Google Releases Geothermal Potential Map of the US 401
a_hanso writes "The Google funded Enhanced Geothermal Systems research at the Southern Methodist University has produced a coast-to-coast geothermal potential map of the United States. Having invested over $10 million on geothermal energy, Google seems to believe that it is our best bet at kicking the oil habit (especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)."
Centralia PA (Score:3)
Preliminary data released from the SMU study in October 2010 revealed the existence of a geothermal resource under the state of West Virginia equivalent to the state’s existing (primarily coal-based) power supply.
Sure that's not Centralia PA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org]
I have been using Centralia's zip code 17927 for years for places that don't deserve my real address. Back when Radio Shack used to collect demographic information every time someone bought a battery, that sort of thing.
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except false information is often trivially easy to weed out, especially if it's repeated.
Refusing gives them data that their customers aren't happy.
OTOH RS use was to track what customers bought in what zip code so they could better server the specific needs of that area.
And they said I was crazy to live on a volcano rim (Score:3)
Still think the gases are so bad NOW, Sheila?!?!?
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These radioactive "gases" like Radon are indeed worse, are you lucky and out of the 'zone'?
USGS Radon map
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/radon/rnus.html [usgs.gov]
neat (Score:2)
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About the same as you throwing a small ice chip into a bonfire. Your incredible lack of scale is ASTOUNDING. If you could magically 'pump' heat from the core to the surface or vice versa, there's enough heat energy in the core to LIQUEFY the surface of the earth for thousands of years. Also, the amount we'd be tapping into is an infinitesimal fraction of what the Earth naturally radiates each day.
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I think it's your own lack of scale that's astounding. There is plenty of heat stored in the earth, but the rock is a very good insulator. Trying to extract too much, and the rock will cool rapidly.
The average geothermal heat flux on the earth is only 0.1 Watt per square meter. That's only 0.1% of the energy that we get from the sun.
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Only smart... (Score:3)
Now if somebody would just put together a project to find more efficient thermalelectric materials so we can take advantage of heat energy represented by the smaller but significant geothermal gradient that is present "everywhere"....
Gotta love any form of energy which can be tapped by going under existing arable land, buildings, and Ma Nature's ecosystems without a subsequent risk of spilling crap everywhere and pollution through combustion.
Yellowstone (Score:2)
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So then - cool it down by drawing out the geothermal energy from that spot and get electrical energy from it as a side-effect.
You need to pipe a lot of water to that spot, but you can get a huge amount of steam from it.
OK, partly a joke, you can't cool it down enough to have a considerable effect on the development of a volcano, but there's a lot of energy to get there.
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That giant dark red glob where yellowstone is pretty foreboding... I assume that 90% of the stuff you hear in all of the shows about a mass extinction event following a yellowstone "supervolcano" eruption is just hype to get people to watch, but still.
It's just hype until it happens. There are geological markers indicating a Yellowstone eruption every N million years, fairly regularly for a half dozen cycles or so... we are currently about N * 1.6 million years since the last eruption.
A rose by any other name... (Score:3)
Hilarious thing is that over 90% of geothermal energy is generated by the fission of nuclear isotopes anyway. All it does differently is during disposal when the earth just kind of farts it out as Radon into our basements.
Don't worry, it'll be dangerous too (Score:2)
Just wait for the opponents to raise these issues [wikipedia.org]
Why is electricity not free? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously. Electricity to residential users should be free (up to a consumption level).
Earlier this year my wife and I visited Grand Coulee Dam [wikipedia.org]. It produces nearly 7GW and costs them rather little in maintenance to operate.
This weekend we drove through the windmills in eastern Washington [rdaltonphotos.biz] and Oregon. They sit there and turn generating more power than can be transmitted [oregonlive.com], costing little in maintenance to operate.
And now Google is encouraging ramping up geothermal (which looks like good stuff for Oregon!), and again requires little cost in maintenance.
