Deep geothermal shaft sinking

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On planets with reachable hot cores, geothermal electricity is the easiest and most reliable energy untill it is exhausted or reduced to less than needs.

Heat dissipation not universal electric utilizable energy supplies remains the largest problem always.  Vacuume insulation can keep heat in and cold out unless you want isolated cold storage where the vac panel walls also work best.  Eliminating the heat from processes requires conduction into water or air for wider distribution or radiating it away using the whole of structural outside surfaces.

Getting geothermal out of the ground miles down under your feet requires boring large diameter shafts through often very hard rock.  To make this easier and cheaper as well as for long distance ET3 tunnels,  proposed is a slotting and snapped off core removal prosess.  This has occasionally Ben tried and is an ancient quarrying. rock slicing and hole core drilling process used for tens of thousands of years.  To make a round shaft a core drill is used to separate the outside walls from the surrounding rock.  The core is divided by three pie slice slots and the resulting sections snapped off.  The section is either lifted out vertically or placed on a rail wheel cart to exit horizontally.

The narrower the slots or kerfs the cheaper the shaft down to almost free.  Making thunder cysts without tool wear is the key to cost reduction.  This can be done with very high pressure oxygen fuel flame cutting, electric discharge but rock is not a good conductor and electrode surfaces wear, using plasma gas cutting, water abrasive cutting, high frequency cutting, micro explosive cutting against a anviland what we do today impacting and grinding.

Reducing energy cost per unit of rock that is pulverized is only a part of the problem as increasing speed makes any shaft sinking or tunneling process more efficient and more energy cost may reduce tool wear cost and equipment time to foot per minute of progress cost.

In vertical to horizontal use proposed is opposed shaft sideway slot mounted cog gear tubes.  These support a all direction shaft high speed mobility system.  These might ascend a verticle shaft with a multi ton rock plug or slice at speeds of 60 MOH or more and go back down even faster.  Ten miles down the round trip takes as long verticlelly as driving it horizontally.  If the shaft is being sunk at a rate of a foot every minute the ascender may have to have one or morepassing sidings on the way up to biomass descending nachinesctaking equipment down and returning to remove more rock cores.  Angled shafts with heavy metal doors every mile or so will be needed to catch falling rock or equipment to prevent damage below.

The buttress cog gear side rails are also seamless heavy walled tubes that conduct the DC electric supply, high pressure CO2 used for cooling and high pressure oxygen and oil used for cutting or blasting or both blast flame pulse cutting With intermittent thermal fracture CO2 cooling.  Heat rising fast up the shaft might be recovered for electricity at the top using the same partly loaded generators that will be the piwer production systems.  The power plant builds and maintains it’s own geothermal energy supply for thousands of years at one location.