Molten Energy

In November 1959 when Hawaii's Kilauea Iki volcano suddenly erupted and formed a lava pool 300 ft. deep in its own crater, no one in the neighborhood saw any particular reason to cheer. But at the University of California's Livermore Radiation Laboratory, the news brought joy to the hearts of a pair of bright young scientists. To Geologist Donald Rawson, 26, and Physicist Gary Higgins, 33, the new lava pool sounded like an ideal testing site for a key phase of the Atomic Energy Commission's Project Plowshare: a plan for harnessing a steam-powered turbogenerator to the tremendous heat released by underground nuclear explosions.

Figuring that the drilling problems encountered in piercing the crust of the lava lake to its molten core would be similar to tapping the heat of molten rocks created by a man-made blast. Rawson and Higgins set up a gasoline-driven rotary drilling rig in the middle of Kilauea Iki's cone on the steaming crust of the lava pool. Using compressed air as a coolant, they drilled a 3 1/2-in. hole into the crust at the tedious rate of 1 1/2 ft. every eight hours. The 1,652DEG heat damaged the diamond bits and jammed pipe threads, forcing a switch to powdered graphite as a lubricant. At nearly 17 ft., Rawson and Higgins added water to the compressed air, found that this speeded their drilling up to the rate of a foot an hour. Finally, at 19 1/2 ft. the bit sank into molten lava after passing through temperatures as high as 1,967DEG--more than the heat a nuclear blast would produce in an ideal Plowshare experiment.

Last week both men were eager to return to Kilauea Iki to try to convert the molten heat to power. By pumping water under high pressure down a pipe to the bottom of the pool and allowing it to percolate to the top as high pressure steam, they believe they might be able to tap enough power to drive a generator.

But Rawson and Higgins have another reason for wanting to return to Kilauea Iki. In drilling their hole they discovered that nitrogen and carbon dioxide were seeping from it. There is a chance that these gases came from the atmosphere, the ocean or surface rocks, but if they can be proved to have come from the virgin lava itself, they may contribute valuable evidence about the formation of the earth. One theory holds that the earth was formed quickly out of dust particles and that it kept hot enough while growing to drive all gases out of its interior. A rival theory is that the earth grew slowly and kept fairly cool, trapping much gas in its insides. Only after radioactivity had heated and melted the deep-down rocks did the gases try to escape through volcanic vents. Samples of uncontaminated gas from virgin lava should help geophysicists decide between the two theories.

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