MIT-Led Study Says Geothermal Energy Is Viable

amigoro writes to tell us about a study for the US Department of Energy, led by MIT, indicating that geothermal energy could account for 10% of energy production in the US by 2050. The study concludes that geothermal is proven, could impose markedly lower environmental impacts than fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants, and is likely to be cost-competitive with the alternatives. This coverage in LiveScience points out how big a player geothermal already is in the US: "The United States is the world's biggest producer of geothermal energy. Nafi Toksöz, a geophysicist at MIT, noted that the electricity produced annually by geothermal plants now in use in California, Hawaii, Utah, and Nevada is comparable to that produced by solar and wind power combined."

Iceland

[0racle]

Iceland will be very happy to hear this.

You heard it here first

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't come crying to me when we cool the planet core off and we end up in another ice age.

This sounds dangerous.

[Anonymous Coward]

But won't stealing energy from the core [imdb.com] of the earth slow [blogspot.com] it down, causing the planet's electromagnetic field to rapidly deteriorate, killing us all?!

Just wondering.

Re:Nukes are the answer!

[Chandon Seldon]

Ahh... I see you suggest modern nuclear power plants.

Did you know that archaic nuclear power plants produce a whole bunch of "unusable" nuclear "waste"? Further, every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction!

Re:Nukes are the answer!

[DilbertLand]

Pass the aluminum foil please.....

Re:Nukes are the answer!

[dreddnott]

Make up your mind! Are you an environmentalist or a neoconservative? I can't tell by the rhetoric.

Re:Yes, yes we have a lot of resources

[ThanatosMinor]

Because you know as soon as we start to depend on geothermal energy, we're going to have to deal with property disputes from mole men and lawsuits from members of SPECTRE whose secret subterranean headquarters are being leeched of their oh-so-important liquid hot magma.

Re:Iceland

[nwbvt]

It must be nice to live right on top of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and a volcanic hotspot and get tons of free energy.

Well, except when one of the dozens of active volcanoes erupts, of course...

Re:Believe me ! I am NOT a Google SHILL !!

[NoseBag]

That's truly nice to know, Anonymous Coward.

As I continue down the long pathway of life, meandering here and there, never knowing what might be around the next bend, I can take pleasure and comfort in knowing that - somewhere out there - there is an anomymous coward that is not a Google shill. Perhaps I shall pass this bit of arcania on to my children - and then to their children in turn - until at some point in the far distant future it becomes a family legend. Thank you, anonymous coward, thank you.

Re:Anti-nuclear bias

[Anonymous Coward]

and the only problem with "NIMBY" when your dealing with nuclear power is if it does go wrong it could well end up in MBY even though it went wrong in YBY, or TBY or SEBY, or ABY.

NIABY!

Re:Yes, yes we have a lot of resources

[Jarnin]

We've got a lot of resources and a lot of needs, why do we have to favor Geothermal over Nuclear or Solar or Wind? Why can we invest heavily into all of them?

People like one solution for all their problems. 3000 years ago, folks had to pray to one god for good health and another god for plentiful harvests and good weather. Now-a-days most folks all pray to the same god for everything regardless of the situation, and they like it that way. They don't want to have to weigh benifits of going one route or another. They don't want to have to think about their options at all.

Maybe one day we'll be able to get past the "one solution to all our problems" fixation we have, but it won't happen any day soon.

Iceland will be pissed.

[r00t]

This is no different from an oil well drilled into some other country's oil. Iceland already claimed the Earth's core. The USA is basically stealing from Iceland. You may think the Earth's core is under the USA, but it's really under Iceland!

Re:Unfortunately, there is opposition to this too

[ductonius]

... sparse network of pipes... a large number of wells... aggregate the output at a central set of turbines.

So, what you're saying is that the geothermal power station is a series of tubes?

OH NO!

[angst_ridden_hipster]

Don't they know they'll end up cooling off the inside of the earth???

Then what will we do?

We'll have to have giant heat-exchanger space elevators circulating water/ice to cool the atmosphere back down, and we'll pump all our radioactive waste down deep to warm it back up in there.

er.

Nevermind :)