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Iceland Seeking 'Supercritical Steam' For Power Source (bbc.com)
New submitter FatdogHaiku writes: Already getting over 25% of its electrical power from geothermal sources, Iceland hopes to break new ground using "supercritical steam" from a 5 km deep borehole. Is it just me, or does this sound like the start of a movie where everything that can go wrong does in fact go wrong? It's not like they are new to the tech, but working with geologic sources at 450C to ~600C is a new ball game for anyone. It should be noted that Iceland also uses direct geothermal for most of its space heating. "In this area at Reykjanes, we typically drill to 2km or 3km depth to harness the steam, to run power plants and produce clean, renewable electricity," explained Asgeir Margeirsson, CEO of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP). "We want to see if the resources go deeper than that." The "supercritical steam" holds more energy than a liquid or a gas. The team wants to bring it up to the surface to convert into electricity, as they believe it could produce up to 10 times as much energy as the steam from conventional geothermal wells.
About the worst case scenario is they waste a lot of money for nothing. It's not like they're going to release some prehistoric mutant monster, or hit a pocket of zombie creating virus, or melt down or anything like that.
Why deal with the middle man?
what kind of pipe they use for this kinda thing, im thinking some kind of ceramic metal hybrid?? Temps and sulfer corrosion must be a major PITA to deal with.
If the drill does hit magma, because it is under pressure, it would be likely to come to the surface rapidly, he explained. "It would come out rather like lancing a boil or popping a spot. It would cause huge problems for the drilling operation itself, but it is unlikely to cause anything more significant than that."
Would not want to be on that drill crew. Falling into lava or getting splashed with lava is just about the worst way I can imagine to die.
deny the existence of volcanoes
As well they should. In my travels 6 miles to and from work, I've never seen any volcanoes.
I personally blame Trump's racist wall for keeping out the undocument volcanoes.
I plan to stage a protest about this. After lunch, that is.
Because calling it what it realy is fission makes the greens scared. It's not all radioactive processes but mostly that.
No sir I dont like it.
" Is it just me, or does this sound like the start of a movie where everything that can go wrong does in fact go wrong? "
Yeah, it's just you.
'Muricans are anti-science idiots who deny the existence of volcanoes,
Actually, they live on top of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Seems like they haven't figured out how to tap the free energy though.
Or not.
"supercritical steam" just means steam at above the boiling point of water at whatever pressure applies. More specific heat than "saturated steam" (steam at the boiling point of water at the applicable pressure), but otherwise pretty much the same as any other steam....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/
Fission != Nuclear decay
Also, even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a ,ulti-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Have they done anything to address the issue of the earthquakes this can produce? Earthquakes (especially large numbers of microearthquakes) are why geothermal energy is off the table because it damages all of your buildings and infrastructure. To make things worse, the effects of lots of earthquakes on wildlife isn't well understood.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If a fluid is supercritical it does not have a distinct phase. Steam is vapor phase. You can either have supercritical water, or you can have water vapor. If you have one, you do not have the other.
Most power plants (natural gas, oil or coal) run on supercritical steam anyways, at least in their designed power level. The technology is neither new nor rare. The need to run on "dry" steam for efficiency is known at least from steam locomotives. The only modern power-generating subcritical steam systems I know of are some nuclear power plants where the reactor expects some of the cooling water in it to stay liquid (read: dense) because it serves as neutron moderator as well.
Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
The sun should probably be called reusable as nothing we do on earth can affect the output of the sun. We can block it from reaching the surface with pollution but we can't change it's output. Many of the other "green" technologies I wonder about. Wind power is a good example. How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather? Is it really completely free? Massive geothermal is another example. How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it? Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem. I wonder if 100 years from now if we find out that some of our free and green energy sources are not as free and green as we originally thought.
Iceland should stick with regular steam and not use Supercritical steam.
Nobody likes a nag.
Also, even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a ,ulti-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
Even if they did object it's not going to stop the process, no matter how much they protest.
>It should be noted that Iceland also uses direct geothermal
It still can't beat nuclear district heating and having your tap water coming out of reactor cooling circuit (Bilibino)
No, not this case. It's not the US we are talking about
I blame God. He made my cousin sick!
why does he have this sort of defeatist attitude, like he wants Iceland to stop researching this? Does he also go on to other areas of energy production and suggest that everything can go wrong, and it's a bad idea to research?
