Any good sources for informations about mining and related technologies?

[Elthy]

I was just thinking about how asteroid-mining would work or how colonists on mars could harvest local resources and realised that i dont know much about mining on earth. Do you have any interesting sources for that topic, similar to e.g. Scott Manley for Spaceflight that cover more than just the extreme basics you can watch in a half hour documentary on TV? Doesnt have to be Youtube, of course.

[kerbiloid]

Nothing common to the Earth technologies, as they are based on: the gravity, the unlimited water, the unlimited carbon, the unlimited place to place.

[DDE]

Yeah, I don't think anyone has the answers, really. A lot of those methods are driven by geology, and our models of asteroids are frequently revised.

[kerbiloid]

No usual enrichment procedure is applicable out of the listed factors.

Except the gas centrifuges, of course, and plasma ovens.

No chemical method of oxide reducing.

No gravitational separation.

[Elthy]

Obviosly there are lots of differences, but at least the ore-collection should work "similar" on Mars as on Earth. But thats not the point, im just interessted in the topic, independed from is application in space.

[Nuke]

i figure you are going to want to do open pit mining for a few reasons. first of which it can be done with a few vehicles. granted you are going to need to put some of the biggest vehicles and machines humans have built on rockets and fly them to mars. lets just assume we can kerbal that problem. and you dont have to use the biggest dump truck you can find either, you can use a scaled down version and when you have used it to mine some metals you can build a bigger one. and the vehicle will need some modifications, a big diesel engine might need to be swapped with a nuclear system. also supposidly there is a mine in brazil that uses the weight of the ore and the altitude of the mine to recharge the batteries to bring the truck back up for another load. i suppose thats useful if you want to mine olympus mons. aside from a dump truck or two, you are going to need a backhoe. actual mining would need to be done with explosives (shipping large quantities of high explosives on a rocket would be interesting). simply blast and muck. however there is the small problem of having an ore refinery that can remove the useful components from thousands of tons of rocks. at least you dont have to worry about cave-ins.

deep mines get interesting because at certain depths atmospheric pressure increases to shirtsleave levels. but with that equipment requirements go up and safety goes down.

 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Elthy said:

but at least the ore-collection should work "similar" on Mars as on Earth

Why?

On the Earth you have a lot of water to cool the machines, to wash the ore, to use solvable agents.
You can use 2.5 greater gravity to separate the ore pieces by size.
Your mining machines are pressed to the mine floor by gravity, while on Mars they are 2.5 times lighter, while the rocks are same strong.

On the Moon and the asteroids the things are even worse.

The main difference is that on the Earth you have to remove the water from the mines, while in every other place you lack the water and have to save it.

[kerbiloid]

You can start from the whole idea and google for particular aspects of it.

***

The main things to mine are iron, coal, aluminium, and oil.
Others come to the scheme in their turn.

The amounts of mined iron and coal outweigh all other mined resources by orders of magnitude.
This hasn't changed since steampunk times.

Basically, the Earth core consists of SiO2 * Al2O3, while the mantle of SiO2 * MgO * FenOm & Al2O3.
The waste rock is basically the feldspar (which is basically SiO2 * Al2O3  with various admixtures) and its numerous modifications.

The waste rock consists of the most common and the most refractory oxides in the universe, so it's a waste rock.
You don't want it.

All ores and the coal as well are usually minor admixtures to a waste rock body.

So, to mine any ore or coal you have to explore a place where the waste rock is polluted by the useful chemical element,define its exat location, size, and internal structure (is it round, layered, branched, or what).

Then you have to crash into the rock body either by widely opening it as a quarry, or by piercing it by mines, and start crashing it by following the ore-rich layers or branches with some crashing machine or by hands.

The machines need cooling and hydraulics.
The mine is hot and needs cooling, too. Also you need a lot of water to protect the people from the dust, heat, and loud sound.
The technical water and the underground water must be pumped out (and that was the first main application of the steam engines).

The pieces of the mined rock, consisting of the waste rock, polluted by the ore or coal, should be loaded on a rail carriage or a truck and delivered onto the surface.

***

Once the pieces of the rock are on surface, they should be enriched.

I.e. you have to separate the useful ore from the waste rock.

In ancient/medieval:

You put the rock pieces onto a forge and crash them into smaller pieces with a sledgehammer or by a weight attached to a water wheel, what is much better.

