Could Geothermal Power Plants Become a Source of Lithium? (fastcompany.com) 173
"Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheap solar and wind power, despite its proven potential," argues a new article in Fast Company. "But that may soon change — for an unexpected reason.
"Geothermal technologies are on the verge of unlocking vast quantities of lithium from naturally occurring hot brines beneath places like California's Salton Sea, a two-hour drive from San Diego..." As a geologist who works with geothermal brines and an energy policy scholar, we believe this technology can bolster the nation's critical minerals supply chain at a time when concerns about the supply chain's security are rising. Geothermal power plants use heat from the earth to generate a constant supply of steam to run turbines that produce electricity. The plants operate by bringing up a complex saline solution located far underground, where it absorbs heat and is enriched with minerals such as lithium, manganese, zinc, potassium, and boron. Geothermal brines are the concentrated liquid left over after heat and steam are extracted at a geothermal plant. In the Salton Sea plants, these brines contain high concentrations — about 30% — of dissolved solids.
If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand. Three operators at the Salton Sea geothermal field are in various stages of designing, constructing, and testing pilot plants for direct lithium extraction from the hot brines. At full production capacity, the 11 existing power plants near the Salton Sea, which currently generate about 432 megawatts of electricity, could also produce about 20,000 metric tons of lithium metal per year. At current prices, the annual market value of this metal would be more than $5 billion....
Geothermal power has the ability to complement solar and wind energy as a baseload power source — it is constant, unlike sunshine and wind — and to provide energy and mineral security. It could also offer a professional bridge for oil, gas, and coal employees to transition into the clean energy economy. The industry could benefit from policies like risk mitigation funds to lessen drilling exploration costs, grant programs to demonstrate innovations, long-term power contracts, or tax incentives.
Adding the production of critical metals like lithium, manganese, and zinc from geothermal brines could provide geothermal electrical power operators a new competitive advantage and help get geothermal onto the policy agenda.
"Geothermal technologies are on the verge of unlocking vast quantities of lithium from naturally occurring hot brines beneath places like California's Salton Sea, a two-hour drive from San Diego..." As a geologist who works with geothermal brines and an energy policy scholar, we believe this technology can bolster the nation's critical minerals supply chain at a time when concerns about the supply chain's security are rising. Geothermal power plants use heat from the earth to generate a constant supply of steam to run turbines that produce electricity. The plants operate by bringing up a complex saline solution located far underground, where it absorbs heat and is enriched with minerals such as lithium, manganese, zinc, potassium, and boron. Geothermal brines are the concentrated liquid left over after heat and steam are extracted at a geothermal plant. In the Salton Sea plants, these brines contain high concentrations — about 30% — of dissolved solids.
If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand. Three operators at the Salton Sea geothermal field are in various stages of designing, constructing, and testing pilot plants for direct lithium extraction from the hot brines. At full production capacity, the 11 existing power plants near the Salton Sea, which currently generate about 432 megawatts of electricity, could also produce about 20,000 metric tons of lithium metal per year. At current prices, the annual market value of this metal would be more than $5 billion....
Geothermal power has the ability to complement solar and wind energy as a baseload power source — it is constant, unlike sunshine and wind — and to provide energy and mineral security. It could also offer a professional bridge for oil, gas, and coal employees to transition into the clean energy economy. The industry could benefit from policies like risk mitigation funds to lessen drilling exploration costs, grant programs to demonstrate innovations, long-term power contracts, or tax incentives.
Adding the production of critical metals like lithium, manganese, and zinc from geothermal brines could provide geothermal electrical power operators a new competitive advantage and help get geothermal onto the policy agenda.
Doesn't scale (Score:2)
You can't scale a geothermic installation up or down with demand. You also cannot expand an existing setup - you need a coastline or a geiser. So it's "constant" and that makes it kinda useless.
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I recall an old study where they estimated the maximum potential yield of renewable sources of energy and geothermal and wave energy did not rank high. It may make sense on a local scale, not every region should use the same sources of energy, but overall the impact of geothermical energy will be small. Unless there is some mayor futuristic breakthrough allowing to access large volumes of heat.
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There are ways to vary geothermal input, and consequently output, to match demand. Even if a plant is not designed to do so, base load can be met, and, if absolutely necessary, excess heat can be wasted.
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We can use more than one source of energy.