Uh, because the amount of heat inside the Earth is far larger than anything we could ever need or use? Evolution will have changed us into another species, there won't even be anything remotely human around and the inside of the Earth will still be hot.
Do you understand now?
Technically no energy source is fully renewable; the sun will eventually burn out, the atmosphere and oceans will eventually boil off, the stars will die, elements will decay to their final stable products, and the universe will eventually reach a state of terminal entropy where no further energy flow is possible. It's a matter of time-scale; if you burn some coal or oil or gas, you have to dig up some more to replace what you use, like right now. Whereas if you build a geothermal plant, or a tidal barrage, or a wind farm, while you may technically be using a finite resource (taking radiothermal heat from the core, slowing the rotation of the earth, etc), in practice you don't have to replace what you've used; it "renews" itself.
That's because racist Donald Trump put a stupid 'park' over it to prevent it from giving free energy to LGBTQRPLMNOPs because he hates everybody.
But you know what's similar to 'park'? I'll tell you... a camp. Donald Trump turned Yellowstone into a concentration camp and anybody denying it is spreading fake news and should be shot.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Did you know your decaf latte probably used supercritical CO2 to decaffeinate the beans? Supercritical CO2, also at very high pressures, is a very good solvent and used in many industries.
Have some fun videos about the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gCTKteN5Y4
Silence is a state of mime.
"In this area at Reykjanes, we typically drill to 2km or 3km depth to harness the steam, to run power plants and produce clean, renewable electricity,"
It may be clean but it is NOT renewable. Unless they're reheating back the magma with solar panels.
Or not.
"supercritical steam" just means steam at above the boiling point of water at whatever pressure applies. More specific heat than "saturated steam" (steam at the boiling point of water at the applicable pressure), but otherwise pretty much the same as any other steam....
That would be superheated steam as opposed to saturated steam. Supercritical steam would be steam that is at pressure higher than water can exist as a vapor and temperature higher than water can exist as a liquid. For water this is above 3200 psia and above 705F.
I assume you mean wind turbines? Here you go.
The higher you go, the higher the figure you can harvest. Effects at the surface are generally rather minimal, although there are some small effects. It's a shame, honestly, as I think most people in windy areas (at least speaking for myself) would like more of a reduction on surface wind speeds.
Geo is generally locally, temporarily depletable. Over broad regions or over long periods of time, it's renewable. Nuclear decay inside the earth yields an average of 0.06W per square meter heat input. While that's far less than solar (even accounting for night, angles, inefficiencies, etc), it's particularly useful because it concentrates and stores. So if you drill a well into a particular hot water reservoir, you're harnessing the heat that flows up through that entire reservoir, not just immediately at the point of the borehole. And even if you're depleting it faster than it's being added (which is generally anticipated to be the case by significant margins, although these things are surprisingly difficult to assess), there's always other areas to move into; over somewhere between dozens and thousands of years (depending on the reservoir), the old site will reheat.
Note that this isn't always the case; sometimes you have "fossil heat". For example, in some places we tap heat from old lava flows or dikes. They're hot because they represent heat from another location (deep magma sources). They're hotter than their surrounding rock, and if you take the heat from them, they're never again going to be hotter than their surrounding rock.
Climate does not work that way. Planet surfaces very rapidly equalize to their equilibrium temperature, as radiation increases relative to the fourth power of temperature. The only way to have a meaningful difference in the surface temperature is to change the radiation balance (which can happen in a wide range of factors, affecting both incoming and outgoing radiation), and thus the equilibrium. Simply having "something hot at points on the surface" is virtually meaningless.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Tapping geothermal energy is a great idea, but it's not precisely renewable.
The process, whether using natural (in place) water or by water injection, is removing paleolithic heat from a piece of solidified rock. That rock only has so much heat in it and the process of tapping that heat cools it. There are already geothermal fields in Northern California (The Geysers) that are producing reduced power output due to local cooling.
The upside with deep geothermal is that there is a whole lot of crust to drill into and depleted wells can be deepened. With better grid technology more remote geothermal sources can be tapped including shallow magma.
There is a lot of energy available but technically speaking it is neither infinite nor renewable any more than anthracite coal fields were renewable. At the turn of the 20th century mining companies were looking forward to mining these vast fields of coal forever.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
It's much nicer than the Walmart basement Obama was keeping me in.
'Muricans are anti-science idiots who deny the existence of volcanoes, which is why they don't live directly on top of one that can supply them with heat and lava.
