Considering that the unit cost for a B2 bomber was $737M (a little over $1B with inflation), I'd say that this is a steal. Just think of things in recent days that have reached the $1B level. For this kind of science? I'd say we'd be stupid NOT to pay for it.
They only built 21 of them so a lot of R&D is included in that figure. Still, we have actually gotten a lot of use out of each of those B2's. If they had built 22 of them the 22nd would have not cost nearly as much.
While it's true B-52's do most of the actual bombing it's only after stealth aircraft like B2's take out air defenses that you can swap to using B-52 safely. Not to mention aircraft are just expensive for comparison a 747-8F: costs US$352 million. Where a B-52H: was only US$53.4 million in 1998 dollars.
PS: In theory long range missiles can take out air defenses there bloody expensive at US$569,000 to 1.4 million a pop vs. equally accurate smart bombs are a small fraction of that.
Designed and manufactured by Northrop Grumman with assistance from Boeing, the cost of each aircraft averaged US$737 million (in 1997 dollars).
Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft, which includes spare parts, equipment, retrofitting, and software support.[3] The total program cost including development, engineering and testing, averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997.[3]
Think of it like this, the cost of designing and creating molds to create parts and assemble them is included in the 737 million. But, that just get's you an aircraft. The cost of spare parts and maintenance facility's is included in the 929 million. And the cost of initial flight tests and the ability to actually use them in a war is included in the 2B figure. The 2B figure also includes costs before Northrop Grumman got the contract to design and build them.
PS: It's often hard to decide where to draw the line with R&D costs. If another aircraft uses the paint designed for the B2 where to you put the 'paint' R&D costs.
Yea, I have been editing that post to be a little more clear. But, I should add that while B-52's are still in service they have been extensively retrofired to the point where little more than the original Airframe remains and the practical replacement cost is significantly higher than 70 million.
We don't fail to drill more geothermals because we are incapable of it, we don't do it because the cost/benefit ratio isn't favorable in most places. Since this isn't about advancing technology, but applying what we already have to this task, this project isn't going to change that.
There's all kinds of things that are possible, but not profitable. And especially when it comes to energy, "profitable" isn't just about money; putting in 2 Joules to create the ability to generate 1 isn't economically practical any more than a company that burns 2 dollars to make 1 is.
We already know how to drill them. It's how to keep producing heat out of them that's the problem. You need to circulate fluid _through_ a large volume of the rock, not just down the borehole. That means you need to create permeability (i.e. fracking. See "enhanced geothermal".) or find permeability at the depths required (i.e. find a reservoir). There are other problems, but the oil industry already developed most of the technology for other things. They've just decided that geothermal is a poor return on investment (in most cases) compared with producing and selling hydrocarbons. On the other hand, the world's largest geothermal energy producer is an oil company.
To be fair, they (the oil industry) already developed pretty much _all_ of the technology in question. Scientific drilling just applies the oil industry's methods to academic projects. (There are a few exceptions, particularly with regards to coring.) Furthermore, the companies that provide the expertise in question are the service companies (e.g. Schlumberger, Halliburton, etc), not the companies that are directly in search of oil.
I am tired of the outright corruption in all industries and the massive profit and exploitation of the oil companies.
I as a citizen demand that the representatives in government require a "benficial tax" on all commercial endeavors: the big corporations are not paying financial taxes, then they must begin to pay a beneficial tax to society.
This is a tax on research requirements, innovation, infrastructure and other methods of physical payment that are immune to loopholes.
I don't live in any of those countries. I live in the US where oil barons become presidents, oil companies can ruin vast seas and dump billions of gallons of oil into the oceans for months without hardly any repercussions, and lobbiests have more voice than sanity.
I live in a country where for the last 10 years I have watch oil defense and banking interests have trumped all else and destroyed any and all faith I once held in my government.
Agreed. Although how many of these projects actually get done for the amount allotted? Maybe it'll end up costing 100B or not get done at all after spending 10B. Whenever anything costs more than like 1M, we get scope insensitivity and have no idea what we are paying for or what it's costing.
