
Iceland Is Drilling a 3-Mile Hole to Tap Magma Power - jonbaer
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/news/a23490/iceland-3-mile-hole-magma/
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jasonkester
Iceland has the most genius way of disposing of wastewater from geothermal
power.

They have tons of hot sulfurous water left over that needs to go _somewhere_ ,
but you can't just dump it in the ocean or environmentalists would get all
mad. And you can't dump it on the land because it'll leave this ugly white
stain as the minerals leach out.

So they dump it all in to this big pool out by the airport and call it The
Blue Hole and have busloads of tourists lining up waiting to pay $50 to swim
in it. Genius.

One day somebody will figure out how to do this same trick with nuclear waste
and we'll have our power needs sorted forever.

~~~
avar
It sounds like your mostly being facetious, but in the interest of historical
accuracy: The Blue Lagoon started as just a runoff from the power plant, it's
only later after the natives had been bathing there for free for a while for
free that it turned commercial.

~~~
idlewords
On my visit there, the bus driver told us the local teens had been swimming in
it and causing a nuisance, until someone had the bright idea to put a hotel
next to it and make it a spa.

It's proximity to the airport makes it especially attractive to tourists who
want to soak for a few hours in the middle of a transatlantic flight. Go there
if you can; it's fun!

~~~
hugi
As one of the teens that used to be a nuisance, I agree. The old lagoon had a
certain magic to it, though. Even if you'd usually leave it both burnt from
sudden surges of warm water and bloody from knife-sharp lava.

~~~
idlewords
I would love to read anything you have to write about being a ne'er-do-well
teenager in Iceland back then.

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irq-1
50 MW seems really small? I don't think nuclear is the way to go, but the
scale seems to make this type of plant irrelevant.

from:
[http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=104&t=3](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=104&t=3)

> As of December 1, 2015, there were 99 operating nuclear reactors at 61
> nuclear power plants in the United States. The Fort Calhoun plant in
> Nebraska has one reactor with the smallest generating capacity of 479
> megawatts (MW). The Palo Verde plant in Arizona has three reactors and has
> the largest combined generating capacity of about 3,937 MW.

~~~
niftich
Iceland's total installed capacity in 2014 was 2770 MW; total generation was
18.1 TWh [1].

So interestingly, even at Iceland's scale, this 50 MW additional capacity will
amount to only 1% of their total installed capacity, which seems small.

[1]
[http://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/Atvinnuvegir/Atvinnuvegi...](http://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/Atvinnuvegir/Atvinnuvegir__orkumal/IDN02101.px/table/tableViewLayout1/?rxid=16bfe9e2-0a91-47fb-8d3c-bde71163af5c)

~~~
tombone12
It's 50 MW per borehole, a power station typically generates power from a
largish number of holes. A big geothermal plant on Iceland can have 30
boreholes, which with the new method could then produce 1.5 TW, 54 % of total
capacity. Of course, how much is actually possible to take out at given size
depends on the size of the magma system you are tapping and how fast it
refills.

~~~
kolinko
1.5 GW

ftfy

------
JorgeGT
Tapping supercritical steam directly seems awesome, specially if it can be
replicated in other areas. And if they avoid awakening a Balrog, of course.

~~~
dasil003
Seems like a Balrog could be a good power source.

~~~
johan_larson
The use of supernatural creatures as weapons or power sources is prohibited by
the secret Appendix AA to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968.

~~~
dasil003
Loophole: not supernatural if we find one.

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20andup
Very cool indeed. It's the first news/article I have read in awhile that isn't
anything negative. It tries to push the boundaries of humanity by doing
something innovative.

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markbnj
How many people here are old enough to have seen "Crack in the World?"
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/)

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pif
Wow! They were able to dig a well down to magma without having magma pouring
out of it? That's the ideal trashbin! Start pouring in nuclear waste and other
non-recyclable garbage, now!

~~~
tombone12
You know magma has a tendency to come out right? If you put trash down the
hole, its burned remains just clog up the end and risk coming back out
whenever the stopper is removed.

~~~
pif
What I'm hoping is that pollution will be diluted in the mantle before coming
back as just traces in the magma.

~~~
dpark
Hoping seems like a risky plan.

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markyc
is it really recommended to mess around fault lines like that? I guess we'll
find out

~~~
exabrial
Not sure why you're downvoted for a good question... I hate drive-by
downvoters.

