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The time has finally come for geothermal energy

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Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#61

Post by Retric »

zdragnar wrote: post #47
Retric wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really how that works. Also earths core is being heated from nuclear decay and tidal effects. It’s getting 10’s or TW worth of heat until the sun expands and eats the earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_internal_heat_budget

The world's total energy consumption (most of which is fossil fuels) is currently estimated at 620 exajoules, or 17TWh / year. Assuming zero growth in energy consumption (hello AI), extracting even half of that seems like it would be consequential.

10 TW * 1 year = 8,760 TWh / year. The current rate of energy production is ~42TW and slowly dropping over billions of years, so even after efficiency losses gathering 1% of what’s produced is several times current energy consumption.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#62

Post by thinkcontext »

yawaramin wrote: post #19

It's nuclear fission. It's always been nuclear fission (well, at least since the '50s) and it will continue to be until we commercialize fusion reactors. Everything else is nice to have but it's like NIH syndrome.

It could be but the US and EU have so far been unable to build commercial fission reactors without going 2x+ over budget in time and money. China is having success but even they are not projected to have nuclear account for more than single digit percentages of their generation.

Maybe SMR's, thorium, 4th gen, etc will work out, but maybe not.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#63

Post by yawaramin »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #56
yawaramin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can find someone unsophisticated to invest in a fission reactor that takes billions of dollars and 10-15 years to build Unsophisticated investors like the Chinese government? 'Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less.' https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...

They dabble in nuclear, but it is not their focus. China can do what the developed world cannot because they are a command economy with less expensive labor, which will only last for a bit longer due to their structural demographics. Unless the developed world no longer has labor regulations, developed world wages, and capital based allocation systems, my statement stands with regards to investment. If capital and la…

If France–a country known for its strong labour laws and unions–could transition to nuclear in the '70s, any Western country can do it.

Even if the Western world lags behind due to labour regulations, the cost still pays off in the long run due to overall less complex infrastructure and stable, AC baseload power. You are thinking only about the cost of building. What about the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure? Huge solar and wind farms spread out over vast areas, essentially destroying the local ecology? NPPs have a relatively tiny footprint.

Every cited source has a bias. You think 'Clean Technica' is unbiased? Come on.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#64

Post by 1970-01-01 »

quacked wrote: post #24
1970-01-01 wrote: post #4

It always has been. Our problem is switching over existing infrastructure without asinine complainers ruining the revolution. We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent. The war to have solar plants over more coal is falling back to coal thanks mostly to AI. Pushback on geothermal will arrive, I guarantee it.

> We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent. The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings. My suspicion is that incandescents were at the "end" of their product lifecycle (high quality available…

[CITATION NEEDED] They do not. If you take the mean, median, and mode of the failure lifetime for LED bulbs sold at these stores and compare them to the failure times of incandescent bulbs, I also guarantee you are empirically wrong here.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#65

Post by hcknwscommenter »

hackeraccount wrote: post #60
hodgehog11 wrote: post #3

I've always been curious why a cost-effective widespread implementation of geothermal energy has never been considered a holy grail of energy production, at least not in the public debate. Much of the discussion is so focussed on nuclear fusion, which seems so much harder and less likely to be reliable.

Harder absolutely but "less likely to be reliable"? If economically viable fusion was "cracked" what would the nature of it's unreliability even be?

all the machinery used to obtain and maintain an economically viable fusion reaction. Having worked with particle accelerators and synchrotron rings, I'll tell you that stuff breaks down all the time.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#66

Post by rconti »

Iceland's hot water was a culture shock to me in 2 ways:

1. The host at our apartment encouraged us to leave the windows cracked and the heat on for good air circulation.

2. The hot water (at the taps) has a sulfer smell, because it's (also) piped geothermal water. My host explained they also had a water heater upstairs in their home because they preferred "heated cold water" over "hot water", which is a funny distinction to those of us who do not have the latter.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#67

Post by Iwan-Zotow »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #3

I've always been curious why a cost-effective widespread implementation of geothermal energy has never been considered a holy grail of energy production, at least not in the public debate. Much of the discussion is so focussed on nuclear fusion, which seems so much harder and less likely to be reliable.

