I’m a huge nuclear energy advocate, but if there is an even better way to get baseline power to fill in the gaps between solar and wind I am all for it. My only question would be the downsides (if any) of using the earths core to power things.
Like if every country starts slapping these things down all over the place would it even start cooling the core in any meaningful way? Would that potentially lead to problems later?
My gut says no, but I would rather at least ask the question and get laughed at than never consider it and have it bite us in the ass later.
We are insignificant flecks of nothing compared to the molton core of the earth.
Abject nothing.
I may be wrong here but I believe a lot of the heat at the core is generated from nuclear decay. so it should be self replenishing, not to mention the scale of which is probably insignificant.
hey, maybe we take enough away it stops a few volcano’s exploding :)
The total geothermal power produced within the Earth is around 47 TW, and humans currently average around 21 TW usage, which is actually pretty close. However the Earth is absolutely huge and has billions of years of thermal energy stored in it. I imagine if we massively scaled up geothermal generation we’d slowly deplete the energy near the surface and would have to go deeper, but that would probably be on a timescale of thousands of years.
if there is an even better way to get baseline power to fill in the gaps between solar and wind I am all for it
What about the fact that baseload power is much talked about in the media and among lay people, but academics have known it to be a myth for over a decade at least?
I think the biggest issues is access to heat and permeability of the rock containing the heat. According to Google the earth’s temp rises by 25°C for every km down, so you’d probably want to go at least 4 km down to get enough heat to boil water (in my experience, it isn’t 25 degrees hotter 1km down, but you get the idea. ) your also need to consider the pressure of the water and the heat you might lose as you lose pressure coming back up.
You also need to create a circuit where you pump cool water in one end and hot the other. So you can frack the rock like in a gas well, but that can cause seismicity and affect the local hydrogeology which other industries and the towns may rely on. This would enable the water to pass through the rock to soak up the heat.
I guess you’d also need a supply of water as you’d doubtless lose some water as it passes through the circuit, though I’m not sure what the retention losses are actually like and would depend heavily on the local geology
Renewables+batteries have almost wiped out the nuclear industry, now geothermal power may be about to put the final nail in that coffin. New research published in Nature magazine shows drilling times are falling so swiftly, that by 2027 geothermal power will be able to deliver a levelized cost of electricity (US$80 MWh). That’s price competitive with nuclear, but that’s not the real killer for the nuclear industry.
Although some locations (like Iceland) are very suited to geothermal, many places are just fine too. Geothermal can be built widely all over the world - more crucially, it can be built quickly and to a dependable budget.
The nuclear industry’s sole surviving argument was it could provide base load power - but so can geothermal. It will now be vastly more appealing to investors and governments than building new nuclear power, which may be an industry about to go into the last stages of its death spiral.
Good. Nuclear is massively expensive and generates so much waste that remains extremely toxic for 24,000 years.
Renewables+batteries have almost wiped out the nuclear industry
Lol.
you find someplace to put or neutralize that plutonium 235 half life of 24,000 years, then you can chuckle fucknuts
I wish we had invested more in fast breeder reactors 50 years ago, because then we’d be burning up most of our waste, and the small fraction of high grade waste we’d have left over would become safe in decades, not millennia.
Like, we only extract 10% of the energy present in our nuclear fuel, and that gives us all this fucking kiloyear half-life nuclear waste that we have to bury. The small amount of waste from a fast breeder reactor produces hideously powerful radiation, but it works its way down the decay chain fast. I think it’s safe in decades, although it might be as long as a couple of centuries. Still a long damn time, but it’s orders of magnitude better than low and medium-grade waste. ~The amount is genuinely much less, because far more of the fuel goes through e=mc². It can’t be radioactive waste if it’s been converted into energy.~ (EDIT: FBRs produce waste in quantities two order of magnitude lower than a standard light water reactor. 100x less, and it’s safe within human timescales.)
People were making good progress towards commercially viable breeder reactors in the 60s, but then we found more uranium and got better at enriching it and people just gave up. Modern attempts have failed for whatever reasons most modern reactor designs have been problematic. I feel like the climate situation might be a bit less from if people had just stuck with developing FBRs instead of being shortsighted idiots. It’s not going to help us now, so I’m really glad we’ve gotten so good at making geothermal work most places.
