I can hardly begin to describe how cool this place was, in an industrial sort of way. I’ll tell you about it here, but please visit the link to see what the place looks like. This is a fantastic engineering marvel, although in a way it’s so simple — harnessing the sun to heat things up.
By the way, I mention 3000 degrees, and that’s Celsius. In degrees Fahrenheit it would be 5432 degrees.
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Burnt by the sun: Uzbekistan’s spectacular solar furnace
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
This is the last episode I’m going to do about my trip to Uzbekistan, but I’ve got to tell you about my visit to the solar furnace. It was really, it was really cool!
It was my last day there, and I had seen some really beautiful things. And maybe you heard the most recent episode about Samarkand. The architecture there was stunning with the gorgeous turquoise tiles.
But then on the last day, I went to this place called the solar furnace. And it is awe-inspiring because of its size and because it’s a marvel of engineering. And those things can be really awe-inspiring, even if they’re not beautiful, although I kind of found it beautiful in its industrial sort of way.
So the solar furnace was built in the early 1980s by the Soviets, but it was actually modeled after a solar furnace in France that’s also still in use.
What you see when you go there, it’s up on top of a hill. So you’re driving up the road, and then all of a sudden you see this enormous structure with this huge thing on it. It’s a giant mirror, but it’s actually a set of many mirrors. And the solar furnace is actually in three main parts.
When you get to the top and you go through the first building to the back, you see 62 mirrors that, I mean, I don’t remember how big they are. They’re big by the standards of our wall mirrors in our homes, but they’re not absolutely enormous. When the solar furnace is turned on, the sun’s rays beam directly into these 62 mirrors, and they can be adjusted so that they get the sun at just the right angle.
And then they reflect the sun up into this enormous concentrator dish. That’s the one I told you, it’s like one huge mirror, but it’s actually got over 10,000 smaller mirrors the size of chessboards that are attached to it. So try to imagine something the size of 10,000 chessboards, and it’s about 13 stories tall.
The sun then reflects off this concentrator dish into a small, a 40-centimeter small, furnace, and within three seconds that furnace can heat up to 3,000 degrees, and it can liquefy iron. Again, it only takes three seconds to go from freezing to 3,000 degrees.
So what on earth is this thing for? The main purpose is scientific research and testing materials and how they hold up to extreme heat. The Soviets used the solar furnace for sort of creepy purposes, as you might imagine. One of their purposes was to test the outside layers of their rockets. Today it’s still being used to study materials like ceramics and textiles and other materials to see how they hold up and how they can withstand extreme heat. As far as I can tell, it’s not being used to manufacture anything, and I asked about that, and they said, no, it’s really a research institute.
I got to climb up on the outside of it. I’ll share at least one link to a page that has a lot of photos, and the outside was like 12 or 13 flights of stairs to the very top of this gigantic concentrator dish. And my guide, his name was Dino, and I asked him, “How are you doing?” And he said, “Oh, I’m feeling a little sick!” And he told me I was the first person he had taken to the solar furnace who actually said yes when he asked if we wanted to climb up the stairs. So yeah, I had to do it, right? Although there is an elevator, but the elevator was broken, and it’s been broken for a few years, so nobody’s doing that anymore. I think they’re repairing it.
But the view from the top was amazing. It’s in spectacular surroundings, and there’s snow-capped mountains, and then beautiful stands of poplar trees in the lower areas that Dino said are traditionally planted when the first son is born into a family, and then they cut the trees when he gets married to build his house.
So the view is magnificent, and they chose this location (the Soviets being “they”) because it’s just about an hour, a little more than an hour, outside of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a very major city, and it gets a lot of sun, and the air is pretty clear because it’s at a higher elevation, and it is on solid bedrock, which is good if you want to prevent something from collapsing during an earthquake, and this is a very seismic area, so that made sense.
Okay, I don’t know if this inspires wonder in you or not, but again, for me, it was the size and scale of especially that concentrator dish and the fact, of course, that it can channel the sun’s energy into a little radius or a little, you know, 40-square-centimeter box. Wow, and it can go up to 3,000 degrees in three seconds, and really amazing feats of engineering are awe-inspiring.
Remember, awe is not always positive, glowing, feel-good stuff. It can also be something that represents great power and mystery and even things that are very scary, but I didn’t find this scary except climbing the flight of stairs was kind of scary, and you know, the whole structure and the whole setting was beautiful in its own way, although it’s not kind to birds. I don’t even want to go there and tell you about that, but you can maybe imagine that this 3,000 degrees area is not really a great place for birds to be flying.
As a creepy bonus, I got to go even higher up the hill above the solar furnace and visit an abandoned Soviet atomic bunker. It was really desolate, and it was really, it was weird to be there, and I was on top of the hill, and I could look down into these holes that I assume were for ventilation, and I didn’t go in the bunker, but just on the top of it, and it was, yeah, I’ve never really seen anything like that at all.
So that is something to marvel about for a few minutes, and maybe you can think about huge or complex works of engineering that have impressed you or that made you marvel at how clever people can be. Of course, whether or not that cleverness is put to good or bad use is always something to care about, too, and it does seem to me that the solar furnace is currently being used for relatively benign purposes, and it may help us even remember how solar power can be harnessed for science and technology, so I think that’s a good thing.
Who knows? Maybe someday something like this can produce electricity for large numbers of people. I don’t know enough about the physics of all that to say how that would work, and I don’t think that the solar furnace is the exact method of doing that, but it seems like a good idea for the engineers to be working on that as well.
Anyway, I hope that you take a look at the website that I’ll share with you and look at the fantastic photos that are there. You can read more about it, and I look forward to talking about something else next time.