anakaine
Born on August 02, 2019•1739 Karma
"For the application in EGS drilling, this device uses a metallic waveguide to carry the millimeter wave (MMW) beam to a standoff distance from the crystalline rock. Argon gas is used as the waveguide fill medium due to its ability to stay transparent to MMW’s at such deep depths and thus higher pressures [12]. Purge gas is also used to pump out the excess material that has been transformed into smaller particles (Figure 2.4). "
As a former geologist involved in drilling, thats going to get real expensive, real fast, in terms relative to regular mechanical drilling thanks to the requirement for argon. Perhaps theres an economically efficient changeover point at depth as mechanical drilling becomes less capable due to increasingly plastic deformation.
It's possible there exists a material that is transparent to mm waves, airtight, and can survive the conditions at the bottom of the hole. In such a case they could cap the waveguide and prevent any gas leakage.
I'm quite sure Quaise is well aware that Argon isn't cheap and are already exploring multiple avenues for reducing its usage.
It is interesting that they have to use Argon instead of the more typical Nitrogen or SF6. A waveguide with such a significant pressure differential is decidedly unusual and a unique challenger for what they are doing.
This is such a sketchy company. Their "Demo" video doesn't demo anything.
At least this is progress though. In previous hype videos they just pretended you don't need to extract anything!
I doubt argon is the purge gas.
I'd be curious if anyone (perhaps the parent) knows why – my assumption is that it's more expensive and/or not as reliable to drill higher up with mmWave, not least because the ground might be uneven materials, etc., and then it becomes something predictable and harder to rotary drill lower down, incl. as you would spend more time doing things like replacing bits low down and sending things up and down?
To be clear though, I'd love to have one of these rigs on my old project and compare rate of progression and hole quality. Particularly when establishing the hole in sedimentary gravels and clays. I imagine casing will still be required.
One thing that I'd be concerned about is the ability to collect samples if most of the material is being vaporised or melted. Similarly, the cooking of the side of the hole on the way down could make geophysical responses much more difficult to interpret. Sonic velocity would probably increase, televised would probably be harder to interpret, harder to spot hydrothermal infill in sedimentary cover, would it affect gamma tools (probably not)
Edit: also wondering how the hole holds up around aquifers. Does the super heating cause wall instability immediately above the non geothermal aquifers as superheated steam is created? How does this affect the hole stability if we are not casing?
Edit 2: if we are not casing, how does the hole hold up around aquifer sands, loose fill, fractured or brecciated mass?
Edit 3: Also! Do we ream open the top of the hole to down past the last aquifers before the geothermal horizon? If not, how are we stopping stopping aquifers interplay and interaquifer contamination?
Some shale formations in Michigan, for example, sometimes requires drilling to a 4" thick target. You don't know the exact depth because the depth of that 4" thick layer can vary by many feet from an another spot 100m north/south.
I'm aware that if you search "thickness of Antrim shale" or "thickness of Collingswood shale", Google will happily tell you that it's 20-40 feet thick, but for modern drilling techniques, the economics of the well depend on hitting a much more narrow target than that, which can be delicately guided in by analyzing fossils that come up.
I started designing a combined unit for this (mmwave + ultrasound) with TLA+ and Rust, but don't have any use for drilling and tunneling myself.
I got into this because a bronze scepter of certain dimensions might carry a 28 khz resonance for ~30s, which - with nanodiamond drilling sand from e.g. pyrolyzed ash and sand - could explain the observed ancient copper core drilling speeds.
I am neither.
Jokes aside, I wonder if people from countries with 2+ names and 2+ last names get different results. In my case, I get a lot of false positives because there's apparently a lot of people with same first name and first last name. Luckily, none of them were me.
I have four names in total, two first and two last, mostly just use one first + one lastname publicly, and this tool only correctly infers correctly when using that specific combination (which also happens to be globally unique, as far as I know), any other combination seems to make the thing hallucinate strongly.
Because "It works" is insufficient for regulated industries that require "Prove is works using ___ standard" (where proving takes a ton of people-time), and more and more industries are soft-regulated as a condition of cyber insurance.
I.e. what RedHat was created to solve
Its why you find the Australian regulator for consumer affairs handing out $200m+ fines to telecommunications companies, for example.
Not that it is likely that they make that much in profit, but still. There probably shouldn’t be a limit, and there probably should be personal legal consequences such as jail time for repeat offenders.
Anyway this is all purely academic. 99% of violations aren't going to increase profit by more than the maximum fine (or even anywhere remotely near that) thus it seems to me that the law has sufficiently broad coverage for addressing a behavior that does not directly result in physical injury.
Instead, it’s much better to scale fines based on the scale of the entity involved, which also results in huge fines, but it’s easier to measure revenue. Thus the fines are more broadly effective, and you can still escalate if they don’t stop.
Note that driving laws are entirely at the state level in the US, and this was California, which is among the most driver-friendly places in the (already driver-friendly) US. There are places in the US where the license could have been suspended for this (though typically with a duration measured in days, not years).
The logic isn't some rigid "make the fine based on the profit".
The logic is based on the intent: make the behavior happen less.
So you can have a base fine of X, even when there's no profit or even if there are losses, and have a scalable fine based on higher profits. This way the company is discouraged to do the bad behavior in general, and is ALSO discouraged to do the bad behavior even if it's profitable.
If the base fine is X, then every actual fine would be X + Y where Y is the profit motive causing the behavior. As such every court case is now also a fight about lowering Y and companies are incentivized to make Y appear lower etc.
Further as companies vary in size generally at large companies Y will be vastly larger than X meaning lowering Y is nearly as valuable at winning.
If they made a profit and I want them to pay more than the base fine doesn't mean if they made a loss I want them to pay less than the base fine.
I think the rest of your come t stands though. There is difficulty I proving profit and Hollywood accounting can probably change those numbers.
I’m not saying they would get a rebate just that for this to be meaningful for a mid sized or larger company requires a large portion of a given fine to be based on profits. So a company receiving a fine based on their profits would argue they made less money from the behavior, it’s a legal argument without any risk.
Consider a fine for a mid sized company that’s base 100k + 10m based on profits it ‘goes away’ if they win but it also ‘goes away’ if they drop it by 99%. Thus just as much effort would be spent on how much money they made as is put forth to defend the fine in the first place.
Now obviously you could set the base large enough to offset that, but doing so defeats the point of profit based fines in the first place. Which means inherent to the idea of profit based fines is the concept they largely go away if a major company can argue their profits where non existent.
Targeting management seems like a tactic that should only be employed where great urgency exists such as life threatening danger. I don't think marketing material is anywhere close to qualifying.
I hate my inbox being inundated with spam as much as the next guy but that doesn't mean drawing and quartering the perpetrators is justified.
Fining executives is hardly drawing and quartering.
No? You don’t need to adjust the floor, only the ceiling.
The goal is to prevent businesses from pricing fines into their margins.
There's an established base of steel mills in Europe. Take one over, and your local talent pool can probably keep it running. There's less risk.