(There are two ways to read this journal: You can read the text first and find out about what I saw at the Hot Springs and then watch the video. Or you can scroll down, watch the video first, and then read the text. Either way works – your choice.)
The Description
The Chena Hot Springs Resort is a neat little place about 90 minutes (depending on the weather and the moose) from downtown Fairbanks. A group of us got to go on Wednesday night after our daily training and I’m really glad that we did. It was a lot of fun.
At the Resort, they have several very cool attractions. There are the hot springs (of course) where you can soak in 105 – 115 degree water outside. A lot of the PolarTREC teachers did that and, when they got out of the water, their hair froze because the air was so cold. (Mine actually froze too, even though I wasn’t in the water. The steam that formed over the hot springs condensed on my hair and then the low air temperature made it freeze. It looked like I used white hair spray on my hair.)
There is also an ice museum, which is a building made almost entirely of ice. They have ice sculptures, tables, stools, staircases, rooms, plates, glasses, and even an ice fire place!
But the Chena Hot Springs Resort isn’t just a resort. They also do a lot of research on alternative energy. They’ve got their own geothermal power plant and production greenhouse. In the activity center, they also have a little machine that converts certain plastics back into petroleum.
The Video
Here’s a short video of what we saw at the Chena Hot Springs:
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Science Content
There are three kinds of geothermal power plants – binary, dry steam, and flash steam. Chena Hot Springs has a binary power plant. (It’s actually the first one of its kind in Alaska.) The benefit of binary plants is that they can be used with lower temperature water.
Binary geothermal power plants have two different sets of pipes (or "loops") that meet each other at one point. Like this:
A very basic diagram of a binary geothermal power plant, like the one at Chena Hot Springs
The bottom loop has water in it. It gets the hot water from a well drilled into a reservoir deep in the earth. (The farther down you go, the warmer everything gets). The water is pumped up to the surface, cooled down in a device called a heat exchanger, and then returned to the reservoir.
The top loop has a different liquid in it that has a lower boiling point than water. When it goes through the heat exchanger, the liquid is heated up until it’s vaporized. (Remember how the water cooled down in the heat exchanger? All the heat that the water lost gets transferred to the other liquid.) Then, the gas is used to turn a turbine, which produces electricity. After turning the turbine, the gas is condensed (turned back into a liquid) and run back through the heat exchanger to repeat the whole process over and over again.