Power flow is in general very low - ca 50-60 mW/sq.m

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#68

Post by yawaramin »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #50
yawaramin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are more expensive when we keep reinventing the wheel and trying to do new things instead of just reusing proven designs. Remember that solar power also used to cost wheelbarrows of cash back in the day. When you do something repeatedly, it becomes less expensive over time. Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when t…

Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. Redwood Materials (founded by Tesla's former CTO) has already established a supply chain to ingest and recycle EV and stationary storage batteries at scale. The problem is that the hardware is lasting longer than expected, and meaningful recycling volume does not yet exist. Conversely, ~95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent s…

> Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials.

That's very clever wording. If someone glances at this sentence they might interpret it to mean that almost all solar panels are recycled. But your own citation tells a different story: https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling

> Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.

Let's compare to spent nuclear fuel, which we know for sure does not end up in landfills. I am talking about today, not some hypothetical utopian future. Today, NPP spent fuel is safely sequestered while solar panels are dumped into landfills.

> nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions

It does, it's just not built yet because it doesn't make sense to do it now. In a few decades, maybe a century we will have commercialized fusion reactors. Once we do, we switch to fusion completely and build the deep geological repositories or whatever other solution makes sense then. Or we can even recycle the spent fuel–the only thing stopping us from doing that now is misguided US politics (as usual).

> we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.

It's capex. We are investing in nuclear technology. If you have a proven design and build the reactors at scale, the costs will flatten or decline, which is obvious to anyone who knows about economies of scale.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#69

Post by toomuchtodo »

yawaramin wrote: post #63
toomuchtodo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They dabble in nuclear, but it is not their focus. China can do what the developed world cannot because they are a command economy with less expensive labor, which will only last for a bit longer due to their structural demographics. Unless the developed world no longer has labor regulations, developed world wages, and capital based allocation systems, my statement stands with regards to investment. If capital and la…

If France–a country known for its strong labour laws and unions–could transition to nuclear in the '70s, any Western country can do it. Even if the Western world lags behind due to labour regulations, the cost still pays off in the long run due to overall less complex infrastructure and stable, AC baseload power. You are thinking only about the cost of building. What about the cost of maintaining all that infrastruct…

> If France–a country known for its strong labour laws and unions–could transition to nuclear in the '70s, any Western country can do it.

France had to nationalize EDF because they could not afford the costs associated with their nuclear fleet. The 70s are 50 years in the past, and are not what the future will look like.

This is also why Spain plans to retire its remaining nuclear generators, and go all in on renewables.

EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-fleet-upkeep-wil... - November 17th, 2025

French utility EDF lifts cost estimate for new reactors to 67 billion euros - Les Echos - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l... - March 4th, 2024

Explainer-Why a French plan to take full control of EDF is no cure-all - https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/07/edf-nationalistion - July 7th, 2022

Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~1GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~28-36 months; per Electricity Maps, only 17.25% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear)

Tangentially, Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, for scale.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#70

Post by nagisa »

yawaramin wrote: post #63
toomuchtodo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They dabble in nuclear, but it is not their focus. China can do what the developed world cannot because they are a command economy with less expensive labor, which will only last for a bit longer due to their structural demographics. Unless the developed world no longer has labor regulations, developed world wages, and capital based allocation systems, my statement stands with regards to investment. If capital and la…

If France–a country known for its strong labour laws and unions–could transition to nuclear in the '70s, any Western country can do it. Even if the Western world lags behind due to labour regulations, the cost still pays off in the long run due to overall less complex infrastructure and stable, AC baseload power. You are thinking only about the cost of building. What about the cost of maintaining all that infrastruct…

The options in the '70s were much different from those of today. And for France specifically what they have underground (lots of uranium, no oil, no gas & no coal) strongly suggested exactly one way forward.
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