Well, the best answer _I_ can say is: we do it already. Every time we've
drilled for fossil water (that's a thing actually), oil, gas, salt (yep, we
drill for salt), typically you want to do it into a fault line, because
natural resources tend to gather there after millions of years. The _exact_
circumstances depend heavily on the geology of the area; which I can imagine,
for this type of investment/project, they are studying it thoroughly.

Really there's hardly ever problems sucking stuff out, it's shoving stuff back
in that occasionally causes problems. 'Saltwater' (That's the leftover stuff
after you extract the resources from your oil/water emulsion) disposal wells
in the Midwestern USA have been implicated it lubricating ancient faults and
causing minor earthquakes. (Interesting side note, the Midwestern USA was a
giant ocean and has massive layers of salt deposits really far into the
earth).

The technology behind injection wells is actually quite fascinating... they
have cement and steel casing around the production casing through an absurd
about of rock until they're way past the point where the point where it has no
hope of returning to the surface. However, we apparently can't make very good
predictions about what they do to ancient faults, and the communication
between producers is minimal because they don't want to spill their secrets.
Nearly ever state has a commission that regulates the amount producers are
allowed to both extract and inject, but occasionally we still have problems
because the commissions lack the field flow analysis that are proprietary
secrets for most producers.

And no, fracking does not cause earthquakes or causes surface damage, even
when the highly regarded scientific research organization CNN tells you it
does. Doing so would be counterproductive to the producer anyway: they'd lose
the valuable fluids they were trying to extract.

------
johan_larson
What's the worst-case scenario again?

~~~
Pica_soO
Better heat conduction cools the magma below, causing it to "fall"-flow
downwards, while somewhere else nearby, hotter magma must go up. Just a
assumption, neither geologist nor fluid-dynamics-expert.

Its a turbulent system though, so any prediction is futile :D

~~~
johan_larson
Would it be too much to hope for a series of cascading failures leading to a
kilometer-high fountain of lava?

Asking for a friend.

~~~
Pica_soO
Just imagine you could control this process- you could form a magma jet cutter
and tame and aim it at a volcano. You could hold the world ransom for 100
billion dollars- and all you need are some geothermal power-plants.

But, no, not again super villainy, not one day at a time. I will not use super
villainy today, no matter what happens. I can do this. We can do this. Super
villainy does not control me. I am moving forward right now.

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envy2
This feels like the beginning of a horror film: how long until the demons
start crawling out from the centre of the earth?

~~~
idlewords
Icelanders are tough. There's probably already a dude or woman at each power
plant whose job it is to demon hunt on the night shift, with good benefits and
a pension plan.

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exabrial
Somewhere there is a Doctor Evil quote describing this exact scenario...

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joering2
Somewhat related - it is very impressive to me how atomic energy players
pushed some genius PR onto people in terms of advertising that atomic energy
is so so clean.

I mean - most people I asked were just thinking that atomic energy creates
steam and that's all.

When I educated my family and friends that its not the case, and that
radioactive after-material is put in boxes and stored on the oceans' floor
with life expectancy of 25,000 years before it will start leaking, everyone
was in shock how this has even been approved in the first place...

~~~
lifeformed
Coal kills us now. I'm sure we can think of a better containment solution in
25,000 years...

~~~
z3t4
do u see much 25k old documentation? Everything we know today will be
forgotten.

~~~
lifeformed
It won't take 25k years to figure out how to deal with it. Maybe 50 or 100
years? It's just a transitional form of energy til we figure out fusion and
scale up other sources.

And honestly, who cares about a person 25k years from now? We can all just die
now, or instead some explorer 25,000 years from now dies, assuming we didn't
figure it out by then.

I'd rather cavemen left us with a dangerous storage area rather than destroy
the entire atmosphere and ecosystem.

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finid
_If the IDDP 's magma well is successful, it could add a new source of
abundant green energy to the country, and the technique could be imitated near
fault lines around the world._

Yes, go ahead, folks. What could possible go wrong with drilling near fault
lines?

~~~
robotresearcher
Well, what? A teeny bore hole in a multiple-thousand-mile structure that
involves vast forces over huge scales. Almost certainly completely
insignificant.

Iceland is covered in huge freaking volcanos.

Are you worried about releasing the Ancient Ones or something?

