4 ms·
If we can construct nuclear reactors a mile down, doesn’t that mean we can more easily drill for essentially unlimited geothermal power? I realize this is an “o
by matthewdgreen 2y ago
If we can construct nuclear reactors a mile down, doesn’t that mean we can more easily drill for essentially unlimited geothermal power? I realize this is an “obvious” question but it isn’t addressed by TFA.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoI’d imagine if it was cost competitive with existing power generation methods people would be doing that already?
- matthewdgreen 2y agoWell, I saw this a few months ago [1]. So I think maybe people are? But the key words in this article are "put a nuclear reactor one mile down" and I'm not sure we have the tech to do that either. [1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-fervo-geothermal-energy-partnership/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
- cwong430 2y agoErik Townsend talks about repurposing oil drilling technology to geothermal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwdchfjtR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwdchfjtR4
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'd suspect that you could put a far higher-capacity nuclear power plant in a deep well than you could extract geothermal energy from same. Most deep-bore geothermal proposals call for many wells to be bored, on the order of dozens to hundreds. These have a limited lifespan (a few decades), and provide relatively low amounts of energy per well (perhaps tens of MW, as compared with 100s to 1,000s of MW from a nuclear reactor). Scale and efficiency matter. (I'm not advocating for or against either alternative here, simply noting the relative scale/effectiveness.)