Electricity is electricity. The expectation is that when I plug something into an outlet in my house I will get 110v. With the exception of inadequate supply, electricity in any home in the United States should be identical. No one advertises that their electricity is better, so there is no competition in 'who builds a better product'. Is this something the government should take control of, create jobs to build more clean energy production, end-of-life fuel burning generators, and turn electricity into a 'free service'? Residential use up to a certain usage could be free, while overages would incur modest fees. Commercial locations would continue to pay same or even reduced rates to help maintain the facilities. Theoretically this could encourage the move to electricity in other areas currently using other fuel sources, like automobiles. Electric cars are cheaper to operate now, but what if it was FREE?
Seems like something to think about.
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Seriously. Electricity to residential users should be free (up to a consumption level)... this could encourage the move to electricity in other areas currently using other fuel sources, like automobiles. Electric cars are cheaper to operate now, but what if it was FREE?
Seems like something to think about.
I live in Florida. I just spent $9K on a new AC unit because the old one was slightly under-powered and massively inefficient. Our summertime electric bills dropped from $350/month to under $100 a month. If electricity were free, where's my incentive to not just buy a (massively inefficient) $500 wall unit A/C to band-aid my 20 year old central A/C and limp it along for another 10 or 15 years, boosting my electricity consumption by a factor of 3x? (Northern Florida, it does get cold occasionally, during
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Electricity isn't free because those generators, transformers, power lines, etc cost money to build and maintain. You could set up systems where you paid the cost via taxes, or via increased prices from the businesses that now have to cover the cost of your power, but you can't eliminate the cost.
Plus, you eliminate any incentive to reduce your electricity usage.
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Because it costs money to get, money to build lines, money to maintain those lines, and so on..
Energy is pretty cheap.
Not oil (Score:3)
Google seems to believe that it is our best bet at kicking the oil habit (especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)."
I always wonder about the disconnect in some people's minds between green energy and oil. This won't help us get off oil at all. Very few electrical plants use oil. The oil is mainly used in cars and other forms of transportation, and no cars run on geothermal energy. If you want to get us off oil, you need to develop an electric (hydrogen/biofuel/natural gas) car, not geothermal energy.
What this CAN do is get us off coal energy, which is a worthy goal. But please show you have at least a basic understanding of energy.
Hopefully, this will get rid of nutjobs (Score:3)
And as to not replacing gas, oil, give me a break. The bulk of oil used in America is for transportation. Electrics are coming. In a big way. Sadly, Detroit is way behind, rather than leading. To avoid having to bail out these idiots we should be encouraging a new breed of car makers. GM and Ford are dead within 5 years.
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Why do you call them solar nut jobs, when solar energy per square meter is several orders of magnitude more than thermal ?
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It is insane to think that solar in our current tech level with PV and storage will replace our current infrastructure. Ye
Unnecessary editorializing (Score:4, Insightful)
FTFS:
(especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)
There are lots of problems with this phrase:
1. "especially now" and "suddenly" imply that opposition to nuclear power is something new, rather than something that's had at least rumblings about for over 50 years.
2. "disproportionately" doesn't describe what you're comparing it to. I'm guessing it's the cost of nuclear power, factoring in the average cost per KwH, the incidence of accidents, and the average cost per accident, but that's little more than a guess.
So that little editorial comment seems to read:
"Nuclear power is safe and fantastic, but those environmentalist nutjobs have suddenly convinced everybody to hate it for no good reason."
The more reasonable comment, if you were going to make any general statement at all, would be something like:
"Nuclear power seems to be mostly safe, but environmentalists have convinced many people that it's a bad idea because of a few notable accidents."
Or, you know, you could just leave that out entirely. Knowing where geothermal energy could be a viable source is worth doing regardless of what happens to nuclear power plants.
And the answer is... (Score:3)
And the answer to the question "what is our geothermal potential?" is... Not so great really.
You need much better than 150-200C to run turbines efficiently. Much, much better preferably. And the map shows that most of the areas where efficiency is reasonable, the terrain is... much less so. Not to mention in general being far from population centers, which means significant transmission losses. *And* lacking in water for either injection (open cycle plants) or cooling (closed cycle plants).
