h a l f b a k e r yMake mine a double.
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Dig a tube down towards the centre of the earth from the bottem of the sea putting turbines every 100m or so, When The temperature is hot enough to change water to steam almost instantly make a loop and another tube back up out of the top of the sea for the steam- again put turbines every 100m or so.
Because the steam would just evaporate once got to the top, you would never run out of water.
Power Tubes
http://wired.com/ne...,1282,48947,00.html
...and why they probably won't work on land... [rmutt, Jan 08 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004]
[link]
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The advantage of having it at the bottom of the sea is that there is plenty of water to fall down the hole. |
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Except for the "bottom of the sea" part, this is mostly how geothermal power works. |
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A water source is not really necessary, anyway; you can just condense and recirculate. |
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Also, consider the salt deposits you'd be building up. And anyway, there's plenty of seawater at the top of the sea, too, and it's a lot more convenient. |
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Dog Ed forcibly restrains The Punster from writing about Geothermic Pubes. |
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Its big and involves high temperatures - I like it... besides we can just sell the salt... |
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Ok put the start of the tube on land and send a PIG down every week. This should stop any cloging up from limescale or general dirt. |
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P.S. What heats up the centre of the earth? Is there any way we can copy it on a smeller scale? |
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Fishbone. We have no idea how this sort of thing might affect the environment down there, but we can be almost certain that it would be harmful to some as-yet unknown, but endangered bottom-dwelling species. |
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Recently on the Discovery Channel there was a show (and it will probably be repeated, so watch for it) called "Supervolcanoes". There seems to be a few real monsters out there. For example, consider the ordinary volcano underneath Crater Lake in Oregon. There is a lake because after the mountain finished huffing and puffing, the top collapsed in on itself, forming a "caldera" -- a crater -- that is a couple of kilometers wide. |
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A supervolcano can leave behind a caldera that is 100 kilometers wide. One of them is known today as "Yellowstone National Park". |
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The geological region surrounding Yellowstone clearly shows that at least 3 eruptions of this supervolcano have occurred in the past, spaced about 600,000 years apart. |
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The last one was about 600,000 years ago, and the ground at Yellowstone has bulged detectably within the last few decades. |
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Folks, it looks like America's need for energy is about to be overfulfilled! When Yellowstone blows, most of North America will be covered in ash, the way Mount St. Helens covered the State of Washington. The last time a supervolcano went off, about 70,000 years ago, only a few thousand people survived, WORLDWIDE. And that was a smaller blast than Yellowstone makes. |
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Well, we don't have to sit idly waiting for it to happen. As a matter of National Interest and National Security, I think we should consider putting lot of effort into perfecting geothermal energy extraction techniques, including many-mile drilling systems. We can RING Yellowstone with power stations! All of them should be at least ten
miles from the edge of the underground magma pool, so that we don't prematurely set the thing off, by weakening the overburden. |
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The goal is to extract energy from the magma pool faster than it can build up underground pressure, and then to merely withdraw energy as fast as it arises from the depths of the Earth. Then we will have a really long-lasting and safe power source, of vast capacity. |
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Oh, Vernon, now I'm scared. |
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//Because the steam would just evaporate//
Isn't steam already evaporated water? |
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this is exactly what tesla wanted to do a hundred years
ago |
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