Periodically you put the pieces into a large with large-celled mesh as the bottom and shake it to let the enough small pieces fall through.
Then repeat crashing the large ones.

You proceed this sequentially with meshes of decreasing cell size to get the rock pieces enough small.

You put the ore in fire to make the waste rock crack and get porous.

The ore pieces are strong and dense (7.8 g/cm3 vs 2.5 of the waste rock). 
*They partially separate from the pieces of the waste rock, but are mixed.

You put the crashed and burnt rock pieces into the water flow, such as a river next to your water wheel dam.
The water flow drags the lighter pieces farther along, while the dense ore pieces stay on their places.

You gather the ore, manually separate the ore pieces, and repeat everything severaltimes, until the waste rock gets visually disappeared, and you have only the pieces of ore.

Nowadays:

Everything stays same, just is made by corresponfing machines powered by a source of energy (in XIX - by a steam engine, later - by electricity).

The hammers are replaced by the crashers (a machine with two vibrating steel plates with a slot of standard side in between), the meshes got mechanical.
A sequence of crashers and meshes of decreasing caliber turns the big pieces of rock into small pieces.

The river flow is replaced by a tube with a pump.

And in the end you bake the ore into pellets.

Also depending on the ore and the waste rock you use other separation methods, such as:
* flotation (let the oil density and surface tension keep one component floating while another one sinking in a big drum)
* electromagnetism (put the pieces on a conveyor belt and let it roll around a magnet, to seperate the ferromagnetic or pueposedly ionized pieces)
* centrifugal separation (obvuious);
* others.

***

Pellets.

You take the enriched ore pieces and put them into the drum of a spherical mill.
Then run, letting the hundreds of small and hard glass balls inside mill the ore into powder.
A sequence of the descreasing caliber mills produce the powder of required size.

Then you take this ore powder and mix it with milled coke, calcite and so, shape it into cherry-sized balls, and bake them to make solid.

Then you send these cherry balls, i.e. pellets as you final product to the metallurgical plant.

***

Iron.

In ancient/medieval.

You get the Fe3O4 (mostly) pieces with remains of waste rock.

You have a charcoal as the only fuel and the reducing agent at once.
You can't use mined coal because it's very dense and doesn't burn goof in small ovens.

The charcoal is veryporous, the contact surface is huge, it burns well.
But at the same time this makes its flame cooler.

The charcoal fire temperature is below the melting point of the iron [ore], and you can't melt the iron from the ore.

You build an expendable oven of limestone plates or so, pour inside a layer of charcoal.
Then a layer of ore together with charcoal.
Then stack this several times again.

You seal the oven with clay, leaving small holes for the bellows and for venting.

Then you light the fire from below and start pumping the bellows for hours, days, depending on the local resource composition and quality.

The charcoal is smouldering with insufficient oxygen, and turns into CO.

The CO lifts up, passes throw the ore layer and take oxygen from the iron oxide, because CO keeps it stronger.
The CO2 vents out.

If you are pumping too slow, the charcoal doesn't give enough strong flow of CO, the charcoal gets burnt, the ore stays ore.
If you are pumping too fast, the charcoal burns to CO2, no CO appears, the ore stays ore.

So, you have to know and keep the exactly optimal speed which depends on the conditions and raw materials and varies from village to village.

If you have done well, after crashing the oven you get a porous piece of reduced iron mixed with ore, charcoal, and remains of waste rock.

You heat it to white in your smith oven, put on the forge and start hammering.
Repeat this many times for several days, until everything but iron gets cracked and fall out,

Of course, you need a lot of charcaol for this, too, and several days bellow pumping.
So, you need either strong and dumb helpers who won't get bored and tired, or a waterwheel for the mechanical hammer (falling weight with a rope on top) and the oven bellows.

That's why the best place for the medieval metallurgy are mountain rivers with wood around.
And that limits the possible medieval metallurgy locations very much.

Finally, you get a several kilogram heavy piece of very bad and fragile iron polluted with carbon and other things.
And you can't melt and cast it because you don't have enough temperature.

You forge it into sticks and then you forge things out of these iron sticks.
The things soon get cracked, you buy them back and forge again.

Bad, bad rural iron. 
That's why they were using bronze armor even in early medieval.

***

The alternative was an iron meteorite. It consist of 90% Fe and 10% Ni, and is very strong.