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By using smaller generators designed for waste heat, then you can generate loads of power. [electratherm.com] these are only 50-100 KW sizes, however just in Colorado, we have 30K abandoned w
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because we won't be using geothermal energy to kill people from other countries?
Maybe if we decided on a geothermal laser. I'm thinking of the mining laser from star craft 2, but geothermal...
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Because you need some LOOOOOOOOONG wires to get from all that dark color in the west to the population centers in the east. Might be feasible for CA, though.
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You do realize that people are in fact living, and thriving, out here in these dark colors, don't you?
Wait... never mind. I've said too much already.
Re:first thanks! (Score:4, Informative)
Once again we encounter this silly notion that most power in the US is used for "people" (residential needs). Residential electricity consumption is just over a third of the total US electricity demand. If power is cheaper in some part of the country, heavy industry and high electricity-consumption commercial will move there. That's why we have so many of our aluminum smelters in the Pacific Northwest, feeding off of cheap hydro. It's why aluminum is Iceland's leading export despite there not being a single bauxite mine in the country.
Furthermore:
A) There are "hot" areas out east as well -- just not as major or widespread. But you honestly don't need much; the total power potential from EGS is so much greater than the demand.
B) You don't have to produce from the hottest areas; it just means more well cost per unit power generated to use a cooler area.
C) Power *can* be shipped cross-country with rather low losses, via HVDC lines. Which are surprisingly affordable; HVDC has a lot of per-terminal cost but a not-unreasonable per-mile cost.
Lastly:
"Get away from the Northeast, the West Coast, and Texas".
In case you didn't notice, the greatest heat potential areas *are* near the west coast.
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The real question I have is, that 2.98M megawatts being pumped out, is that weekly, monthly, yearly, in total or what? And how much of our national energy consumption does that actually take care of?
Re:first thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that we already pipe energy from one side of the country to the other right? The "Long Wires" are for the most part already there. Upgrade, enhancements will be need but the framework is in place.
Actually, we don't. At least not significant amounts.
The USA is essentially 3 main power grids without much interconnection between them (but it's planned).
Check out this map:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398 [npr.org]
(turn off the "proposed" lines to see what the grid looks like today)
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There's also some red in Texas/Arkansas/Louisiana and West Virginia. Not as much as out west, true, but probably enough to be useful.
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There's money in weapons and killing people. (Google "Military Industrial Complex") There's a definite loss of money when it comes to the care and feeding of humanity or of the planet. Geothermal is too close to being "free energy" for most to consider.
Also, for every clean energy source, there will be some asshat that will come along to protest it. Most notably, I recall a story about wind farming being protested because it kills birds. So okay, burning stuff is out. Wind is out. Solar is out becaus
Re:first thanks! (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, there are idiots. So? Even the Audubon Society supports wind power, so long as you do the (required) bird safety studies and best-practices for bird strike amelioration. Bird turbine deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to most anthropogenic bird death causes, even taking into account its currently limited scale. Our worst are glass windows and the raising of housecats, but everything from habitat destruction to hunting to industrial waste ponds to vehicle strikes kills far more birds than wind turbines. The "wind turbines are bird cuisinarts" notion came from one old, specific wind farm, built in as horrible of a location and manner as possible (Altamont Pass). It was from before the bird strike issue was well known. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway, using small, low, closely spaced, fast-spinning turbines whose tower structure was inviting for birds to try to perch on. It was a perfect recipe for disaster, and doesn't apply at all to modern wind farms.
