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Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

thinkgeoenergy.com

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Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#81

Post by qwerty_clicks »

nerdsniper wrote: post #15
mzhaase wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could hook up a mass spectrometer to the purge gas to get real time composition.

perhaps, but usually things like "which fossil species are present" are also utilized to figure out what's going on near the drill bit, like if you're trying to reach oil deposits right along the edge of an old riverbed. Some shale formations in Michigan, for example, sometimes requires drilling to a 4" thick target. You don't know the exact depth because the depth of that 4" thick layer can vary by many feet from an…

No fossils in granite. Drilling shake shouldn’t require new technology, most shales are easy to drill (except cherts, where again, no fossils. I doubt this tech would be needed for exploration but for reliable brownfield development.

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#82

Post by UltraSane »

synctext wrote: post #74
willis936 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Page 7 looks like a single point of failure in an unmaintainable device that would result in a well of contaminated water a mile deep that passes through the water table that could never be fixed. This sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard.

Yeah, 76cm (30 inch) bore hole drilling with standard oil&grass rig. Fill with unshielded nuclear reactor of novel type: super skinny. Gently lower down until depth of 1 mile is reached. Repeat 1000x for a 1 GWe power plant. What could possibly go wrong? Best horror story of the year in 15 slides.

Please explain exactly what you think can go wrong.

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#83

Post by willis936 »

UltraSane wrote: post #79
willis936 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Page 7 looks like a single point of failure in an unmaintainable device that would result in a well of contaminated water a mile deep that passes through the water table that could never be fixed. This sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard.

A mile is much deeper than the water table is almost everywhere. It is normally solid bedrock. So you can just fill the hole with concrete and dirt.

How does this look in practice? You need the water to transfer the heat, so in response to a disaster that has already poisoned the water table you need to extract the water, put it somewhere, and backfill with concrete, all while you've already poisoned miles of water table and fighting from spreading further and damning all workers involved? For what gain?

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#84

Post by willis936 »

UltraSane wrote: post #80
willis936 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I want to add on that if you lined the well to be single fault tolerant you will still be vulnerable to a high likelihood common mode failure from a single seismic event. Truly just the worst. The founders should pivot hard and fast.

There are plenty of places with very little seismic activity.

And how many of those places have we dug 100 mile deep holes in and verified nothing has changed? It doesn't take a long look at fracking research to see that this line of reasoning doesn't hold.

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#85

Post by mentalgear »

baron816 wrote: post #32

I really like what https://www.deepfission.com/ is trying to do. They have the absolute simplest model for nuclear fission that I can imagine. They’re digging one mile (1.6 km) holes dropping low enriched nuclear fuel to the bottom, and filling them with water. The pressure from the one mile column of water is perfect for the reactor. From there, it’s basically a geothermal well. No need for an expensive containment…

This echoes 'safe fracking' claims - and now many people in proximity have gas coming out of their facets. Digging hazardous materials out of sight into a potentially unstable or potentially becoming leaky structure is never a sound strategy.

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#86

Post by epistasis »

This company might not be very good at getting deep, but they have definitely figured out how to get press attention.

I have been hearing about them for years in connection with enhanced geothermal, and while other companies are out drilling functional wells, Quaise is just getting basic drilling going, with seemingly zero promise of being cheaper than the alternatives.

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#87

Post by Ma8ee »

stavros wrote: post #65
Ma8ee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t need any new and untested technology to solve to stop spewing out greenhouse gases. We just need to scale up current green tech. It’s not know how and technology that is lacking, it is political will.

"We don't need to research any more potential solutions to this existential problem we're facing" is certainly a take.

I don't say we shouldn't do research. What I do say is that we do have all the technology we need. And more importantly, we don't have the time to wait for some future technology that potentially could solve all our problems. The climate disaster has already started (and this [0] is not "the new normal", this is just the beginning, a hint of what we should expect).

The only reason we are in this shithole is because of the lack of political will. It would have been comparable trivial to solve if we just had started 30 years ago when scientists started to yell about that it was getting urgent.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jun/24/europe-he...

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#89

Post by pphysch »

UltraSane wrote: post #82
synctext wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 76cm (30 inch) bore hole drilling with standard oil&grass rig. Fill with unshielded nuclear reactor of novel type: super skinny. Gently lower down until depth of 1 mile is reached. Repeat 1000x for a 1 GWe power plant. What could possibly go wrong? Best horror story of the year in 15 slides.

Please explain exactly what you think can go wrong.

Seismic activity collapses the well, trapping the nuke underground, pressure find a way to escape via polluting a "faraway" aquifer, or it doesn't escape and you have a man-made volcano in the works

Re: Millimeter wave technology drills 100 meters into granite

#90

Post by CuriouslyC »

cyberax wrote: post #40
notrustincloud wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

below and penetrating the water table with the potential for short and long half-life transuranic fissile products and a path of least resistance for any runaway conditions which is directly to an uncontained well head... with the extra bonus of installation proposed in 'spent' hydrocarbon bearing regions which implies reduced density substrates with all the tiny seismic outcomes and risks. perfectly safe /s

We can then build a primary school on top! And use the water from the well for heating directly. What could possibly go wrong!?!?

Only if the primary school is exclusively for the children of oligarchs.
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