If try to forge it heated, it atrracts the oxygen and becomes FenOm rust.
So, you have to forge it cold, the strong doped steel.
It takes a lot of efforts and time, so a meteorite thing is available only for a royal price league.

It's not the way to go.

***
At some places like Damascus there was a natural phenomenon, the local ore was not Fe3O4, but FeO.

So, if put a small amount of it into a melting pot together with proper minerals, plants, and blood of 12 virgin frogs, then dance naked at fullmoon at the crossroad, it was melted, the wastes surfaces, and they got an ingot of much more pure iron.

So, the Damascus steel and its analogs in other places became a hit of sales of that time.
The attempts to repeat it in early XX have demonstrated that actually it's just a low-end steel in terms of XX, so it isn't used.

***

The population was growing, the need in the steel, too. 
The ovens furnaces were getting larger.

The only metallurgical fuel was charcoal, and Europe was getting out of forests.

They were mining the coal, too, but only to distillate the organic remains as "coal oil".
The dry remains (i.e. the coke) were treated as wastes and used to cover the roads.

One the furnaces got enough large and the charcoal was getting more expensive, they tried to throw the coke into the furnaces, too. 
In a large furnace the coke was cracking and burning well, so it was becoming a cheap replacement for the charcoal.

In XVIII the furnaces became so large and their surface-to-voulme ratio so low, that the temperature inside exceeded the iron melting point, so they suddenly started finding the iron ingots instead of the porous pieces.

This allowed to produce as much cast iron as the furnace allows, and the furnaces started growing faster.

***

The problem was that the only power source was a water wheel, so the metallurgy was still limited with mountain rivers.

But large amounts of the steel allowed to roll a lot of thin steel sheets and experiment with steam boilers.

First the Newcomen atmospheric engine allowed to pump the water from the mines.
The the Watt steam engines allowed to power everything everywhere with small amount of water and coal.

Since then the metallurgy was separated from the waterwheels and became self-sufficient.

***

You have a metallurgical plant which produces steel.

You have a furnace (originally of load/unload discrete cycle, but since XIX of the constant/permanent/whatever in English cycle.
One conveyor belt on top is constantly coke, another one - ore pellets. Or same and and mixed.

From bottom a flow of CO raises up and reduces the ore into carbon-rich iron.

On bottom the liquid cast iron is drained into one vat carriage.
Above it the liquid waste is drained into another vat carriage.

Other furnace constructions differ, but follow the same principle.
Pellets, coke, deoxidizing reagents.

***
The cast iron is too rich with carbon, so you pass it through a convertor furnace, where either a flow of oxygen-rich air, or admixtures oxidize the carbon and take it from the melted iron, turning it into the steel.

***

Coke.

You mine the coal and enrich it like any other ore.
Then deliver it to the same metallurgical plant.

You put it into the coke furnace.
It uses previously made coke as fuel and just heats the coal pieces up to the distillation temperature of the organic compounds.

You collect the distilled organic compounds, they are a mixture of aromatic hydrocarbons (benzene, toluene, xylene) which you separate by distillation and send to a chemical plant for durther usage.

The heated coal without the organis is the coke you need.

You drop it from the coke furnace onto a rail carriage, them crash, sort by size by meshes, and get the coke pieces of standard size.

Some of this coke you send to the ore enrichment plant to make the pellets and to power its steam boilers.
Some of it use in the coke furnace.
Some of it you use in the iron furnace above.
Some of them you mill into graphite and bake electrodes for the aluminium and other metallurgical plants.

Steel.

You get the melted steel, take it with a clay ladle and pour into a slab shape.
Or nowadays into a slab-making machine of constant cycle.

You get standard steel slabs.Figurally speaking,a steel plate 2 x 1 x 0.2 m (the size varies).
This slab is the final product of your metallurgical plant.

Rolling.

You don't need slabs. You need thinner things.

You bring the steel slabs to a mechanical plant and start rolling them in rolling machines which is a belt of rollers and two pressing rollers in  the  middle.

You roll the slab into a thick sheet, 
Then a thick sheet into a thin sheet.
And so on.

You cut the sheet into sticks and pull them through a hole to make them round.
Then pull the sticks through a narrower hole to make wire.

Many sheets, sticks, and wires requires many rolling machines to be used, because you need a lot of varoius types constantly.