There are some concerns about EGS, mainly about earthquakes; however, the quakes are low-level, and all you're really doing is just accelerating what was going to come naturally. Apart from that, geothermal is about as non-intrusive of a power generation method as you can get -- just a plume of steam rising in the distance. There's even one interesting geothermal approach being pursued out there that eliminates even EGS's problems. Instead of drilling open "wells", then fracking a reservoir, then running water through the reservoir, instead you drill a self-contained water-cooled "heat sink" of thermally-conductive grout. Your water working fluid never touches the rock (only the grout does), so it never takes on corrosive minerals or waste gasses, there's no earthquakes (because there's no fracking), and it works reliably, equally well everywhere in the world with the same heat gradient (instead of just in areas with good potential reservoir rock layers) since you don't have to get water to run through a fracked rock layer in just the right manner (one of the big problems with EGS is that you never really know where your water is going to go once you inject it until you drill the well, frack the rock, cross your fingers and try).
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Take a look at GTherm's technology. No shaft corrosion problems because the water never touches the rock. Heat is transferred to the water by a thermally conductive grout; it's basically a giant underground liquid-cooled heat sink. Which also eliminates the huge problem in EGS of not knowing where your water is actually going to go after you inject it until you physically try it out. Probably the biggest problem EGS has is that you have little control over how the reservoir rock is going to behave. You
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why not do it immediately for humanity and the planet's survival?
Increasing our available sources of energy and thus allowing for even more uncontrolled growth and overpopulation is not ensuring the planet's survival but rather its destruction.
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Your assuming that any significant amount of people are actually controlling their reproduction based on the world's remaining resources.
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I thought that the current activist meme was that wealth was a bad thing...
These change so often over the years. I have trouble keeping up with them.
It's a bit like tropical oils as opposed to hydrogenated. They were ok, then evil, now they're ok again. *shrug*
Re:first thanks! (Score:4, Funny)
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What makes you think this would make the average person more wealthy? Everything we've seen throughout history would dictate that somebody would get rich but not the majority of people.
And there are plenty of wealthy religious people popping out 4+ kids.
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You are way too optimistic about humanity. The whole "go forth and multiply" religions encourage people to have lots of kids and tell them that god will fix it all up so don't worry.
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Abundant, low impact power can achieve amazing things in terms of increasing carrying capacity. Iceland will soon be a net *tomato exporter*, for example. They build geothermal power plants, generate power from the water which they use to run lights in greenhouses, and use the waste heat to heat the greenhouses. Super-dense, high productivity grow operations. You can see some examples up north here [youtube.com]. Iceland has long been self-sufficient in fish, dairy, eggs, and meat, but is increasingly becoming self-
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Ya but just wait till the Thorium starts building a web.
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Thorium is a stupid move. You'd have to start the darn things on reprocessed plutonium anyway, so you may as well go with fast breeders ( The reprocessing step is the major obstacle at the moment ).
Now while there may be some safety advantages with using molten salts as coolant, there is no reason why you could not do that in a fast neutron spectrum with plutonium and uranium. In fact, the latter would probably be easier since you could use much more common and less corrosive salts, like NaCl , MgCl or ZrCl
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the nice thing about geothermal: you're not actual bringing stuff up out of the ground. just heat. similar to sinking a well. local environment *can* me minimally impacted if done right.
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realizing the map was taken at 6.5km deep, I guess its not the same as an oil well. average oil well depths are 4000-6000ft, or about 2km. So you'd have to go pretty deep for these, maybe not too similar to sinking a well.
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Re:Geothermal issues (Score:5, Funny)
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1: who knows.
2: right now, we'd be talking about substitutional energy. people will use geothermal heat where they'd normally use combustion derived heat. so, unless this enables increases in energy use beyond current expected rates of energy use, the net heat to the environment shouldn't be significantly different. of course, when people have their own private free energy source, I guess they'll use more energy. So there is that.
Re:Geothermal issues (Score:4, Informative)
I hope those questions are a joke. Geothermal wells don't go any where deep enough to reach the core. In fact they remain in the mantle, the top layer of the earth. It's only where the core sends a plume of lava close to the surface that geo-thermal is possible. Removing any large amounts of energy from these plumes will make no difference in the core temperature. (about as much change as a fart in a hurricane).
As for question #2, that is one of the limits to the amount of energy we can use on the surface of this planet, and a limit to growth of the human race.
