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Problem with traditional drilling is that your drill has to contact with hot rocks. With gyrotron, it doesn't have to. If you pump lot's of water down to your e

Problem with traditional drilling is that your drill has to contact with hot rocks. With gyrotron, it doesn't have to. If you pump lot's of water down to your electronics, it can be used to cool electronics, then gyrotron, then be dumped outside head where it flashes into steam (thanks to megawatts of energy that is melting rocks already) and helps to evacuate ash while also cooling it and preventing recondensation on walls of already drilled tube. Walls will still be glassy because they were just melted.

ufmace 4y ago
That doesn't sound practical at all. It doesn't matter if you have direct contact or not, everything down there is that hot, so you're gonna be that hot. Existing oilwells already flow fluid through at a fairly high flowrate - high enough that eroding parts is a concern - and it's not enough to get the temperature down much. You're gonna need something a lot better than "just pump some water though" to cool things down enough to get the MTBF back up. And that's before accounting for how much heat this rock melting microwave laser thing plus it's power transmission lines is adding to the environment.