I'm guessing much of the funding comes from the Japanese government. They funded the Chikyu project which resulted in a deep drilling robot they plan to reuse.
The Chikyu is a (very large) riser drilling ship, not a robot. Other than that, dead on. The Chikyu was more or less built to drill the "mohole", and the Japenese government has been fairly set on it. However, it would almost definitely be a part of IODP (the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program), so the US would play a role in funding it, as well.
"It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide on the bottom, and then drilling a few meters into the foundations"
Wow, that quote really put it all into perspective for me.
I remember as a kid some of the conspiracy theories about how the US cut off and then classified all the deep drilling work in the late 60's [1]. I had a chance early on in the 80's to invest in a company that had designed a new drill head (one of my USC alums went to work there), I thought it was a silly investment I mean drill bits? really? But they did quite well with it.
That said, the whole concept of just digging and digging until you hit the middle holds childlike fascination for me.
[1] Mostly related to discovering alien artifacts and the like.
As am I although there is pretty damning evidence in Sonoma County [1] California that you can cause earthquakes with it. That said, I'm surprised we've not seen more closed loop systems [2][3]. My favorite is to take a loop of tungsten tubing a reservoir, a cooling tower, and a turbo pump and toss the tubing into the magma flow of a volcano. Pull out enough heat to run a turbine but not much that you freeze the lava. I'm totally going for this concept in my Mad Scientist Power Base.
I'll admit to being utterly ignorant about deep-hole drilling. If I was tasked with doing something like that I'd do two things:
1- I would not do it in the ocean
Lots of reasons, from the potential to damage an ecosystem to the unknowns that could be catastrophic in so many ways. Of course, cost is another reason.
Doing anything in the ocean --particularly deep-- is incredibly difficult and expensive.
2- I would not use a ten mile long shaft with a drill at the end of it.
I just don't think that this is the way to do it. Again, I am ignorant when it comes to drilling of this sort.
What I would do would be to design a drilling robot that would drill the hole and burrow itself down the hole as it works. To continue with the overly simplistic view, the only thing this robot would need would be power (lots of it).
You select a candidate site and build a large solar array, large enough to power the drill-bot.
A starter hole of the required depth and diameter would be drilled via conventional means. The robot would then be inserted into it. It would expand and clamp itself to the hole to begin drilling deeper. If the broken-up dirt and rocks must be removed either the robo-drill has the capability to collect some amount of it and traverse back to the surface or it comes back and a "cleanup" robot would go down to get the stuff out.
It'll take a long time? Is that a problem? The operation could probably have a good degree of automation.
Just for the sake of explanation, here are some of the reasons (I'm a geophysist, currently working in the oil industry, but my dissertation work relied heavily on the Chikyu (the ship in question)):
1: The ocean is the only place where it's feasible. The continents have much, much thicker crust (40-70km) than the ocean basins (7-15km). Areas of exposed oceanic crust (e.g. Iceland) have much thicker than normal oceanic crust.
Beyond that, it's (slightly) easier to "drill" through water than through rock. There are a still a _lot_ of challenges involved in deep-water riser drilling. You don't just have a what's basically a steel rod going down (as you would with riserless drilling), you have to have a system that's capable of returning fluids and maintaining high pressure going all the way down to the seafloor (and below, once you case the well). However, it's still faster to deploy the riser than it is to drill through solid rock. At any rate, I'm getting sidetracked. The locations where they're looking to drill to the moho are in relatively shallow water (3-4 km) compared to the water depths that the Chikyu has already drilled in.
2: You're misunderstanding how drilling works. :) In some sense, what you've described is exactly how it works. (Just think of the drillbit as the robot.) However, you have to overcome the pressures at the depth you're drilling at (otherwise the hole will collapse, among other things) and you need an efficient way to return the cuttings (waste material) to the surface. Thus: drilling mud. You circulate pressurized (and very dense, so that the pressure increases with depth) fluid that flushes the cuttings back to the surface and keeps the borehole open. (It's an oversimplification, but that's the basic idea.) In some cases (e.g. coil tubing rigs), this fluid is even what drives the drillbit.