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Re:Geothermal issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, this question was serious? The heat from the mantle will eventually migrate upwards anyways. And turning it into electricity won't introduce more heat into our atmosphere than we already are from burning coal/ natural gas. Considerably less so, especially without any CO2 production.
Geothermal can last a long, long time. Although I should point out that scharkalvin is wrong (about this one): Google's EGS plan doesn't use geothermal plumes like most geothermal power does, it just uses the Earth's natural heat at about 6.5km down (which occurs everywhere to various degrees.) Hence, the gradient map.
Oh, and lest we forget, sun unleashes something like 1*10^17 joules of energy on the Earth per second. It would take an absolute shitload of geothermal stations, probably more than we could ever effectively build, to add any considerable amount to that.
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"Eventually" means "millions of years".
It might be possible to tap out a geothermal well, cooling it down faster than the local heat sources can put more heat in. But the effect will be limited to the top crust, not even reaching the bottom crust, much less the mantle or the core.
Yes, in a technical sense it will eventually affect those things, too, but not in any way you'd be able to measure for millions of years. If we find a way to take out energy faster than that, everything in technology will change
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Imagine sucking the entire world's ocean through a straw.
Now, imagine that the ocean extends through the entire thickness of the planet, instead of only a few thin kilometers.
Now you understand how little effect geothermal could possibly have.
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Imagine sucking the entire world's ocean through a straw.
Not quite a straw, but today's xkcd seems to be pumping it all into Narnia through a wardrobe: http://xkcd.com/969/ [xkcd.com]
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Removing any large amounts of energy from these plumes will make no difference in the core temperature. (about as much change as a fart in a hurricane).
I lived through a hurricane once in a small beach house. Someone in the house farted and conditions suddenly were far worse for all of us.
If what you say is true, then the entire earth will take on a distinct odor of brimstone if this plan continues.
Re:Geothermal issues (Score:5, Interesting)
A hurricane has about 6e14 W [noaa.gov]. You might be able to create somewhere around 8kJ/day if you found a way to harness [spectrum-e...etic.co.uk] all your gas. That's about 1e-1 W. That's a difference of 15 orders of magnitude.
The earth has geothermal energy of about 1e31 J [wikipedia.org]. 15 orders of magnitude less than that is 1e16J. That's less than what Zimbabwe uses annually [wikipedia.org]. The core is radioactively replenished at 30TW. As of 2007 there was already 10GW [wikipedia.org] of geothermal electric capacity. That's only 4 orders of magnitude. So no, it's not a fart in a hurricane. I am flabbergasted by these findings. I thought for sure you were right.
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1. core is VERY VERY deep, not 6km, try 6000km :P
2. it is believed the core of the planet is run on uranium
3. no one knows exactly what causes magnetic field to exist as it does - some say iron core, others say water, etc.
4. question #2, well, -_-
Geothermal energy rises through the surface @ 1W/m2. Solar energy falls on the planet @ 1000W/m2 (more or less). Geothermal is much more reliable source of energy.
Anyway, large scale geothermal will not work. Pumping large amount of heat involves pumping large amou
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1. hahaha, any idea how much heat you are talking about?
2. hahaha, any idea how much heat you are talking about?
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If we don't figure out an energy solution better than geothermal in "a couple thousand years" I don't think we deserve to survive.
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I know the latter will eventually happen by burning fossil fuels, too.
No it won't. If we burn fossil fuels at today's rate, there are only 30-odd years of fossil fuels left. Even less if our energy needs keep expanding. What you expected it to last forever?
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The greenhouse effect dwarfs any direct changes we could make in generating heat. So, if we could replace burning fossil fuels with geothermal, we would slow down the global warming due to CO2 greenhouse effect.
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Umm, no. there are 100's of years of fossil fuels. see:Coal.
The issue is it's changing the planet and poisoning us.
And probably 100 years of oil.
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First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.
You can convert coal into gasoline and diesel via several coal liquefaction processes. Germany did it during WW2 when they got into oil supply problems.
