano drills hole in YOU!
I'm sure that
is good journalism; but I gotta say that I'm with Gudmundur - it would have surprised the hell out of me too !How many beans make five, anyhow ?
into PWR -- pressurized water reactor.
Lava Jokes... They're just not cool.