At any rate, hopefully that helps illuminate things a touch. :)
My disclaimer was accurate: I am ignorant about these things. I going camping this weekend. Can't think of a better subject to Google while out there (gotta love coverage in California) and learn about.
Isn't googling while camping cheating? :) While you're at it, look up the Chikyu. It's a very neat ship! (and some of the translations on the JAMSTEC website for the Chikyu are amusing: e.g. "Science the Earth")
That aside, they're very good and very reasonable questions.
So your first reason is, you wouldn't do it in the ocean? But logically that would be where I start.. and my explanation is that drilling an ocean so to speak is much more easier than drilling actual land. So I have an advantage over you in a way that by the time you reach the depths of oceans on the land I would be further down. Sure it is trickier to operate under ocean and, there are additional costs, but I feel like the above stated benefit is enough of a reason to do it on the base of an ocean.
In addition to what the other reply stated, you also need to replace drillbits often, which would turn the drillbot into basically how drilling is done now.
The mantle is solid rock. In some special environments (mid-oceanic ridges, subduction zones, etc) you can expect to have some percentage of melted mantle rocks, but this is not the general case.
We know that the mantle is solid because it can transmit shear seismic waves.
pretty sure no one has any real idea only theories. hopefully it doesn't start some crazy volcano that eventually engulfs everything. when this planet does go the way of the buffalo it likely will be our own fault.
I was secretly hoping for that Russian drill team in the arctic tapping into that frozen lake to unleash some sort of crazy frozen, earth-destroying demon/alien
Perhaps I will shift my wishes to this mantle quest to unlease some fiery, earth-destroying demon/alien.
Remember pressures. Any fiery, earth-destroying demon/alien would consider where we live to be incredibly inhospitable, on the grounds that if they actually come up here, they will explode. And not even nuclear-style "wipe out all life on Earth, ha ha ha!" type explosion, but just a dead-fiery-earth-destroying-demon/alien-making-a-short-lived-unpleasant-mess sort of explode. You wouldn't want to be standing right next to it, but on the grand earth-destroying scale it'd be barely a blip.
If the hole is only 30cm wide, and it's going to take 8 years to complete (complete in 2020), isn't there a decent chance that there will be movement in the plates that will close up the hole?
> It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide
>"It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide on the bottom, and then drilling a few meters into the foundations," says Teagle.
If this is indeed an accurate analogy than I would be very interested to see it done as a proof of concept!
Because the rocks extruded in a volcano suffer a lot of changes during its way up.
Moreover, a mantle rock is composed by many different minerals. When temperature goes up, some minerals melt first. So, you expect the extruded magmas to be enriched in those minerals. The extruded rocks are not sampling the mantle properly. Of course they provide tons of information, but is not the same as having a fresh mantle rock.
I'd guess for purity reasons. Volcanic eruptions don't always come from the mantle - in fact think convection cells, the rising material actually comes from deep down
Without adequate safeguards, what's down there will come up here (at least to the top of the borehole), and create a new 6km volcano. I'd name it Moria.
I don't think it works like that. If you are in the middle of an ice burg and drill down to the ocean below it, does water start shooting up through the hole?
Yes, if the bottom of the iceberg-hole is below sea level.
If the mantle at the bottom of this new bore-hole is under pressure and liquid, then it will go up the bore hole until the pressure above it equals the pressure below. If the bottom of the bore-hole hits a part of a liquid mantle with a lot of pressure, then we might get a volcano. Hence, Moria.
So, If you want to create your own island in the middle of nowhere all you have to do is drill a couple of holes to the mantle. I can certainly see some people creating islands this way in the hope of using them decades latter.
What is the earth explodes? Earth was designed to keep the very hot stuff inside a very hard container. If we break this container by drilling through it, the hot stuff will explode and humanity will get hurt.
Especially if compared to all the other things that we nowadays spend billions on, and where the long-term benefit is much less clear.