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Tuesday, 3 September, 2024 / Edition 23

I hope you all had a very non-labor intensive Labor Day! Though if you’re in the field, the rig waits for no one, and we appreciate all of you who might not get the holiday.

After several weeks of software topics, we turn up the heat to look at how mayo can help us better understand nuclear fusion as well as the ways different companies are working to access geothermal heat. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Better Understanding Nuclear Fusion with…Mayo?

Oleksandr Bilch/ Shutterstock.com

There’s a lot of energy to be extracted in inertial confinement fusion! This is a process key to nuclear fusion, which many feel could serve as a prominent energy source in the future. Oddly, and randomly, enough, a few scientists recently tried to understand this process better with mayonnaise.

Inertial confinement fusion involves three words we likely all know, but when used in succession like that, we may not be sure exactly what the phrase describes. So, let’s break it down:

• Inertial confinement fusion is a process where fuel is basically smushed until it disintegrates.

• In the moments before disintegrating, energy is released.

• The key is to hold the material at the point just before disintegration long enough for the fusion reaction to release more energy than it took to reach that point.

• When you’re using mayo to represent the material, you’re working to hold the mayo, as it were 🤓

Why mayo? A question you never thought you’d ask. It’s a soft solid that undergoes hydrodynamic instability when rotated up to 150 rmp. Who knew?!

Why it matters: These properties can help scientists better understand plasma, the superheated state of matter in nuclear fusion.

It’s key to figure out the hydrodynamics using the mayo analog and have some better predictions of outcomes before moving to the real thing. “At those extremes, you're talking about millions of degrees Kelvin and gigapascals of pressure.”

The catch: “One of the main problems associated with this process is that the plasma state forms these hydrodynamic instabilities, which can reduce the energy yield,” said Arindam Banerjee, a coauthor on the study.

Geoscientists are very familiar with analogs. We often use modern environments to inform us of older environments, but we also use fun things like Play-Doh to understand rheologic behavior.

Such innovative thinking is often necessary. We can’t always get our hands or eyes on the exact materials we’re studying, so sometimes, a little mayo will work in a pinch.

For more information about the study, look here.

A message from NVIDIA

NVIDIA Accelerates CCS by 700,000x

A new approach to carbon capture and storage (CCS), powered by NVIDIA AI, enables scientists and engineers to accelerate CCS modeling by 700,000x with Fourier Neural Operators (FNO).

Yes, I’ll Have a Geothermal…On the (Hot) Rocks

When life hands you lemons…you make a warm old fashioned and garnish with a lemon. Okay, warm cocktails on ice doesn’t really work, BUT hot rocks do pair well with innovation and energy.

Geothermal energy has an enticing value proposition: reliant, continuous power with little to no pollution. We’re literally pulling heat out of the ground.

The conditions needed to fully realize this potential are rare-ish. It’s hard to find subsurface water that is hot enough, clean enough, and can be accessed and utilized.

Hot rocks are not as hard to find however, and several geothermal companies are using different methods to bring their own water to the hot rocks party:

• Sage Geosystems is using a method it calls geopressured geothermal systems (GGS). They drill deep, hydraulically fracture the rocks, and instead of pulling anything out of the fracs, they pump water into them, let it heat up, and then pull that hot water out.

• Fervo Energy follows the ‘ol oil and gas method of using an injection well to pump hot water in and another well to pull it out, but instead of vertical wells, it uses two parallel wells.

• Quaise Energy is using microwaves to drill into deeper and hotter rocks than a typical bit could withstand.

Geoscientists play a key role in all these companies. Our skillsets help elucidate geothermal gradients, which dictate drilling depths, clarify the subsurface conditions that constrain fracturing requirements, and generally point companies to locations with the best chance for success.

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✉️ To get in touch with Sarah, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.