If your home sits in the sunlight, you can get solar, if it is shaded it may not be the best option.
You may live near a stream that runs all year, you can build a generator on it to power your housing block, or it might freeze over every year so it isn't a good option.
We primarily convert energy into electrical energy, with then goes into electronics which makes its output rather consistent, and can be shared. It is not like I need to buy a phone charger for areas
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Only if you have a roof. Or, to be a little more precise, a roof which is not someone else's property. There are 4 different owners between the top of my apartment and the sky.
Understanding "location" to include "grid", yes. And, are you including battery storage under "chemical" in your list?
We have a test plant close to my place (Score:2)
Close to my place we have research plant. Only 0.5MW electricity, but a hot water supply for the police stations in the town (for heating, not consumption).
However: the lithium mined that way is enough for 20,000 EV batteries per year!
" battery-grade lithium "...? (Score:3)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I count 14 isotopes, with 2 stable and 2 with half-lives that are actually long enough to be of any importance (so 4 different types of lithium that potentially matter).
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I count 14 isotopes, with 2 stable and 2 with half-lives that are actually long enough to be of any importance (so 4 different types of lithium that potentially matter).
If you're building a fusion bomb, which isotope you use matters. If you're making batteries, all the isotopes you can mine are the same: they are chemically identical. For batteries, there's indeed only one type of lithium. (to quote Spock: "a difference that makes no difference is no difference.")
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If you're using all of one isotope, your packing is going to be uniform. If you're using a mix of isotopes, your packing will have lots of holes and irregularities, which is going to impact the electrical properties. Resistance will go up, for a start.
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If you're using all of one isotope, your packing is going to be uniform. If you're using a mix of isotopes, your packing will have lots of holes and irregularities, which is going to impact the electrical properties. Resistance will go up, for a start.
No. Isotope shift is such a tiny effect it has no impact of crystal packing, to start, and even if it did, the resistance of the lithium itself is not an important factor in the resistance of a lithium battery.
When you learn something about solid state chemistry, get back to me.
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That may be so, but that's not related to whether there's one type of lithium (as Faxe claims). The purity of the lithium and the ease with which impurities can be removed are obviously very important factors, but that wasn't the point raised in the post I was replying it. If it had been, then I'd have accepted it, just as I'm accepting yours.
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They're talking about refinability/smeltability. How easy it is to turn into a pure metal. That needs to be cost effective too.
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There are other uses than just batteries. Still being able to get non-battery grade lithium can free the demand of battery-grade lithium, used for non-batteries.
In many ways, this is reliable old tech (Score:2)
A former neighbour had a heat pump installed back in the mid-70s. Our houses were identical...well, one was the mirror image of the other. Their heating bill was always about 10% less than ours. I drive by that house a few times a year, and there's been no remodeling or anything. One of these days, I'm going to stop and ask the owner if the thing is still installed and working. If so, that would be pretty close to half a century of slightly cheaper energy...which adds up.
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I suggest you move your keyboard about 5mm to the left :)
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Not to mention that heat pump technology is substantially better than it was 50 years ago. Particularly for new construction, it is (in most climates) the cheapest way to heat and cool a house, even after amortizing the higher upfront cost.
But a lot depends on the
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As a heat pump is just an air conditioner with a reversing valve, and maybe slightly differently sized components so that they work better in "reverse" than they otherwise would, and an AC typically lasts 10-20 years but that means it can last a lot longer with maintenance, or just if it was spectacularly well built. And since pretty much everything is being built ever less solidly, the odds of that are better if it's older. Companies just keep skimping on materials and even fasteners to increase profit.
Of
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I got a heat pump in 2021, so far I have saved about 50% in my heating costs (not including the amount I am paying for the unit). I live up in the North East, they don't work well when it is below -5f, however I didn't get the one rated for the extreme cold, as my home has alternate sources of heat.
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... so far I have saved about 50% in my heating costs (not including the amount I am paying for the unit). .
Out of curiosity, what did you use prior to the heat pump?
Same in Southwestern Germany (Score:2)
In Southwestern Germany, there are already some geothermal plants (in the upper Rhine plain rift).
Some of the existing ones will be retrofitted with lithium extractors, and additional future geothermal plants are likely to have lithium extractors installed from the beginning./p>https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/03/28/0418236/could-geothermal-power-plants-become-a-source-of-lithium#
Geothermal is a Bad Idea (Score:2)
Geothermal is a bad idea for the same reason oil is: It's a finite resource, and over-use will lead to catastrophic planetary changes.
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Geothermal is a bad idea for the same reason oil is: It's a finite resource, and over-use will lead to catastrophic planetary changes.
Is this intended as some weird form of sarcasm?
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Technically true. but infeasibly large. A brief, conservative view [wired.com] indicates that, even at a 10% efficiency rate, we'd have ~17B *years* of power to draw down the core temp by ~900 degrees -- and doesn't account for the re-heating of the core by ongoing fissioning of heavy elements in the interim. Or that the Sun's lifetime is "only" estimated at another ~5B years; meaning that we'd have to triple the power requirements in the first estimate, move to 100% geothermal power worldwide (zero hydro, solar, win
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While technically true, it seems very unlikely that enough geothermal plants could ever be built to have any sort of noticeable impact.
The largest geothermal power plant in the USA, at The Geysers near Calistoga, suffered reduced output and they restored it by pumping primary treated sewage into the ground. This has the effect of moving stuff around between where the water is pumped and where it comes out, and this particular geyser is known to produce a lot of toxics including radioactives as it is one of the most volcanically active regions on the planet. In the past they used to wash the turbines and put the slurry in drums, then eventu
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I'd say it raises a question about whether this is a good idea, which I suggest will be site-dependent. Having to deal with radioactives changes up the whole situation from one where you don't, or at least where concentrations are low. This issue wasn't even mentioned in TFA, so I figured I should mention it.
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but the it sounds like in this case it was more a question of not properly disposing of toxic waste. Wouldn't be the first time in US when cutting corners resulted in environmental damage.
Absolutely. Won't be the last time either. Now they are building a toxic layer cake on site instead, they have a pit that they wash the turbines over and then they just let it dry out, then cover it over with a concrete cap, and raise the perimeter wall when necessary.
The point though was that while geothermal is renewable, the process of renewing production can have negative outputs. Pumping the water into the ground has also increased seismicity in the region, and there's a fund for paying the nearby prop
Hmm...Geothermal has usually be marginal, but... (Score:2)
This could improve the profitability of geothermal plants enough to make plants that were only marginally worthwhile be "quite worthwhile".
So expect a lot more interest in geothermal plants.
That said, the places that are suitable are quite limited, so there won't be a real boom.
It still won't be cheaper (Score:2)
Even if the US moves forward in a Manhattan Project like fashion to get domestic lithium mining going, it still won't make the technology any cheaper. A lead-acid battery of a given capacity is three to four times cheaper than a lithium battery of the same capacity and that doesn't include the battery management circuity needed to keep it healthy.
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Well maybe that wouldn't be the case if lithium was as cheap as lead. Also you can charge/discharge lithium batteries from 100% to zero and back over and over to make use of the full capacity. Not so with lead-acid.
"The total cost of ownership, including charging costs, of the RB100 was $1,925. That’s 51% less than the Gel battery, the most economical of the three lead-acid batteries."
https://justcatamarans.net/lit... [justcatamarans.net]
More info about the tech (Score:2)
It looks to me like the scheme hinges on the economics of extracting the lithium from the brine, which may not be much of a stretch.
https://finfeed.com/features/e... [finfeed.com]
"There are a number of technology companies which market the ability to perform DLE with high lithium recovery including Lilac Solutions, Tenova Advanced Technologies, Adionics, EnergySource Minerals, and others, some of which will work well for geothermal-lithium projects."
Fast?? Company? Slow. Even GM is already there. (Score:2)
GM announced its investment in California geothermal with Li extraction the middle of last year. So this is "Fast" company? e.g.: https://www.metaltechnews.com/... [metaltechnews.com]
Salton Sea: trigger point for San Andreas fault (Score:2)
Minor disturbances at Salton Sea have caused major disruptions in California's major fault several times in the past. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this (for those with a morbid curiosity) is that it begins with a minor shake near the lake and grows continuously as it spreads north and west toward Los Angeles, hitting Hollywood especially hard (oh no!). Scientists are focused on the Sea with this potential disaster in mind, and they are debating the results of disturbances such as an empty Sea, a
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Got some kinda link I can peruse about these ecologies which aren't at the bottom of the sea? The search results are conclusively dominated by same.
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Got some kinda link I can peruse about these ecologies which aren't at the bottom of the sea? The search results are conclusively dominated by same.
Yes. [nrel.gov] You need to search on "geothermal potential map" and similar.
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Oh, so you were just rambling about something unconnected to the story, got it
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Geothermal produces only about 0.4% of US electricity. [eia.gov]
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On the contrary. Geothermal is mature technology.
And it has some mature problems. I don't dislike it, but those pipes bringing up that witches brew of elements have a tendency to end up blocked with deposits The best example is at researchgate.net . DDG "clogged geothermal pipe. First image hit. Sorry for the confusion - they won't let me get to the picture separately and I think you would need a membership.
The stuff clogging the inside of those pipes is the goodies they want to extract. Perhaps highly insulated pipes so the minerals make their way to
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On the contrary. Geothermal is mature technology.
When did combustion power plants become a mature technology? Combustion power plants were online in 1880, so probably mature by 1960, right?
No, huge increases in efficiency with combined cycle plants came along after 1960 (the very first such plant was built in 1961) and not widely adopted until the 1980s and later with many innovations to maximize efficiency down to even the most recent decade. They are still making significant improvements that increase efficiency and cost efficiency.
Similarly, the existe
The "ring of fire", aka Pacific rim (Score:2)
We pretty much know where geothermal is. Same place as earthquakes and volcanoes, which are spots where the geothermal pokes through the surface. It's called the "ring of fire".
It goes from Baja south to Peru.
On the north side, it goes to from far northern California / Oregon to Alaska, across to the Russian coast, and south through the Islands - Japan, Taiwan, Phillipines.
Of course there are only certain spots around that ring that make sense, that are feasible. If you see a volcano, that's pretty much yo
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So why can't we use Geothermal? Once we convert energy into electrical energy, it becomes very interchangeable. So we should make sure we have multiple sources of energy, available.
My home has 3 sources of heat, Oil Heat, Electrical Heat Pump Heat, and Wood Pellets. The latter two I had added to my home later. I very rarely use Oil Heat, only when the temperature drops below -10f, however the single wood pellet stove does a good job at heating the home, and the Heat Pump helps offset the amount of wood p
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In absolute terms. In relative terms, Iceland produces about a quarter of its power with geothermal energy. But I think that maybe JanSand's point was that the Pacific rim isn't the only tectonic boundary on the globe.
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There's simply not enough lithium to support a global transition to renewables + storage but Sodium OTOH is massively abundant and it looks like the tech has matured enough: https://youtu.be/cHNELRnJ_4Y [youtu.be]
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Perhaps you should look up the composition of the earth instead of making an idiot of yourself.
You literally can build a bridge from earth to moon out of pure lithium.
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Yeah, because money is infinite and energy is infinite. Who's the idiot?
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Perhaps you should look up the composition of the earth instead of making an idiot of yourself.
You literally can build a bridge from earth to moon out of pure lithium.
But don't allow the part on earth to get water on it.
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There's simply not enough lithium to support a global transition to renewables + storage but Sodium OTOH is massively abundant and it looks like the tech has matured enough: https://youtu.be/cHNELRnJ_4Y [youtu.be]
And we'd be idiots to attempt to use lithium as the driver for renewables. I've done a BOE on Nickel-Iron batteries for solar or wind storage. Cheap and abundant, very tough, and while not technically the best batteries, suffering lesser energy density and charge retention - which doesn't really matter much, build a few more batteries per installation, and their retention is plenty good enough for the purpose - heavy, which who cares - they'd be sitting on concrete pads. below the towers or beside the ar
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I've done a BOE on Nickel-Iron batteries for solar or wind storage. Cheap and abundant,
But they have all the drawbacks (some of which you list) and as far as I can tell they are not cheap compared to Lithium. For example, this site [oasismontana.com] lists the Iron Edison 12v/100Ah battery at $1210 (the actual Iron Edison site won't give me a price). I can go on Amazon and get a 100Ah LiFePO4 battery for $400-$600 or go on Alibaba and get one for $200-$300. NiFe batteries are reportedly tough but are they really tough enough to be worth 4x the price? Particularly with their poor current charge/discharge cap
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+1 you get it, if we want a lot more storage for renewables then lithium is not it, what we want is: cheap, abundant and easily recyclable materials / elements.
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The word rare does not mean what you think it means. Lithium is quite plentyful.
Lithium is 44th in abundance in the universe.
Iron is 6th in abundance.
Nickel is 13th in abundance.
https://www.angelo.edu/faculty... [angelo.edu]
I the earth's crust: Lithium 33rd in abundance.
Iron 4th in abundance.
Nickel 28th in abundance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Now let's see - Is relatively rare a useable term? Yes it is. Compared to iron? Yes. Compared to Nickel? Yes.
In addition, it is not uniformly distributed. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
I meant what I meant, and the numbers agree
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The word rare does not mean what you think it means. Lithium is quite plentyful.
It is not about how plentiful it is. It is about how easy it is to get too. There is a large deposit of lithium in the middle of the United States, possibly more than any other place in the world. I'm too lazy to actually look up where it is.
But this deposit is on land sacred to First Nations, it is in a wild life preserve, and getting using current technics will pollute the ground water that people in the area depend on. So, for the foreseeable future this deposit is off the table.
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The reserves of Lithium are small this is well known, Lithium is not a viable long term solution to energy storage needs even for just cars. Humans are major fucking stupid when it comes to not raping the Earth until it's dead though. There is a pervasive dogma that resources are practically infinite and it just takes a bit more money to get the rest out, the idea that anything can run out appears to be alien to many people. The shit is going to hit the fan so bad later this century, billions will starve.
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The reserves of Lithium are small this is well known
No, they are not small. And as the summary already is pointing out: the huge amounts of Lithium are easy to exploit in geo thermal plants.
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Known in production reserves might be small. That is basically irrelevant to whether extraction can be scaled up to meet a future demand. I will at this point remind you that Lithium is the third most common element in the universe... There is more than enough lithium in the oceans to meet human demand for the stuff for ever.
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Known in production reserves might be small. That is basically irrelevant to whether extraction can be scaled up to meet a future demand. I will at this point remind you that Lithium is the third most common element in the universe... There is more than enough lithium in the oceans to meet human demand for the stuff for ever.
Funny how we get off on these tangents. Yeah, we can figure out how to get at and extract lithium.
But it's loony to try to use Li batteries to augment things like solar and wind. Yes, it will work. The process of storing, releasing, and recharging batteries is pretty simple. Could even do it with simple lead acid batteries. But a Nickel-Iron array will function just as well as a Lithium array. And the Nickel - Iron array is no where near as prone to those exciting pink colored kabooms. They are tough
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How common it is is irrelevant, the price of extraction is the important factor.
Lithium [Re:Geothermal potentials] (Score:2)
The reserves of Lithium are small this is well known.
Essentially meaningless. "Reserves" means deposits that have been mapped and assayed. But until 2016, lithium usage was very small; nobody was looking for lithium sources (see https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com] ). When you don't look for something, it's not surprising you don't see it.
When demand goes up, it takes a while for new supplies to reach the market.
Will new sources be brought online? Yes, probably-- that has happened many times in history. Stay tuned.
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Lithium is already expensive, demand will be limited by that expense. You're another person that seems to believe that somehow magically there will always be more resources and the price for them will always be paid.
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I am not technically sophisticated to evaluate the role of lithium supply economics as critical to support geothermal energy sources but the general availability of this form of energy and its possible replacement of fossil fuels in a source not destructive of the planet's condition to support life seems to me to be worthy of exploration and, perhaps, vigorous support.
But hey - you write quite pretty!P MrL0G1C is correct that Lithium isn't the fix, but it isn't a good fix anyhow. That would be a waste of lithium where other storage battery systems would be suited better. And Lithium batteries are fragile.
But if we can extract Lithium and other elements from Geothermal power generation's brine, we should. At this time, that brine ends up clogging the delivery piping, as it deposits on the walls of that pipework. So cleaner pipes, and Lithium will always be in demand
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I have read elsewhere that there is a variable in the thickness of the planet's crust where there is a difference in variability of the best areas to drill
This is 100% correct. However, this may change in the near future this may change by using an old idea for a new purpose, record-breaking deep-earth drilling. [slashdot.org]
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both demand materials and manufacturing that have a negative impact on energy and materials consumption
Excavation is an issue but the other problem is disposal/recycling. On top of that you have NIMBYs who will block/slow deployments.
Does deep drilling upset stabilities in the Earth's crust?
With traditional drilling, yes. However, the gyrotron based drilling is actually burning the rock away at millions of degrees. Doing this means it effectively creates a glass tube as it descends without the vibrations of a traditional drill. I'm no geologist but it seems like this would avoid upsetting anything. That said, even if it causes earthquakes, we need an obscene a
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seems to me to require far more time than global warming would permit
It depends on how many drills you build. If you built 10K drills then you could drill all 30K in a year's time.
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It's fortunate then that the existing plants around the Salton Sea are adequate for U.S. needs 10 times over.
Developing those for lithium extraction will lower prices enough to discourage development of currently undisturbed places.
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If I open up my GIS (GeoMapApp, geomapapp.org) I can get access to a database of exactly these measurements - well, actually a good half-dozen databases answering more precisely formulated questions than yours. It's not as if we (geologists) haven't been doing this since the 1920s - probably earlier, in non-industrial levels (all it takes is two good clocks, a geophone, a colleague, and a box of sticks of dynamite).
The big problem with geothermal exploitation
Re: Geothermal potentials (Score:2)
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It's not a debate about whether we mine it, it's a question of how. The mineral extraction industry as a whole has been poorly regulated & has been allowed to do irreversible damage to our environment on local & global scales, hence the climate crisis we're in right now. We need to do it better & in more controlled ways than previously. That means requiring mineral extraction companies to follow 'good practices' to ensure that we don't swap one set of problems for another.
Which usually amounts to doing whatever the #$#$^& they usually do, just writing off regular cheques to the greenie organizations that would protest otherwise.
Re: Geothermal potentials (Score:2)
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Re: Oooh (Score:2)
Actually those bunch tend to be in favor of geothermal as much as they are nuclear. Hydro power as well. They tend to be outspoken against solar and wind power because they're unreliable.
Re: Oooh (Score:2)
Actually those bunch tend to be in favor of geothermal as much as they are nuclear. Hydro power as well. They tend to be outspoken against solar and wind power because they're unreliable -- you basically are at the whims of the weather.
The one and only reliable power source that doesn't depend on having just the right geography and weather, is nuclear.
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Nuclear is clean, safe, reliable, and ridiculously expensive.
Until you fix the cost, the other attributes don't matter.
Vogtle hits new delays, costs surge to $30B [eenews.net]
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And it does not produce Lithium as side product :D
At least not non radioactive ones.
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Nuclear is clean, safe, reliable, and ridiculously expensive.
Until you fix the cost, the other attributes don't matter.
Sure, if you let green morons heap on regulation to make it so.
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So you want nuclear to be Dirty, dangerous, unpredictable, but cheap.
Chernobyl vs Three Mile Island. Was a difference between little regulations vs a lot more regulations. Sure there was a problem but the scope of the issue were orders of magnitude better.
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> Chernobyl was all about too much governmental regulation, in the form of party apparatchiks breathing down the necks of regular engineers who knew that what they were doing could end up in tragedy. Without government pushing the engineers to speed up the tests and conduct them when they'd be unsafe, so it'd look nice for propaganda purposes, there'd be no disaster.
That is not regulation, but quite the opposite. Had they have had effective regulation in place, they could have stopped non-complying gove
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> Chernobyl was all about too much governmental regulation, in the form of party apparatchiks breathing down the necks of regular engineers who knew that what they were doing could end up in tragedy. Without government pushing the engineers to speed up the tests and conduct them when they'd be unsafe, so it'd look nice for propaganda purposes, there'd be no disaster.
That is not regulation, but quite the opposite. Had they have had effective regulation in place, they could have stopped non-complying government meddling and stayed within the safe, regulated parameters of operation.
Non-complying government, LOL. In case you didn't know, the government makes the regulation. These are the literal guys who can truthfully say "I AM THE LAW".
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Chernobyl was caused by a flawed reactor design covered up by the USSR central committees so that it wasn't even known about by the reactor operators combined with an idiot in charge whose reaction to a completely unexpected(given all the information known to the people running the plant) series of events thrown out by the reactor was to demand more power instead of immediately shutting down and figuring out what the fuck was going on. It had jack fucking all to do with the regulatory environment.
