Exploration and extraction of deep minerals without mines and quarries with the help of nuclear autonomous thermal drills-geoprodes

Abstract

The Earth's interior at 10–15 km depth horizons is a geoastrophysical space within which direct contact access of research instruments and other devices is not yet possible. At the same time, the list of fundamental and applied tasks that can be solved with the help of direct contact deep research of deep matter with the delivery of its samples to the surface of the Earth is a rather voluminous process and has an extraordinary scientific and technical significance, physical significance. Extraction of deep minerals without mines and quarries with the help of nuclear geosondes, for this it is necessary to consider the hydrodynamic problem of the vertical melt flow from the front part of the geosonde in the opposite direction to the movement of the geosonde vector. The need for a comprehensive consideration of thermophysical and hydrodynamic problems is justified by the presence of a common parameter – the speed of the geosonde as a heat source. The paper examines aspects of the theory and construction of autonomous nuclear deep thermal drills-geoprobes, which are used to solve fundamental scientific and applied industrial tasks, as well as significantly reduce the ecological burden on the environment with the help of geotechnical methods and means of exploration and extraction of deep minerals. The purpose of this work is a detailed theoretical study of the most fundamental possibility of creating ultra-deep nuclear autonomous geoprobes-thermodrills and an assessment of the main engineering parameters of the heat and mass transfer process in real conditions of contact melting of deep rocks. The results of theoretical studies show that the possibility of deep thermal penetration is theoretically substantiated quite correctly. Moreover, even today the problem of creating an ultra-deep geosonde is a fundamentally solvable scientific-technical and engineering-physical task. New deep industrial geotechnologies are a fundamentally new concept of greening the mining process and are suitable for the development of poor and deep ore horizons for which the construction of mines or quarries is impractical or impossible.