EDIT: my explanation for why FBRs have less waste is not correct. See the replies for a more correct explanation.
The amount is genuinely much less, because far more of the fuel goes through e=mc². It can’t be radioactive waste if it’s been converted into energy.
I’m not sure this makes sense. The conclusion might be right, but I don’t think the explanation is. Matter isn’t being annihilated in nuclear fission. The number of protons and neutrons at the start is the same as at the end. The reduced mass is a result of increased binding energy.
At least, that’s how I remember it from highschool physics. I find this stuff fascinating so I’d love to hear an explanation of how it’s wrong or overly simplified, if so.
AFAIK, the number of protons and neutrons is the same, but the overall mass is reduced because the binding energy holding the nucleus together counts towards the mass. I do not understand why the binding energy acts as mass (I dropped out of physics after moving past classical mechanics), but that’s what’s I’ve heard over the years.
So basically, you have it right, and my explanation is overly simplified because I am not very competent and forgot how this shit worked lol. I remembered that the overall mass of the waste is lower than what was put in, but I fucked up when explaining why that happens. Breeder reactors can’t do much with the fission products themselves, but the worst part of nuclear waste from a long-term storage perspective is the transuranics that get created inside of a reactor. FBRs make a lot of neutrons that can transmute those transuranics into fissile materials and then burn them up, extracting the binding energy from them and reducing the overall mass. Eventually you’re just left with fission products which are generally very short lived.
EDIT: I accidentally hit post way too soon, so I wrote most of this as an edit. Apologies for that.
Geothermal is so obvious, we’re sitting right on it.
I’ve got a geothermal heatpump at home and it’s simply amazing.How far did they have to dig and how much did it cost?
300-350ft, 22k CAD.
It’s a 300-350’ down, 8" wide, cylindrical, vertical hole. From talking to him, the same guy also does wells for water.
Took them about a morning of boring with 25ft sections. 700’ of 1.25" polypipe with a soldered U joint at the bottom. Pipe filled with a water/glycol mix.
Then the hole is backfilled with some kind of clay that acts like thermal paste.
The liquid from the loop comes back at around 7C year round. It’s much easier for a heatpump to extract heat from 7C water than from -30C air or dump heat into 7C water than into 30C air.
Anyway.All said and done, it was somewhere around $22k (CAD) including boring, heatpump, labor and getting the old furnace and tank out.
Our old oil furnace was gonna need replacement anyway, except it now costs me about $650 a year instead of 2-3k (that was when oil was half the price it is today), and now provides us with air conditioning too. About half of my current cost is because I like having the fan on all the time to move the air around the house.
Temps around here range from -35C to +35C (-30F to 95F) and the aux heat never kicks, even on colder days, except when I force it on to test it.I did already have the duct work.
No maintenance so far aside from cleaning filters, which you should do regardless.
No oil smells, no refilling, it just works.Return on investment was initially planned at about 10 years, but the price of oil has gone up since, so probably less than that by now.
But mostly, the temperature is much more constant, which I find more comfortable.
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) enable geothermal energy usage in unconventional areas by enhancing the subsurface permeability and increasing fluid flow, which is then extracted as a carrier of the thermal energy.
Is this fracking?
technical issues and concerns over induced seismicity have historically hindered the broader expansion of EGS.
Yeah, fracking…
I don’t know of recent advancements or how it relates to this application, but my understanding is that fracking is a bad idea.
Also, I’m astonished that anything costs more than nuclear.
Technically just a little bit different from fracking as used in the oil/gas industry, since it doesn’t create new fractures in the rock, it only expands existing ones. However it carries basically the same risks with at most a difference in magnitude.
There’s an interesting case in Switzerland where they tried to drill one over an historically active fault line, without first doing a seismic risk assessment.
Cold fusion is just around the corner too.
It’s been just around the corner for like 30 years
Cold fusion was an academic fraud. The actually possible but eternally around-the-corner tech is just plain fusion.
It’s amazing how little advancements we make when we don’t fund them…
Yeah but that corner is sooo close now
