(may be broke/outdated!)
I have this idea to tunnel down into the mantle and set off nuclear bombs at different levels of the earth’s crust to create a small volcanic region that can be used to make steam to drive turbines on the earth’s surface.
If it works, magma would rise to the surface and turn a liquid water reservoir into steam. Is this idea feasible?
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3 Responses
the earth would cave in on itself, bad idea. Also, you need to understand the full case of the “energy crisis” I’m not the one to say this, but look it up online, but basically, we have the sources, we just don’t have the ability to get to them yet. Laws, and money issues are preventing us from getting to them.
Geothermal energy could be developed only in California and Hawai. I don’t know if there are opther areas of the USA which is volcanic. In the Philippines, however, there are already four areas developed by California Energy and PNOC
This is at least an interesting concept. One would think that it might actually work.
The obstacles that would have to be overcome are the extreme depths involved (fodder for movies more than real drilling capabilities) and the relative meagerness of nuclear weapons in terms of doing anything useful for us.
Indeed, if you could tunnel or drill that far into the Earth’s surface, you might not need to help things with a nuclear explosion. You would have tapped the heat of the magma directly.
It might be possible to “encourage” volcanic action using nuclear weapons, but you might have to have a nuclear weapon every few hundred feet and all of them go off at once just to get through the Earth’s crust, which might be 15 miles or so thick. Then, of course, you would have a lot of radioactive debris to deal with if anything comes out of the hole, and assuming the hole did not collapse.
The other problem with using geyser steam (which is really what your are going for) is that it would contain a lot of minerals and probably saturated steam (unless you could assure that it is superheated) that would quickly degrade the turbine machinery and piping systems involved with converting the steam into electricity.
These adverse consequences and engineering difficulties are far more complex than can be discussed here, which is also why we get so many idealistic thinkers proposing that all can be solved by solar and wind energy. Typically, the more equipment needed per kilowatt hour, the more expensive and impractical the idea will be. Solar and wind technologies are getting better, but they still require a lot of hardware and cooperation from Mother Nature. Same for geothermal in many ways, but primarily in other maintenance areas not obvious to non-engineers.
All such ideas are, of course, vital to progress, even if engineering practicalities get in the way for most of them. Without idealistic ideas, we do not get the chance to work on the engineering and economic practicalities.