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posted by mrpg on Saturday May 06 2017, @03:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the energy-from-the-inside dept.

It's named after a Nordic god and drills deep into the heart of a volcano: "Thor" is a rig that symbolises Iceland's leading-edge efforts to produce powerful clean energy.

If successful, the experimental project could produce up to 10 times more energy than an existing conventional gas or oil well, by generating electricity from the heat stored inside the earth: in this case, volcanic areas.

Launched in August last year, the drilling was completed on January 25, reaching a record-breaking depth of 4,659 metres (nearly 3 miles).

At this depth, engineers hope to access hot liquids under extreme pressure and at temperatures of 427 degrees C (800 F), creating steam that turns a turbine to generate clean electricity.

Iceland's decision to harness the heat inside the earth in a process known as geothermal energy dates back to the 1970s and the oil crisis.

But the new geothermal well is expected to generate far more energy, as the extreme heat and pressure at that depth makes the water take the form of a "supercritical" fluid, which is neither gas nor liquid.

"We expect to get five to 10 times more power from the well than a conventional well today," said Albert Albertsson, an engineer at the Icelandic energy company HS Orka, involved in the drilling project.


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  • (Score: 2) by fnj on Saturday May 06 2017, @11:07PM (1 child)

    by fnj (1654) on Saturday May 06 2017, @11:07PM (#505598)

    As long as humans are anywhere in the loop, nukes are NOT an acceptable way to produce energy.

    I don't disagree, but just to point out: humans are ALWAYS somewhere in the loop. Always were, and always will be. If operation, is 100% robotic, humans designed and built the robots. Or the robots that made the robots. Or ... you see where this is going.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @12:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @12:40AM (#505629)

    It's been running, sans any human attendants, for billions of years.
    It's 93 million miles away and its energy takes 8 minutes to get here, but that really isn't a big problem

    Not only is all the sequestered fossil fuel on Earth a consequence of that not-built/maintained-by-humans thing, we're only now figuring out that it can meet pretty much all our energy needs without our burning/"burning" stuff and constantly producing life-threatening byproducts.

    Terrestrial nukes and fossil fuels are redundant.
    Renewables are the future (and even the present in a bunch of places).
    Get with the program and embrace them.

    Stop excusing flawed humans and their flawed energy paradigms from previous centuries.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]