A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
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A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#2Did this go anywhere? The only papers if find that reference the original ideas (2005 and 2008) mention nuclear waste that melts itself into the Earths core.
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#3What a fascinating proposition. FYI: This blog article is from 2013 and is about scientific papers written in 2008 and 2005. A few minutes of cursory Googling turns up nothing else.
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#4wow this is actually genius cheap and doable can some please forward this to Jeff Bezos?
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#5With the accelerating change in the earth's magnetic field it would be fantastic to drop a few of these bad boys and see what's actually going on down there.
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#6Seems that the technique would also work on Europa to melt its way into the ocean underneath the ice.
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#7Did this go anywhere? The only papers if find that reference the original ideas (2005 and 2008) mention nuclear waste that melts itself into the Earths core.
Probably not. That's a scary thing to build. Cobalt-60 gammas are hard to shield, and 2000K is really hot. The laws of physics don't forbid building such a thing, but I wouldn't want to be in the same building with it.
Okay, so you have something that's so self-heating that it'll easily melt rock. In fact, it's hot enough that it self-liquifies quickly at STP. Cobalt reacts weakly with oxygen, but you'll still have to be careful with it in air, so you'll have to seal it in something; at 2000K, there are only a few materials with which you can hold and seal it, tungsten being one. Also, it's radioactive, and the tungsten sphere you put it in isn't nearly sufficient to stop the gammas.
So, you get your tungsten sphere all ready to go, let the cobalt liquify itself, pour it into the sphere, and then lower/drop it into a borehole. Better not be any water down there, or it might come back up.
Once you've got it doing it's melting thing and it's really deep at the bottom of a borehole, it probably can't hurt anyone.
I can't imagine a funding agency being ballsy-enough to fund it, and _really_ can't imagine a nuclear regulatory agency being interested in letting you build a source that could get itself so thermally hot.
TL;DR -- lots could go wrong.
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#8Seems that the technique would also work on Europa to melt its way into the ocean underneath the ice.
But if there really is live down there, how do you then explain to them that you just dropped some nuclear waste into their ocean?
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#9Seems that the technique would also work on Europa to melt its way into the ocean underneath the ice.
It has definitely been suggested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryobot http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2002/release_2002_6.html
Re: A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
#10This sounds like a more practical version of David J. Stevenson's 2003 earth probe proposal: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0514_030514_...