Volcanoes, Nuclear, Supercritical water and Hydrogen

Sabine Hossenfelder: Fearless Icelanders to Drill Into Magma Chamber at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOF1FaqeoCA

The first thing that came to mind is that, if supercritical methods would help geothermal, they will also help nuclear and atomic – and perhaps less mess.  Generally, if you can think of something, it is there because you heard or read it somewhere. So compose a good query using exact terms and usually you will find about 10,000 entry points (results) for most ideas – no matter how seemingly unusual. It changes your sense of humility to know that most things you can think of, many thousands or millions are already working on almost every part of it. But then, it means if you want to actually make things, the pieces, people and resources are often already there waiting.

As usual I composed a parsimonious query ( “supercritical water” “nuclear heat” ) and came up with 6710 focused results.

“Heat extraction from super critical water-cooled nuclear reactors for hydrogen production plants” (2012)

There is even an acronym “Super-Critical Water Reactor (SCWR)” that you can find on Wikipedia.

When I worked at Phillips Petroleum Business Intelligence on global climate change, alternative fuels, cold fusion, and similar energy issues, I also had to design a global hydrogen economy that works. So hydrogen is always in mind. Except it has such high value in the chemical industry, it is a waste to burn it. Iceland might be able to do it. If Icelanders are not afraid of volcanoes, perhaps they do not fear “nuclear” either. Maybe nuclear waste has a lot of heat they can drill into.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation