MIT-Led Study Says Geothermal Energy Is Viable 291
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."
GeoWhoWhat? (Score:1, Interesting)
How is this projected? (Score:1, Interesting)
Nukes are the answer! (Score:5, Interesting)
I like how the summary states that geothermal energy generation is cost-competitive with straw men like solar power, and lumps nuclear power plant environmental impact with the other straw man, fossil fuels.
Please don't mess with the ocean gradients (Score:5, Interesting)
(and yes - using the gradients means reducing said gradients - it's that whole "laws of thermodynamics" thing Homer keeps reminding Lisa about)
Iceland! (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite part of the visit was swimming in the Blue Lagoon [art-iceland.com]... a spa built alongside the runoff from a geothermal power plant. Seriously: you're in the middle of a lava rock field, and boiling hot waste water pours from the power plant into a huge outdoor pool. In the cold air you can nearly cook yourself as you swim closer to the power plant. But it's clean enough to swim in.
There are many criteria that need to be met to build a geothermal power station at a given location, but I think the research and development needed must be far less than for some other technologies, and the end result is completely proven, so the risks are minimal.
My ideal-yet-realistic world features geothermal and nuclear supplementing each other, with the preference towards geothermal.
Cheers.
Re:Nukes are the answer! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nukes are the answer! (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Although my sarcasm detector is deeply confused by your post, I'll hazard a reply anyways. A nuclear reactor can cause a large amount of damage but only slightly more then a standard gas/coal/oil power generation plant. Events like chernobyl were basically steam explosions when the operators purposely overode every failsafe for some reason. The major difference is a nuclear power plant is that after an accident, clean up takes longer. A modern reactor like a pebblebed or candu reactor would result in less nuclear waste and is even harder to have an accident occur.
Nuclear isn't "optional" is is the next most abundant fuel after the hydrocarbons are gone. So it's either now or later. You don't have a choice not to use it.
Re:Anti-nuclear bias (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no problem having a nuclear power plant in my "backyard", and would be more then happy if it was a fast breeder reactor that could continually burn it's fuel (as to have very little waste). If you want to get (cheap, less-polluting energy) you have to give (having production close by, being rational with regards to generation method).
Most people don't get that a coal-fired electical generation facility puts out more radiation then a nuclear power plant. Go figure.
Interview with Jeff Tester (MIT chairman) Sat. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Please don't mess with the ocean gradients (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.noaa.gov/questions/question_082900.htm
Perhaps more interesting than anything else is that it states that a hurricane puts out about 1/2 the global electrical generation capacity; figure out how tiny a hurricane is compared to the ocean and you just have to be careful not to pull to much energy out in one particular place.
Re:Nukes are the answer! (Score:2, Interesting)
Stopgap solution. (Score:1, Interesting)
The way I see it is, you build the power plants you need now, based on geothermal and similar technologies that are known to be clean and safe, even though you also know that they won't last forever. You then use those power sources to develop other fuel sources. Australia has an obvious solution: solar power. Grab some of those vast, empty tracts of land, and throw some mirrors, water pipes, and so forth thereon. Hey presto, power that's almost free for the taking (just maintenance and salary costs, more than anything else, to pay.)
Now, solar power doesn't work well at night, right? So build some power storage plants. Hydro plants (pump water up when there's a power surplus, let it run down and drive turbines when there's a deficit) work well for that. So does a solid flywheel. And the storage doesn't have to be close to the power plant. So in the most extreme version of this vision, you have your hundreds of towns and cities, each with enough power storage stations to hold the energy for 24 (or 48, or 72, or whatever) hours of demand; and your solar or wind or tidal plants elsewhere, feeding those stations.
All of a sudden, you don't need an ultra reliable transmission system spanning the entire continent. If it goes down for a couple of hours, it's no big deal. Fix it, get the power flowing again, and nobody will notice. Flywheels can be built pretty much anywhere - say, underneath the roads of the cities, out of the way of water, gas and other pipelines
Solar might not be viable in the US, but the above is still a useful blueprint for any country, regardless of how the storage systems are recharged.
We have the technology already. All we need is the political willpower to make it happen.
Re:GT being used here for years..it is good (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Global Cooling (Score:2, Interesting)
No quite accurate. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:GeoWhoWhat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, there are several plants in California. The twenty-odd plants that make up the Gysers north of Santa Rosa in the Bay Area, and I understand another field in the Imperial Valley. The Gysers field has been drying up over the years, despite them trying to pump water back down into it, and I haven't really checked the status of it in years.
As much as this is an interesting technology, it's not perfect. The geothermal steam that goes through the plant is also loaded with sulfur and arsenic, which all has to be scrubbed out before the steam can be released through the air. The amount of solid sulfur removed per day was quite a bit.
Another thing to keep in mind, that this Reuters article [yahoo.com] covering the same thing mentions that there are 61 projects in the works for 5000+ megawatts. For comparison, Diablo Canyon nuclear plant has two reactors, and each can produce over 1100+ megawatts. There is way more bang for the buck in other technologies, but they all have their drawbacks.
UK does not have a perfect safety record... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why did Windscale change its name to Sellafield? read up on the history of that plant. Hint: read up on the 1957 Windscale Fire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nukes are the answer! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm interested in making the economy work the way Adam Smith intended by removing externalities.
There is an economic benefit in having a megawatt of electricity generated. So each power company should be given a subsidy for putting that megawatt into the grid.
However, there's economic costs to every form of power generation. Coal, oil, and natural gas power plants should pay for each ton of CO2 and other pollutant they emit. Nuclear power plants should pay for the disposal of their fuel and the power plant itself when it is end-of-lifed. Solar panel manufacturers should pay for the disposal or recycling of their panels at the end of life. Hell, McDonalds should pay for each pound of trash it generates with its packaging.
In this way consumers would be able to make better decisions because the true costs of them would be visible in the price. It would remove the externalities that Adam Smith said were the problem with his economic theory. Also, by paying these fees to the government and passing along the price to the consumer, we would be able to eliminate almost all taxes that we currently pay.