Re: Oooh (Score:2)
Basically Chernobyl was cheap. The USSR kept its power structure based on the idea that everything they have is the best in the world, not the cheapest in the world. People knew it was bullshit, but couldn't say anything and so it gets covered up. When you accidentally vent large quantities of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere though, that gets a little hard to cover up.
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Nuclear is not clean orsafe,but can be made reliable, and ridiculously expensive.
FTFY.
You can argue all day long that nuclear can be made safe or that it's "dirtyness" is manageable. I'm still going to argue against it, but at least it'll be a fair fight -- you bring an argument, I bring one, you refute one, I refute another.
But outright claiming that it's "clean" and "safe"... sorry, that's glossy flyer marketing style speech, not even useful as toilet paper.
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The reason people keep building old reactor designs is because they are proven over long periods of time. Any new design is a huge risk. They could throw billions at it and then find it doesn't work as expected. In fact they have done that repeatedly, and found severe unexpected problems. Even EDF's relatively conservative new design has just encountered expensive flaws at the first plant being built in China, while identical plants are under construction in Europe.
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Clean? We still having figured out where to dispose of the nasty bi-product of nuclear energy.
Cost? Until we figure out where to dispose of nuclear waste, we don't have a TCO of nuclear energy.
My ex gets a lifetime of additional health screenings due to her proximity to Fukushima in 2011. I might be a bit biased when discussing nuclear energy, but not for good reason.
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Sorry about your ex.
I really don't think it was ever a good idea to build a nuclear power plant in an area that is known to be prone to earthquakes and/or tsunami. But that's not a nuclear problem. I wouldn't put an oil refinery, a chemical plant, a landfill or anything else that contains a lot of potential harmful pollutants in such a place.
Likewise I wouldn't judge the overall safety or usefulness of nuclear power plants based on what happened at Fukushima. There's plenty of land available where such thi
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It is a good source of energy, however there is one giant drawback. Radio Active Waste will need to be managed and cared for thousands of years.
Lets just say the Aztec's had nuclear power, They buried their nuclear waste in what is now considered prime real-estate lets just say in California or Texas,. Now the waste will still be need to be managed, so California or Texas will be begging the federal government every years for funding to treat nuclear waste, created by a civilization long sense died out.
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It's the cleanest form of mass scale energy production. Geothermal is cleaner, but it sucks at being scaled up because drilling is expensive even where the heat source is shallower underground and is far enough down in most areas that setting up the heat exchange is untenable. There's currently a company claiming to have managed to change that, but we'll see if it pans out in the next decade.
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I live in a nation that can't maintain their infrastructure to prevent bridges from collapsing. And the media here [foxnews.com] reports on it [wsj.com] with less than a child's understanding of cause and effect.
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Depends on what you are classifying as nuclear. Yes the sun is a nuclear reactor and it is the cleanest form of energy we currently have. Unfortunately to harvesting that energy for practical uses isn't as clean and there is an extra expense in doing the conversion.
If by nuclear you are referring to fission nuclear reactors then you would be quite wrong to say that it is the cleanest form of energy production. A simple water wheel in a stream or river is much cleaner. Geothermal is much cleaner. Wind energy
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Before the discovery of radioactivity, scientists couldn't figure out why it wasn't a lot more frozen than it is. Natural radioactive decay keeps it hot.
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Before the discovery of radioactivity, scientists couldn't figure out why it wasn't a lot more frozen than it is. Natural radioactive decay keeps it hot.
A garbled and mostly untrue account.
Lord Kelvin calculated a false age of the Earth based on the then estimated crustal thickness and heat leakage rate that found it to be only a few tens of millions of years old even though geologists had concluded from erosion and sedimentation that it must be at least hundreds of millions of years old. But he made a fundamental error even by classical physics -his calculation was based on heat conduction alone, ignoring the process of convection that brings up heat from
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Can't tell if serious? The earth's interior is heated by gradual decay of radioactive elements in the core and mantle. It's a giant thermonuclear reactor. We couldn't deplete that even if we tried.
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Can't tell if serious? The earth's interior is heated by gradual decay of radioactive elements in the core and mantle. It's a giant thermonuclear reactor. We couldn't deplete that even if we tried.
About half of it is relic heat from Earth's formation. That half that is not is not "thermonuclear", it is just radioactive decay heat.
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