3 ms·
> 40 megawatts. If you need to get cracking, the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW. In a one meter diameter tunnel, or in this case, a l
by chmod775 4y ago
> 40 megawatts. If you need to get cracking, the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW.
In a one meter diameter tunnel, or in this case, a long and really hot oven. 120MW are enough to turn a metric ton of most rock into magma every ten seconds.
In any case I guess Earthgrid will join the small club of companies and government programs who require extremely high temperature electronics. I'd also bet that these things will have limited sensors and give little feedback about what's actually happening in that tunnel. That or they'll need some fancy cooling idea or a pause until the tunnel cools down. Maybe the hot rock that is removed could be used to carry the heat away?
And that's just worrying about what the heat will do to your device. You'll also have to think about what it will do to the material you're tunneling through. Will the rock around you lose stability at higher temperature? Will water within the rock expand violently and collapse your tunnel? Will your device get stuck when everything around it turns into sticky goo? Will you set fire to whatever is close to your tunnel?
Finally, how do we actually get that much power? Certainly you cannot expect the local grid to supply that much. Maybe they could design and power it with a portable nuclear reactor? That's the same order of magnitude as a small one. Can't wait for the portable river technology that will make cooling all this possible.
I guess they could bring some 2,000KW diesel generators. They'll just need sixty of them. At around twenty four metric tons per unit and a combined consumption of 30,000 liters of diesel per hour that is going to be some interesting logistics.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago> the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW I don't understand why or in what way this is considered "100% renewable energy" "super-cheap tunnel tech".
- pizzathyme 4y agoRenewable here just means electricity powered, rather than oil or gas powered. It is assuming that the electricity is created from renewable sources
- stevenjgarner 4y agoWould that not imply that all energy is renewable, given that you can make endless hydrogen by electrolyzing water with endless electricity? Then convert the hydrogen into your hydrocarbon of choice using the Sabatier process, and again endless electricity? Maybe I am projecting my own bias onto this, but there's something about endless electricity that does not imply renewable.
- fastball 4y agoAre you being deliberately obtuse? If not, in common parlance "renewable" implies Solar / Wind / Hydro / Nuclear (this one depending on who you ask), while non-renewable = fossil fuels. If you have a drilling machine powered by diesel it is impossible for that machine to be "fully renewable" in terms of its power source. If you have a drilling machine that is powered entirely by electricity then it can be 100% powered by renewables, but yes as GP pointed out "can be" doesn't mean "is", but still if you care about such things you should obviously prefer the fully electric solution.
- stevenjgarner 4y agoYou're right. I was just stunned at the 1.38 gigawatts for a "stage 3" system (including "mother rig" + "father rig") for just a 10-m (33-ft) tunnel.
- preisschild 4y ago1.38GW is insane. The APR-1400 pressurized water reactor outputs 1.4GW, but at this point you would have a huge nuclear power plant to just power a single tunneling operation.
- Andys 4y agoYou could, but it isn't efficient enough to compete economically with the plain old electricity in more direct forms?
- bigiain 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lovemenot 4y agoIn the special case of tunneling in order to bury high voltage power cables, the power source for boring could be quite remote.