Sadly, you're right:
http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/...
And the main argument the opposition has is not the occasional release of gas pockets while drilling, but that geothermal energy angers the volcano god.
Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
A renewable process is any process that does not use up external inputs of some fuel. Geothermal energy is renewable nuclear, in the same way that a dam is renewable solar.
even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a multi-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
That's because those dumbasses believe that all the Earth's fissioning material is buried miles below the crust, rather than being distributed through it, including places where a lot of people live:
http://ecolo.org/documents/doc...
You appear to think that most of the heat at the earth's core is residual, in which case presumably tapping this heat would "let it out" and we would eventually run out. This is not the case. The vast majority of the heat (90% or more) is from the decay of radioactive elements. Thus, the heat is being produced continually and is renewable until the radioactive elements decay (should be a good source of heat for at least a few billion years, probably much more). This means that tapping into the earth's core is not going to ruin the insulation of our crust and cause all the stored up heat to get out, because the core isn't really hot because of residual heat – regardless of what people are taught in grade school.
Saying geothermal heat like this is not renewable is ultimately like saying that hydropower is not renewable because at some point the sun will expand and the earth will get so hot that all the water in all the rivers evaporates – which
Because this country of 330k people produces the sixth most geothermal power on the planet, comprising 26% of electricity production and 53% of primary energy production, including the 3rd largest geothermal plant in the world? And is pioneering new production methods?
(Tombstone is barely a thousand people, so not even close; Iceland is closer in population to, say, Anaheim... and about the area of Kentucky).
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Its all fun and games until someone frees the Balrog.
[QUOTE]In this area at Reykjanes, we typically drill to 2km or 3km depth to harness the steam, to run power plants and produce clean, renewable electricity," explained Asgeir Margeirsson, CEO of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP).[/QUOTE]
As other posters have noted, this is an oxymoron. To renew the heat that resides in the depths of the Earth, one would have to pump heat, against a gradient, back into the earth.
The other issue is the thermal efficiency the the heat is converted to electricity. Turbines typically harness about 35% of the energy in a coal powered electrical plant, the rest escapes to the atmosphere. That 35% does not include the energy used to extract and transport the coal to the electrical plant.
Picture an unimpressed Balrog chained to a treadmill...
Of course we haven't figured it out. Too many goddamn hippies tell us that we need to preserve the pristine nature of the area... so we made it a park and forbid any serious effort to try to poke around at it and make any useful headway.
Then you have morons like the guy on scienceforums.net that says "The idea is like trying to put a pin into a balloon to let just a bit of the air out." Idiot doesn't realize that there is a way to do just that. Put a piece of tape on the balloon; poke a hollow needle coupled with a valve into balloon through the tape; have as much control as the valve allows to let the air out slowly without bursting the balloon. Using science it'd be easy enough to figure out a method to tap the volcano and bring it under control for man's usage in much the same way.
There's all this talk of making America great again as a leader in business and scientific innovation, but it just isn't going to happen until we get over this fear of death and killing thing going on right now. You can't make a damn omelette without breaking a few eggs. Likewise you can't make meaningful progress without killing a few people in experimental ways. Case in point, how many test pilots died as we tried to figure out how to get into space? How many people died from the effects of radiation exposure and gave us a better understanding of nuclear technology from it? How many people died in the construction of the various skyscrapers that dot the oldest American cities? True progress can't happen without the deaths to learn from.
Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
We don't. In essence, nothing is renewable, thanks to thermodynamics.
However, in comparison to fossil fuels, the power of the Sun or geothermal energy is plentiful and almost completely unused. It is renewable in the sense, that we have an X amount of energy total on Earth from fossil fuels, and if we use some amount Y, then for tomorrow we have X-Y total energy that we can use -- but, today, we get Z photons from the Sun, and no matter how many we will use today, we still get Z photons tomorrow. Same with geothermal energy -- the Earth radiates some heat thanks to proceses in the Earths core. We can either use it, or it will simply radiate away to space.
Wind power is a good example. How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather?
Air pollution has a much more disastrous effect on the weather than a few million windmills. Furthermore, wind is the result of air particles aiming to equalize pressure systems in the atmosphere. Putting a windmill inbetween allows us to use that energy -- and it has no effect on the forces that create pressure in the atmosthpere in the first place.
Is it really completely free?
Yes.
Massive geothermal is another example. How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it?