Finally, you have produced a wide range of steel sheets, sticks, bars, and wires which you send to the plants which build machinery and constructions.

Edited September 23, 2021 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

Aluminium.

You find a boxite deposit. It's a nearly pure alumina, unlike the usual clay consisting of both alumina and silica.

Mine, enrich in the same manner as the iron.

Find somewhere a deposit of fluorite. Admix it. It's required to low the melting point of the alumina in the melting tub below the melting point of same alumina the tub is made of.

Get a lot of coke from the metallurgical plant milled into graphite and baked into graphite electrodes.
So, buy the graphite electrodes from their manufacturer.

Pour the alumina+fluorite into the alumina tub, stick the graphite electrodes in, and apply a lot of electric energy.

The alumina in the tub gets melted before the tub itself (thanks to the fluorite).
The graphite electrodes burn away as carbon oxides, also taking away the oxygen.

You have the aluminium ingot lying in the remains of the alumina.

Now you can melt it, cast slabs, roll them into the aluminium sheets, bars, and wire.

 

Oil.

Find oil.

Drill down several holes.

Stick into the holes pipe columns, adding the pipe segments one by one.

The gas pressure will be pushing the oil up through a pipe, collect it.

As the gas pressure tends to decrease (or even doesn't exist from the very beginning), pour water into another column to replace the oil in its place and to push it up.

The oil is stored in the cracks in the rocks, rarely in underground caves.
So, the water is filling the rock cracks, and the oil deposit becomes a waste water deposit.

Burn the gaseous part of the oil as a torch (because it's too weak and thus expensive to collect).

As the oil itself contains a lot of water itself, and you are pouring more water from above, the oil you are pumping contains a lot of water.

Together with the methane (i.e. the natural gas), when the methane gets closer to surface the water and the methane cool together, and produce the crystallic clathrates which stick into your pipe and seal it.
Then the pipe bursts from the pressure and you have a fun.

To avoid the fun, you have to pour solvents into the water you pump into the ground.
The most cheap and available is methanol.

It dissovles the solved and prevents the water and methane mixture from crystallization.

So, you keep pumping a mix of oil, water, and methanol from below, and instead pour a methanol solution down, turning the oil deposit into a waste methanol deposit.

***

You bring the raw oil to the oil plant.

It's full of pollution. The sulfur compounds are the worst of them.

So, you repeatedly run the raw oil through the deoxidization plant and a sequence of heaters and coolers to distill all possible oxides and sulfides from the oil, and to get them absorbed, separated, and stored for further usage.

***

You run the oil through a preliminary distillation column to distill the propane-buthane mixture  from the oil.

You either sell this mixture as a propane-buthane product, or separate it as propane and buthane products.

***

You pour the oil into the main distillation column.

The coulmn has a gradient of temperature inside.
It's hot at the bottom (becausse you are heating the bottom with fire of the same oil products you are producing) and less hot on top.

At every of its layers you distill the corresponding fraction of the hydrocarbons.

The gasoline fraction at the very top, the heavy petrol / light kerosene below, the heavy kerosene even more below, then the fuel oil.
At the very bottom you get the liquid tar.

The fractions depend on national classification, so they can be called and defined in very different manner.

At every stage of this column you vent out the corresponding gaseous subproduct and pass it into an auxilliary distillation column.
Every auxilliary column separates the very top and the very bottom subfractions of the corresponding fraction and returns them back into the main column.
Then it drains out the product from the middle.

So, every auxilliary column gives you a corresponding fraction of the hydrocarbons.

After you have gotten the fractions, you again pass them through the deoxidization plants to remove more sulfur and carbon oxides.

All these columns are connected by heat exchangers, as some parts of theplant are exothermic, others are endothermic, so one of them cool or heat each other.

***

You take the gasoline and depending on the plant purpose convert it in required way.

Either pour into a column where conditions make it partially turn into the hydrocarbons raising the octane number.
Or heat it in another column to turn into a heavy fraction like the fuel oil.
Or another column converts it into aromatic hydrocarbons.
They differ with pressure, temperature, and catalists.

You mix the heavy petrol and light kerosene to produce the kerosene product.

You mix the heavy kerosene fractions with fuel oil to get the diesel fuel.

You drain out the tar into another column, heat it and partially crack into light gasoline (which you add to the gasoline) and to bake it into the oil coke (which is better than the usual coke,but more expensive, so is used in chemistry, not as fuel).
The remains you sell as tar product.

