OT: Geothermal research

Good idea:

Yeah, problems happen occasionally:

Dave.

Go walk the blades of a windmill, as in SoCal ;-) ...Jim Thompson

How many were killed?

Zero, luckily. Shame about the 56 at Chernobyl and the thousands more of cancer huh? How many were killed in your posted German geothermal accident?

Dave.

Hardly comparable.

A city is just about to be flattened. Excellent ROI, eh? Sorry 'bout that.

I didn't say they were. The point is (in case you missed it), accidents happen with most large scale energy production systems. The German geothermal incident is no different, except that no one died, some buildings are cracked due to subsidence, and it'll cost at least a few million to fix.

Flattened??, sure you aren't exaggerating?

And what are you implying? that Geothermal research and energy production is a bad idea and should be dropped because of an accident in a German town and a few other incidents?

BTW, subsidence happens all the time with various mines and other infrastructure systems too, so nothing particually surprising about a geothermal system causing a subsidence.

Dave.

But the best one of all was

Hi,

Yes, we can't imagine that there may be any problems in future if we cool down the geological spheres under our tectonic system. Similar than noone could imagine the problems that arises by burning oil and coal, even nuclear power is soooo cheap and clean to use...

Even the water we live from could never be affected by thousands of deep wholes?

No one wants tot care about this. but the problems are obvious.

Marte

Iceland does quite well by it. Growing bananas in greenhouses inside the Arctic circle using the waste heat from their geothermal power plants. The crust is very thin there and in some places edges of natural lakes boil.

One hazard when drilling boreholes for geothermal is unexpected breakthrough into molten magma. The titanium deflectors don't look too good afterwards but seem to control things. Magma is a lot less forgiving than oil if it escapes up the borehole.

The amounts of energy available from the molten core are vast compared to the amount that we can sensibly tap and readioactive decay is still generating heat. Only economic where the crust is relatively thin.

There are plenty of cracks in the rocks already.

It is one part of the solution.

In some parts of the world it will be economic. They tend to be unpopular if the installation provokes earthquakes by drilling into a fault line as happened in Basel, Switzerland see:

Regards, Martin Brown

About the only "renewable resource" that can actually generate a goodly percentage of energy needs... ..not like fakey wind power, fakey solar power, and (worse) fakey tide power.

What do you mean by:

"and (worse) fakey tide power"

You are nuts. Any cooling would decrease power output, and the system would be shut down temporarily for warm-up. That AFAIK has never happened. Most probable scenario is for the water (or steam) to dissipate neough to become unuseable. As a matter of fact, many potential geothermal sources were capped / canned due to no or zero pressure (leaked out thousands of years ago). Success rate seems to be around one tenth of finding oil, so the cost is extreme. And the geophysical indicators are totally different and almost non-correlative; a real bummer.

It is the radioactivity of the bulk of the earth which is slightly more abundant than your puny needs, that creates the heat (think molten rock which is slightly warmer than a glass of water).

On a sunny day (Tue, 2 Feb 2010 12:04:07 +1100) it happened "David L. Jones" wrote in :

Recently a part of a German village got severely damaged by quakes or waterflow resulting from drilling holes to get 'cheap' geothermal energy. The project was cancelled. Same in the US where a similar project was cancelled because of earthquake danger.

danger.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. OTOH there are places where it can work very well indeed - at least to provide copious amounts of hot water and low grade heat. But it takes ideal sites and/or sophisticated drilling methods to generate high grade superheated steam.

Iceland leads the way in this technology - very impressive it is too. There has to be some payback for living next door to live volcanoes.

Regards, Martin Brown

odly

He means that he is a right-winger, and believes all the crap he finds on denialist web-sites.

I imagine that his objection to wind power is that the wind doesn't blow all the time - which doesn't seem to worry the Danes or the Germans, since it does seem to be blowing in enough places within the northern European grid at any given time to keep everybody happy.

He will have similar objections to solar power, which isn't much help at night (except for the variants that melt salts during the day and use them as heat sources overnight to keep the steam turbines spinning).

Tide power is much tlaked about, but the only serious installation is in France

It does seem to work, but it is outside the contintenal United States and thus presumably doesn't register on the right-wing sensibilities.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Yeah, and like I said subsidence happens *all the time* with other forms of energy mining too. It's a risk of digging into the ground for anything.

Are you another one of these people who think Geothermal should be abandoned because there were a couple of localised accidents? If you apply the same logic to coal, it would have been stopped almost 100 years ago.

Dave.

On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:33:51 +1100) it happened "David L. Jones" wrote in :

No, I am not against geo thermal, and for nuke power, and do not care about global warming. Fact remains that so far geo thermal has little real stuff to show for it.

That's because scant money has gone into in the past, but thankfully things are changing, and even Google is in on the act:

Iceland have made good use of what they have:

Dave.