This energy is already being steadily released. Geothermal vents existed before humanity, and will exist long after the last human had breathed its last. We can either use them, or let that energy go to waste.
Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem.
Very well, imagine You have a city, and You have to provide electricity and heat for it. You have a coal based plant. It generates X amount of heat from coal, which can be used to generate electricity and also provide heat to people living in the city. We additionally create a geothermal power plant. By coincidence, geothermal forces provide exactly X amount of heat which can be used to generate electricity and provide heat to people.
Keeping both coal and geothermal releases 2*X amount of heat. Shutting down coal while using geothermal releases exaclty the same amount of heat -- but without burning any coal in the process.
I hear polonium poisoning is pretty slow, unpleasant and untreatable.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
typically used for industrial processes, but one local example may be the area hospital laundry facility, where they typically run in the 2500-2700 degree range at the boiler.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Wind power is a good example. How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather? Is it really completely free?
The short answer is yes. Trees also slow down wind and we are short on those, literally — old growth is taller. We can see a minor localized heating effect downwind of a turbine (due to turbulence and a reduction in wind speeds) which is rapidly lost in the chaotic noise.
Massive geothermal is another example. How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it?
So far the only problems we're actually seeing (or even imagining) with geothermal are increased seismicity and pollution. Radioactives come out of those vents with the water. These are both real problems, though. It would be interesting to do the math and figure out how much of humanity's energy needs would have to come from geothermal before the delta would be significant. Well, it would be interesting for someone else to do it, since they might do it correctly, and then report back.
I wonder if 100 years from now if we find out that some of our free and green energy sources are not as free and green as we originally thought.
We already know geothermal to fall into that category, but we have no reason to suspect it of wind. Solar, of course, can involve toxic manufacturing processes, but barring those it's not going to cause any substantial problems until it dramatically changes albedo. Mostly they don't change it much because of where they are located, and anyway a solar panel with a white back (as most of them have) is going to reradiate most of the unused energy back into space (or at least the atmosphere) through the usual mechanism.
There's no good reason to believe that wind or solar have a negative environmental impact. There is exceptionally good reason to be concerned about the implementation details when it comes to geothermal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because on human time scales, the resource renews itself. Suck heat out the ground with a geothermal plant, and the ground will heat up again from deeper sources. Collect solar and wind energy, and there will be more tomorrow. This is unlike coal or oil, where the resource does not renew itself on human time scales.
Strictly speaking, all energy sources are finite. The Sun's fuel will eventually run out, and the Earth's interior heat will run out. But that will take billions of years, and energy projects are measured in decades to centuries.
> How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather?
As much as three trillion trees do. Trees are pretty effective at slowing wind, which is why areas like the Southeast aren't so good for wind power. We have lots of trees, the midwest not so much. It's also why offshore wind is generally better than land, in terms of available power - no trees.
In real world units around 375 degC and 220 Bar.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Then we should do this at Yellowstone. If we harnessed enough energy from there, we might be able to stave off a caldera super event, which is overdue.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
You first.
If I go...I'm going to want to take the entire world with me. Not a good option for the greater good of mankind.
Depending on the how much pressure the injection well pump can provide and the geology of the field, supercritical geothermal could be possible. Not common, but possible. Most geothermal wells are under 600F and the steam temperature declines over time. Heat carrying capacity of supercritical steam is not great, however, so this could potentially be very damaging to the geothermal field. It would also wreck havoc on most turbine designs, even ones with superalloy parts and overlays. Unlike most power plant steam, where the water chemistry is very carefully controlled, geothermal steam is quite dirty with sulphur and arsenic compounds and salts. Supercritical or even superheated steam could cause a creep / stress corrosion cracking failure quite quickly.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
If my calculations are correct, 5km down is right around where the balrogs live...
Ahhh, another xenophobic, isolationist, fingers in ears asshat. God, I love this country. it is soooo great now.
Silence is a state of mime.
Because Iceland and other countries Do It Right, while you are just a bloated country dependent on 100k+ H1B immigrants every year to Do It Right for your failing tech sector, thanks to your failing culture and society.
Not a scientist, and haven't done the math, so feel free to take pot shots if this is way off. But Earth's magnetic field depends on the motion of the inner core against the more molten outer core. The faster you cool down the Earth's interior (by leeching energy out via geothermal), the quicker Earth's core solidifies, and you lose the convective heat motion that generates the magnetic field. You lose the magnetic field, and we relatively quickly start losing atmosphere to space. Seems like a bad idea?