***

If you don't have oil, but a lot of coal (like the Pedant Germany), you build a Fischer-Tropsch process plant or similar and turn the coal together with water steam into artificial oil.

Then you use it in the same manner as the raw oil.
But it's rich of the gasoline and oil fractions and poor of the kerosene ones.
So, you gets a lot of gasoline and fuel oil, but lack the diesel and jet fuel, and your tanks can't use diesels, while the jet planes fly on methanol and hydrazine.

***

Natural Gas.

Same as oil, but is hissing instead of sloshing.

***

Deoxidization column.

A pair of columns. In one the liquid absorbent (diethanolamine or another) absorbes the carbon and sulfur oxides from the gass bubbling through.

In another (regeneration) column the absorbent gets reduced and releases the oxides as gases.

The absorbent returns back to the first column.

The acidic gases (CO2, SOx) get collected, separated and stored as a mass-produced industrial product.

The same plant works on proper metallurgical plants to absorb the CO2 from the burning coke.
The same about proper powerplants.

(That's why I believe the carbon dioxide problem is fictional. Just put this everywhere,)

Edited September 23, 2021 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

Sulfic acid.

Made of sulfur oxides.

No need to mine. It's a need to remove.

But they mine when needed.

***

Nitrogen and fertilizers.

The air gets sucked from air by centrifugal pumps and gets cooled and separated in a turboexpander into liquid oxygen, liquid nitrogen+argon mixture, and other stuff including the liquid noble gases.

The frozen CO2 is a product.

The noble gases (except the argon) get separated by distillation and are a product.

The nitrogen-argon mixture is either separated into liquid N and liquid Ar, or stays as the "nitrogen-argon mixture" product.

The oxygen is a product.

***

Ammonia.

The methane gets gotten either from natural gas, or from coke and water steam.

The methane is burnt  in a proper proportion with oxygen-rich air and produces  the "hydrogen-bearing gas", consisting of carbon oxides, water steam, nitrogen, and hydrogen.

It gets deoxidized in the deoxidization plant, losing the carbon oxides and the water.

(Actually this process consists of a couple of phases with different amounts of air, oxygen , and nitrogen)

The resulting nitrogen-hydrogen mixture many times passes throw the heater-cooler-deoxidizer to completely distill out the traces of anything but the N and H.

(If you import the hydrogen from external source, you don't need to remove the carbon oxides, of course).

The final mixture of the N and H gets into the column where it gets heated on the catalist (the catalist covers the meshes along the pipe in all such plants).

Then you simply get the ammonia and extract it in these cooling-heating cycles.

***

Oxidizing the ammonia, you get the nitric acid (and thus the whole set of chemistry and fertilizers) or the nitrogen tetroxide for you rockets.

***

By using some of several processes you also produce hydrazines from the ammonia and the methanol or another raw material.

***

Fertilizers.

The nitric fertilizers are the most rare in nature and the most required, so you literally eat them turned into plants.

As the handmade agriculture of the early XX was giving 0.5..1 t of harvest per ha, while currently it's 2..4, so your food is  3/4 industrially produced.

Edited September 23, 2021 by kerbiloid

[wumpus]

Oddly enough, if you are willing to use 16th century sources, De Re Metalica was absolutely definitive on all things mining (and probably most of metalwork).  Translated to English by Lou Henry Hoover (with assistance on mining tech by her husband, President Hoover).

There aren't many great sources like that any more (maybe Hennessy and Patterson for computer architecture).  It pops up over and over in the history of technology.

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

distillation column.

I wonder what temperature would be needed to completely vaporize/plasmafy regolith so it can be run through a distillation column (or zero-gee multi-level centrifuges) so the various elements could be separated that way. 

Actually, once plasmafied, magnetic fields could be used to separate the elements by mass, similar or identical to a mass spectrometer 

[kerbiloid]

48 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I wonder what temperature would be needed to completely vaporize/plasmafy regolith

Ionization temperature for most of materials is about 10k..20k K.

They use this in plasma ovens for chemically pure metals extraction and for junk total decomposition.

No need in heating to this temperature. They evaporate it to the lower temperature and cause a shockwave in plasma to cause the local heating up to the total ionization.

This is not a distillation, but the electromagnetic field then can be applied to separate the ions of different chemical elements.