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#2: that's already happening. Heat from the core is constantly diffusing into the crust and then the atmosphere. Even with our best efforts, we're not going to change the rate at which that happens by a measurable amount.
This heat is only a small fraction of the heat we get from above, so no worries.
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1. The decrease in temperature will contract the core, leaving big caves beneath the crust. All volcanoes will cease activity. Then the dinosaurs will be able to climb up through them and invade us.
2. We'll move inside the giant subterranean caves, which were inhabited by the dinosaurs. We'll sell all their treasures and be rich.
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The amount of heat leaking out of the core already is MUCH larger than anything added by geothermal power plants, by several orders of magnitude. The surface area of the Earth is huge, which means its thermodynamic coupling to the atmosphere and oceans proportionally high. When you compute the thermal output of a single lava volcano should find that it dwarfs the sum of all deployed geothermal power plants and probably our worldwide energy needs. All of this heat eventually leaks into the atmosphere alrea
Re:Geothermal issues (Score:4, Insightful)
1. What happens to the core when we start pumping large amounts of heat out of the core? How long until it cools enough for our magnetic field to collapse enough to be dangerous?
Here's a fascinating thought experiment that might interest you: What is cold weather?
It's so easy to say that cold weather is the movement of cold air, but that's wrong. "Cold" is not a force or some sort of negative energy that gets applied during winter. Cold is what happens when, if even for a moment, we stop getting enough sunlight to make up for the energy that's lost to space. Every single winter of every single year (and remember that summer on one hemisphere is winter on the other), huge swaths of the planet are losing energy to space. It's enough to bring the frost line of soil down several feet just in the northern US--I'd hate to think how deep it penetrates in Canada.
There is no comparison of the surface area affected by severe winters to the surface area of geothermal wells, and as such, there is no comparing the energy loss between the two.
And keep in mind, nobody's suggesting drilling into the mantle, let alone the core. That's known as a volcano. We don't really have materials to safely handle that sort of well. And the crust of the earth is so remarkably thin compared to the size of the mantle... well, I'm not sure we'll have to worry about it for millenia if not more.
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We don't really have materials to safely handle that sort of well.
It's called steel. You pump a liquid coolant at high pressure through a steel lance to keep the temperature down below the melting point, and run the coolant through a mechanically cooled heat sink. Cool the cold side of the system with a big tower (boiling water) or a big surface ground sink (-10C, but needs massive surface area so a tower is going to work better).
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It is already leaking out. What do you think those sea floor vents are?
Nuclear reactions are one big source of heat that deep. The scale we are talking at all of humanities energy usage would be a rounding error.
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Already done, a poster further up showed how much heat we lose to space vs human energy usage.
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Wolfram Alpha says [wolframalpha.com]: mass of the earth / (mass of the atmosphere) = 1.2 x 10^6.
Basically:
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I guarantee that many many many many many many generations from now, the kids of the kids of the people of that time will not have to worry about it.
I think you need to get a grip on scale.
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How about some numbers? Underestimating scale is what humans do. You are going with a'gut feeling'; which is a stupid way to approach this.
How much geothermal needs to be moved in order to get 30 PWh of energy..yes PWh.
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Fission, not fusion.
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The chance that humans could impact such a large object in an way, is pretty slim.
This argument sounds familiar for some reason ...
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Citation please? If you've used any numbers at all to derive that, you've extrapolated a curve based on the assumption that it's exponential. If that couple next door that had a baby 3 years ago, and twins 2 years after that continues the trend, they'll have 16000 children by the time she reaches menopause. What, praytell could we be neglecting in our analysis of these trends?
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The earth is about one trillion cubic kilometers big, and most of that is molten. Volcanoes have spewed up rivers of liquid rock for billions of years. You tell me whether it's negligible. ;)
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At least you are not dumping that stuff right into the air, or into a slurry pond.
Nothing is totally clean, but somethings are much cleaner than others.
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And all the time you burn oil and mine uranium to get energy.