Fission != Nuclear decay
Well.. If you want to get technical, Fission is a FORM of Nuclear decay.... It's just decay controlled by the physical geometry of the fuel and reactor...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No, fission is distinctly not a form of nuclear decay (excepting spontaneous fission, but that's not applicable to the heat release within the Earth). There are all sorts of modes of decay - alpha, beta+, beta-, proton emission, neutron emission, double beta, and on and on. Fission (again, excepting the inapplicable spontaneous fission) is not among them.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Thanks to technologies developed by the petroleum industry for deep drilling through solid rock, it is feasible to find enough heat to run electrical generators in most places of the US. Two boreholes are drilled, high-pressure liquid cracks the hot rock between them, and you have a closed loop that delivers steam or hot-enough water. Can run 24 x 7 x 365, stopped and restarted as needed, and located pretty close to where the power is needed. The mass of rock is immense, so there is little danger of cooling it off prematurely. Closed loop is pollution-free, no waste to store for centuries.
DOE had a significant research program going on, but it has been scaled back. Short-sighted thinking.
Yeah sure thing, buddy. Let's just pave over the entire planet while we're at it. 'Develop' and exploit every single natural resource, without exception. Who the hell needs trees anyway? They're just lumber waiting to be processed; cut them all down, they're standing in the way of progress! So-called 'natural beauty' is just for hippies, little children, and the simple-minded, right? ..Oh, I guess we can landscape some median strips, just to keep the tree-huggers happy, LOL. Truly evolved humans see the wisdom and beauty of concrete, asphalt, metal, and glass, not silly old forests and the natural world. It's not like you'd ever get out of your nice, comfortable, climate-controlled car anyway, it might be too cold or too warm or you might get a little dirt on your shoes, and walking? Who even does that? That's what God gave us cars for, right? If you're not comfortable and happy inside your glass-and-concrete urban high-rise, breathing processed air, eating your processed food, drinking your commercially-made soft drink, and playing video games on your 200-inch UHDTV and actually want to go outside, then there must be something wrong with you; no worries, we'll get you some nice antidepressants then you'll be fine! After all, the landscape in your PS16 games is 1000% better than random, messy 'nature', right?
OK, I'm tired of being sarcastic now. We don't need to fuck up every last square hectare of this planet just to exploit resources. I'm no tree-hugger, I'm no hippie, I'm no wingnut environmentalist, I work at one of the largest high-tech companies on the planet, and I like getting the hell away from it all sometimes to a place that hasn't been touched by 'civilization' to see the sights, breathe the air, listen to sounds of the natural environment, and get the hell away from all the high-tech distractions and noise, and I'm far from being alone in that. Maybe someone like you should go apply to migrate to Mars, where there's no natural environment to ruin in the first place. Leave this planet alone, we've already done enough damage to it.
You forget the earth is also tidally heated by the moons gravimetric push/pull
So what you're saying is: windmills do not work that way!
Good night.
And if the Earth were a ball of compressed gasses held together by an airtight skin, that would be a valid worry.
Fortunately the Earth is actually a ball of liquid and semi-liquid rock held together by its own gravity, with an incredibly thin and broken crust floating on the outer surface. Absolute worst case scenario, a borehole is creating a pinprick hole through one of the floating pieces of broken crust that, if conditions are just right, may end up spewing magma on the surface - i.e. creating a new volcano. Could be a really bad day for anyone directly downstream, but it isn't going to threaten the planet.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
But geothermal steam is pretty corrosive for the pipes which carry them. Think of lots of sulphur and other "nice" chemical compounds from the literal burning hell.
Thanks Obama!
>Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem
Technically yes, but not in any substantial fashion, at least at current levels of energy consumption. Any released heat is going to be,at worst, 3 or 4x greater than the harvested energy due to inefficiency losses. Global warming has much worse returns - burn fossil fuels and you get similar efficiency losses at the point of consumption, but you also release geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere as CO2. And before that CO2 is captured as biomass it will, on average, capture several million times as much solar energy as there was heat from the initial burning.
Basically, the CO2 released generating enough energy to power a single light bulb will capture enough solar energy to power a large town (if it were somehow possible to actually convert that energy into electricity). To even begin to rival the heating effects with carbon-neutral energy sources you'd need to give every single person their own gigawatt scale power plant constantly operating at full capacity.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Do you understand how large the supervolcano under Yellowstone is? I don't think you do... An eruption would destroy the breadbasket of America, and diminish the suns output globally for years, which in turn would lead to mass starvation for billions of people.
