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Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020
An anonymous reader writes "A half-century after the first attempt to drill through the ocean crust into the Earth's mantle, a new campaign armed with improved technology is underway that could reach the mantle by the end of the decade, researchers say."
The soviets have already tried this, but ran into issues with the deep-crust temperatures (570*F when they stopped, but it was still climbing) melting their drill bits. How is this project intending to resolve this issue?
Shredder and Krang already did this in like 1989.
What would tend to happen is that as they drill the hole, lava starts climbing up the shaft and cooling again into solid rock. Even once they are all the way through, the lava will still quickly cool into rock as it comes onto the surface.
Ultimately, it would amount to becoming a man-made volcano... one that would probably take several centuries before it was of any significant size, and that's assuming that it remains active for that amount of time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You want to put spent nuclear fuel rods into a burning hot ocean of magma in a spot where enormous upward pressure is being exerted? Realistically, a hole in the earth's crust that reaches the mantle already has a name. It's called a volcano. You wouldn't try to shit in an overflowing toilet, would you?
Though you may have something if you meant that we somehow insert spent fuel into a Subduction Zone, where a portion of the crust is sinking into the mantle anyway.
Personally, I'm all for storing the old fuel until technology becomes sufficiently advanced to use it again, there is still a ton of energy present in it. I'd say the best way to be safe from the stuff it is to bleed it dry.
They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.