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Originally posted by THENEO
Some good posts!
There is believed to be nuclear powered tunnelling machines used by the military which actually melt rock rather than bore through it.
This process produces a hard, smooth and sealed tunnel that looks like a glass tube.
These tunnels would be hundreds of feet below ground and would avoid for the most part any surface interference.
Originally posted by HowardRoark
Originally posted by THENEO
Some good posts!
There is believed to be nuclear powered tunnelling machines used by the military which actually melt rock rather than bore through it.
This process produces a hard, smooth and sealed tunnel that looks like a glass tube.
These tunnels would be hundreds of feet below ground and would avoid for the most part any surface interference.
That does not make much sense. Even if you melted the rock, you would still have to remove the liquified rock, which would cool back to a solid fairly quickly. Furthermore, how would you keep the machine and the nuclear containment system from melting also?
What would happen if you ran into a coal seam?
(underground coal fires are no joke)
I do remeber seeing someting like that in a bad Japanese movie once, but I kind of doubt that it is real.
Originally posted by Gazrok
Well...I won't go that far, but underground tunnels connecting bases, isn't fantasy...it's practicality, and common military practice, especially in the middle east.
Originally posted by goose
Wasn't there an underground base found in Virginia because of a plane crash? I remember reading about it. Also there was a large hotel in West Virginia with an underground facility large enough to house top government officials in case of a nuclear attack. Don't you just love it they are preparing their own giant luxury accomendations and telling school kids to crawl under their desk. Heck even as a child I knew that would not work, anybody else recall those drills of scooting out of your desk hitting the floor and rolling under your desk, that was back in the day of girls had to wear dresses to school, that floor was cold!
Originally posted by Gazrok
A: The majority of the boring is through rock...the machines in question (not the ones in the pics) are said to not just be drilling, but vaporizing, the rock...
Originally posted by HowardRoark
Originally posted by Gazrok
A: The majority of the boring is through rock...the machines in question (not the ones in the pics) are said to not just be drilling, but vaporizing, the rock...
OK, If they are vaporizing the rock, how are the "vapours" being handled? Are any of them toxic? I seems to me that since rocks and minerals are composed of a large variety of elements, if you were to "vapourize" rock, some of the vapours would be rather toxic. If you were "varourizing" through fractured bedrock, you would have to be carefull that some of those toxic vapours did not seep through into a water table and into someones private well.
Also, the amount of 'vapours" that would be released from a square foot of rock would be fairly high, don't you think? Add to this the fact that the vapours would be heated up and you have a huge volume of gas you would have to expell.
Again, there is the question of the excess heat. How do they handle this? What if the rock is an aquifer?
What if there are coal and gas formations?