Word: steams
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Plenty on New Zealand's North Island is an uneasy, earth-quaky land full of hot springs, geysers, active volcanoes and puddles of boiling mud. Trying to tap the power of this natural boiler, government engineers have dotted the area with wells, out of which steam pours with a screeching roar that makes jet engines sound like whippoorwills. Last week six of the screaming jets had been harnessed to a turbine and were generating 6,400 kw. of geothermal electricity...
...whole trench is conveniently capped by a layer of impermeable siltstone a few hundred feet below the present surface. Beneath it, porous rock accumulates steam like a kind of natural boiler. A well only 1,000 ft. deep taps this reservoir. Some of the steam is "juvenile," coming from water that was trapped in the deep interior when the earth was young and rising upward through the deep faults. The rest derives from surface water that has trickled down through cracks and been turned to steam by heat from below. When the steam gets to the surface, its pressure...
...Zealand's engineers made a close study of the world's only other big geothermal power plant, at Larderello in central Italy. Larderello's steam has been used since 1913 to drive power plants. New Zealand's steam needs less treatment to free it of foreign matter and seems to be far more plentiful. Though authorities at first hesitated to schedule expensive powerhouses in the geothermal region for fear that the steam wells might peter out, nothing of the sort has happened; after eight years the oldest of the steam wells is screaming as loud...
...turbine is only a beginning. Eventually New Zealand plans to get 250,000 kw. of geothermal electricity out of the Wairakei region, and hundreds of square miles of steam land are awaiting exploitation in the neighborhood...
Though the Budd strike and the aftermath of the Chrysler strike will cut this week's production under last week's 1958 high of 125,279 cars, most automakers are putting on full steam to catch up to the healthy demand. Chevrolet last week produced 35,000 cars to pass Ford in weekly output for the first time this model year, hopes to reach 42,000 in three weeks...