Thanks.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Also the sun's, though if I recall correctly it's only about half as strong.
More to the point though, even an extraordinarily deep 6km borehole, you'd only be reaching 1/1000th of the way to the Earth's center. We're not appreciably cooling the liquid core, or even the outer semi-liquid mantle, we're just cooling some of the hot spots in the solid crust floating on the surface.
In the extreme long term, or if human energy consumption increased radically, that might indeed be a problem. As it is though, the Earth's core is already cooling at about 100*C per billion years. We could double that and the magnetosphere would still be going strong by the time our slowly heating sun boils off the oceans.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
We don't need to do anything to renew the sun. Every morning the sun rises to start a new day, duh!
Well sounds like we should then be extracting energy now to lessen it's destructive capability eh? A few centuries of powering the entire continent might actually save our collective asses.
"angers the volcano god" I think that translates to give the volcano god worshipers more money. The volcano god can be placated by money.
Well, Yellowstone will surely do itself in and take a good deal of nature away from the US.
I'm not a geologist, but I'd figure a little borehole isn't going to suddenly make it go boom. If (some say when) it wants to go boom it will, borehole or not.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
OK, maybe shouldn't feed the troll but we CAN do this, and are doing it in NorCal. The downside? More earthquakes. There was a 5.0 quake in the Geysers field just yesterday. That's at the upper end of what they think you can get there; but they still say our activities can activate the faults, just like fracking in Oklahoma. As for larger fields like Yellowstone, maybe we just don't want to go there? It might erupt with or without us; but if it erupted can you imagine the blame? We've got so many other sources of energy that are more reliable and clean--solar, wind, etc. Iceland just does this because it looks like the best option there.
Still I'm not sure I'd want to be holding the flashlight to see what's at the bottom of that borehole, I suspect even a minor hiccup would spoil your whole decade.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
No, fission is distinctly not a form of nuclear decay (excepting spontaneous fission, but that's not applicable to the heat release within the Earth). There are all sorts of modes of decay - alpha, beta+, beta-, proton emission, neutron emission, double beta, and on and on. Fission (again, excepting the inapplicable spontaneous fission) is not among them.
So without the inapplicable spontaneous fission supplying a few neutrons, how do you propose starting your man-made fission reactor? It's not like there wasn't a natural self-sustaining fission reaction in the Okio Gabon a couple billion years ago.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
In real world units around 375 degC and 220 Bar.
That would be 22MPa in the real metric system.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It would be crazy to use the geothermal steam directly and not use a secondary boiler.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Come on, when they frack it doesn't cause the land for miles around to sink like one of my soufflés.
Well only a bit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's just you.
You are too stupid to know how stupid you are. Hollywood movies are not documentaries. Most of us have already figured that out.
Let me know when you turn eight years old. Then maybe I'll care.
Nobody who takes anything Hollywood makes seriously should ever be taken seriously.
Fission is decay only in the sense that grilling steak is rapidly decaying meat. /hat tip Anne Rice
(Score: -1, Stupid)
True, that's why around my place we like to use the hPa, as a number it is identical to the Bar.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
My guess is that WHEN you join 'The Great Majority' you will perceive it as the entire world - as you knew it - being taken out.
If you run into Harry Houdini would you mind asking him why he hasn't bothered to communicate with us?
Hey, at least I got an Obamaphone and Obamacare when I was in that basement! Thanks Obama!
And do you understand how broken and porous the geological formations already are? All those geysers, etc. aren't there because they like the view. Adding another tiny pinprick to a huge broken geothermal formation might trigger a localized release of pressure, maybe even allow some magma to reach the surface and ruin the day of everybody nearby. But it's not going to trigger a massive increase in pressure in the main chambers, nor weaken the "plug" preventing an eruption. To do that you'd probably need to bore a large (by volcano standards) hole from the lower magma chambers down into the larger reservoirs closer to the mantle. But then you're probably talking 20-50km deep depending on the local crust, radically deeper than any borehole yet drilled. And frankly, if you're drilling that deep there's probably not much need to start anywhere near surface geothermal vents anyway.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
Well, you just need to take the long view.
We are still in the expansion phase of the universe. Next will come the contraction phase. Eventually the gnab gib will occur and the next big bang will start the cycle again. /sarcasm