And I guess, this is the only realistic wave to mine metals outside of the Earth in industrial scale.

***

I would presume that the ET/future tech of the asteroid and other place mining ls:

Make the harvester hover above the mining place.

Emit maybe UV from below, modulating the resonance frequency of the ground, autoadjusting it by a pilot ray measuring the ground vibration amplitude.

Let this pulsation cyclically heat the ground causing its pulse expansion/compression at the resonance frequency due to the portions of the emitted energy.

Let the resonance pulverize the ground thin upper layer into dust.

Partially ionize this dust with UV.

Suck the dust inside by a magnetic field.

Move.

This way you will get a flat surface where the harvester had passed over.

 

Bring the dust to the oven as above, separate in elements powder.

3d-print the metal sheets, bars, nuts, bolts, as you will never need same much total amount of them like on the Earth, and at the same time you need numerous rolling machines to manufacture them traditionally. It isn't worth it.

So, the 3d printing is the cheapest way of production outside of the Earth with its unlimited water, air, place, carbon, and taxpayers.

Edited September 23, 2021 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

-

2 hours ago, wumpus said:

Oddly enough, if you are willing to use 16th century sources,

He isn't. I just brought this as a simple example of what is currently done by machines.

[magnemoe]

We will be mining other stuff than here on earth, we need to mine for ice on Mars for one. I guess this is best done much like we mine some salts, drill an hole and blow steam into it and collect the melt water. 
Ice on the moon will be on the surface as its deposits of vapour from ice hitting it and collect at places the sun never shine. 

Next thing we mine will probably be regolit, just like we use lost of stone for construction all from gravel to sand. 
 

[SOXBLOX]

Have you tried AR's mining page? It might be a good jumping off point... 

@kerbiloid has a point as well. Earth provides an infinite heat sink for some very energy-intensive operations,as well as an infinite supply of gases, etc. All of these are solveable problems, I guess...

[Nuke]

On 9/23/2021 at 7:51 PM, SOXBLOX said:

Have you tried AR's mining page? It might be a good jumping off point... 

@kerbiloid has a point as well. Earth provides an infinite heat sink for some very energy-intensive operations,as well as an infinite supply of gases, etc. All of these are solveable problems, I guess...

mars is pretty cold, lots of places to dump waste heat. read a paper on a lunar tunnel boring machine which would store waste heat in the resulting rubble, and simply truck it out of the tunnel and dump it on the surface.

also those infinite sources are only seemingly so, there is a finite amount of stuff here. i have a feeling if we replace all of our hydrocarbon infrastructure with fusion, we will have a problem with heat pollution. 

Edited September 28, 2021 by Nuke

[Spacescifi]

9 minutes ago, Nuke said:

mars is pretty cold, lots of places to dump waste heat. read a paper on a lunar tunnel boring machine which would store waste heat in the resulting rubble, and simply truck it out of the tunnel and dump it on the surface.

also those infinite sources are only seemingly so, there is a finite amount of stuff here. i have a feeling if we replace all of our hydrocarbon infrastructure with fusion, we will have a problem with heat pollution. 

Doubt we will have fusion reactors in say... Somalia etc.

Given the heat loads, I reckon a great amount of steam would be billowing into the air constantly. Whether or not it adds to global warming depends on how powerful the fusion reactor is and how many of them are available.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Nuke said:

mars is pretty cold, lots of places to dump waste heat

The temperature doesn't play a role. Only the heat capacity does.

A +4°C infinite ocean, connected to any place with rivers is an infinite heat sink we have everywhere on the Earth.
And the heat can be easily removed from the mechanisms and reactors just by water washing.

While the heat capacity of the thin air, poor ice, and rocks on Mars are negligible, and no heat conductor like a water flow from the closest river is available.

So, any mechanism on Mars is almost thermally insulated and can be cooled only by radiation.
Even if you cool the reactor or the drill by Martian water, you anyway should then either cool the water by radiation or to dump it and extract new water from drilled ice.

Edited September 28, 2021 by kerbiloid

[Blasty McBlastblast]

here is a link to a pdf version of the Hard Rock Miner's Handbook which may be of interest 

[Elthy]

6 hours ago, Blasty McBlastblast said:

here is a link to a pdf version of the Hard Rock Miner's Handbook which may be of interest 

That looks a lot like what im searching for, thanks!