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This page contains content from Underrail: Expedition expansion.

Mark Bright 

Hydrothermal Vents, article for the Lemurian Intelligencer

The existence of hydrothermal vents had been known to humanity for many years before the end of the Old Era, and while they were well-studied and the mechanisms by which they operate well-understood at that time, harnessing [MISSING] difficult challenge and would happen only in the years just before the Descent. These vents [MISSING] fissures in the planet's surface that issue geothermally heated water, and are primarily found deep below the ocean surface in regions where tectonic plates spread from one another.

[MISSING] With the average depth being just over two kilometers, it is clear that the path to exploitation of these rich sources is one laid with some quite imposing obstacles. In addition, some of the other, more effective ways of producing energy made pursuing hydrothermal vents as valid energy sources a rather costly and inferior option during the early twenty-first century of the Old Era.

But the world was changing rapidly in these deleterious times of human existence, [MISSING] - but the future was costly. The exploitation of fossil fuels itself fueled political avarice and extermination of millions of [MISSING] most brutal wars the world [MISSING] for if food comes before morality, so do hydrocarbon energy sources. The reason [MISSING] their finiteness, and the growing hunger of a modern society that needed to be sated with exponentially more energy. Thus more and more political entities - be it countries or super-corporations - were forced to turn to renewable [MISSING]

New Frontier Technologies made it their mission to rely only on renewable energy sources: sunlight, wind, waves [MISSING] geothermal heat if available. It was our saving grace that we had developed these technologies to a high degree before the [MISSING] staring into the eyes of extinction otherwise. One successful NFT project was Lemuria: The world we live in, and it is the inquiry into the exploitation of geothermal sources that has made Lemuria possible.

In the chaotic final days of the Old Era, a global investigation has been performed by New Frontier Technologies in order to find suitable locations [MISSING] Tenebrous Dome Lake [MISSING] abundant gashes in the lake-bed. The relative seclusion - relative meaning that Underrail is still not too far away - spaciousness of the caverns and thriving underwater and terrestrial life all further attributed to [MISSING] richness in life is precisely the product of these hydrothermal vents, because the energy and precipitation of the minerals from the vents support the chemosynthetic bacteria, which are in turn being consumed by the larger organisms, and the food chain continues from there.

The relatively small depth of the vents made harnessing energy from them a simple task for NFT, so sensibly all facilities were, and still are, being powered by hydrothermal energy. This natural decentralization of power sources [MISSING] each facility had to have its own generator; granted, L-IT4-U AVAC transformers have been installed to transfer energy between facilities in case of emergency, but these ended up being used rarely, the most notable case being the power failure at LEMCO in LE 21.

The generators that were used were L-X-SCRC-70-U supercritical Kestrel cycle generators designed specifically [MISSING] installed at the base of each facility, atop their respective hydrothermal vent. Each facility is equipped with power substation units, singular devices based on old Seddar power generators. These units are directly connected to primary generators, performing a variety of functions such as regulating distribution, electrical current conversion and backup generation [MISSING] reason why the Seddar design was used as the basis for the unit.

The vents themselves range between 200 and 400 degrees centigrade in temperature with some of them providing in excess of 50MWt, whereas the generators themselves were designed to last for more than 200 years; the estimate for "dry" versions - a.k.a non-underwater - is about 250 years, which convincingly relates how well-designed and coated the U versions have become at that particular time.

I will conclude my article here. As I have already mentioned, there are more reasons why hydrothermal vents have proven useful to us: The minerals being precipitated are collected and processed, the biota being supported by the vents [MISSING] and the tall smokers and corals make up for a stunning landscape which grasps the viewer and doesn't let go. I will leave elaboration of these, however, to someone more competent in the respective subjects.

See also

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