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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."
I had no idea G.T. energy was already in use in California. Just goes to show how much one knows about where his own power comes from. But to say produces more energy than Solar and Wind combined, is that really saying much?
Spam Thwart: Anti-Spam Collective
This doesn't seem like a viable alternative. 10% in the year 2005. Is that including forecast increases in power usage (as per population and ignoring other technological impacts). Additionally 10% isn't much overall, how can this be a viable alternative.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Iceland will be very happy to hear this.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
*Modern* nuclear power plants are the best solution to our coal and oil dependence.
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.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Don't come crying to me when we cool the planet core off and we end up in another ice age.
...by 2050 it will be too late to start using more environmentally friendly power anyway...
1: We'll be out of oil and forced into it and
2: Global warming will have progressed so much that we couldn't do anything to lessen it at that point except wait it out.
So what is the point?
But won't stealing energy from the core of the earth slow it down, causing the planet's electromagnetic field to rapidly deteriorate, killing us all?!
Just wondering.
In energy generation, the point of burning a fuel is usually just to create a temperature gradient. Using naturally occurring temperature gradients is certainly attractive.
Existing energy generation technologies generally require a large difference between the high and low temperatures (e.g. steam generation). If economically feasible technologies are developed that can use gradients with smaller temperature differences then even the temperature gradients in the ocean would provide useful energy.
We get it. The US is a Big country with a lot of resources, you don't have to keep telling us stuff like "The United States is the world's biggest producer of geothermal energy." You know, even at only 20% of the nation's total electric energy consumption, the US is still the biggest commercial supplier of Nuclear energy? Beating out France and their 80% of their nation's energy consumption. 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? Maybe with a diverse supply, we won't be caught with our pants down next time an energy resource starts to become more trouble than we need.
Demented But Determined.
When used correctly, nuclear power has no emissions and no leaked radioactivity. Its only associated problem is NIMBY-related, namely the long-term storage of "waste", which would in any case be less important if the US rescinded its silly ban on breeder reactors.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Look, I am a proponent of Nukes. But we are in the nightmare that we are BECAUSE we became dependant on one main fuel source; Oil. Coal and natural gas is heavily used and that is also a big issue. OTH, if we use a combination of Nukes, Wind, Solar, Geothermal, wave, etc then if one has to be taken out of the mix, no big deal. More importantly, none can create a true monopoly (or oligolpoly) as is the current case with Oil.
Not only do we need lots of GT, but western North America and many other places on this planet are perfect for it. One thing that America needs to do, is to better develop geothermal residential heating. That is to place the outside coil of a heat pump in the ground and use the relatively good temp for our house heat. Outside of states that are pumping natural gas, this is probably one of the better ways to lower energy useage in America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1. Earth farts
2. Profit!
Table-ized A.I.
I'm fairly comfortable that we've got a long way to go to screw up the earths core temperature and/or magnetism (that's not based on any scientific knowledge, btw). It seems, however, that we could much more quickly screw up ocean currents by changing the thermal gradients that exist (again, not based on hard science numbers). Since much of our weather patterns are based on those ocean currents, I would venture that a real effort to convert to using ocean thermals to satify a larger portion of humaities need for energy could very well alter the global weather in just a few generations. Maybe the numbers don't support my gut feeling, but I would need to be convinved otherwise before I considered using ocean gradients for power.
(and yes - using the gradients means reducing said gradients - it's that whole "laws of thermodynamics" thing Homer keeps reminding Lisa about)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I visited Iceland a couple years ago, and I became sold on geothermal. I mean, Iceland is a small country, but they have fairly high power needs per capita because of the cold climate, and they run almost entirely off geothermal, as I understand it. This isn't some apologetic green technology that is decades or more from delivering affordable massive power, like solar, wind, etc. No, this is the real thing: a geothermal plant puts out power at nuclear reactor levels. And these things are clean.
My favorite part of the visit was swimming in the Blue Lagoon... 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.
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.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Except for the fact that in this case "best return on investment" is very location dependent.
Sell people permission to produce CO2, create a market for the trading of said permission. Require all energy producers to buy the requisite number of permits. Then put a limit on the amount of permits(CO2 production).
Problem solved. That may include nuclear, it may not, but the energy producers will decide what solution is best for them.
Deleted
"You don't have a choice not to use it."
Apparently your universe doesn't have "conservation", nor "increasing efficiency".
... is just a lot of hot air ... isn't it?
If it wasn't for the ridiculous environmental regulations, we could supply a great deal of power from this location, probably only using 20 acres out of the entire site. However, it seems they would rather us continue burning fossil fuels than use renewable natural resources we already have.
Has anyone ever calculated the heat capacity of the earth? I mean, if we start running geo-thermal plants I assume we are allowing the earth's core to cool quicker than it otherwise would have. Maybe the amount of cooling is 0.001% or something more than what the earth loses already. Still would be interesting to know.
Among the many reasons the high-quality geothermal resevoirs of the western US have not been exploited more than they have is that they attract opposition from environmental groups. Since the land is largerly Federal in many of the locales they are talking about, they use their clout in Washington DC to hinder local geothermal development since there is little overlap between their supporters in Congress and the constituencies that are affected, so it is a low-cost political bone. Instead they build space efficient natural gas and coal plants, which produce much more power with much less land use.
Geothermal power plants of any scale cover large areas of land with a sparse network of pipes. It is usually not the case that you drill one well and put a turbine on top of it, instead you drill a large number of wells, about one well per 20-40 acres and aggregate the output at a central set of turbines. It is not as though you are paving the region, just putting in a small well-head and a pipe to transport/aggregate the output. Note that you also have to have pipes to pump the condensed water back into the ground in separate wells; they do not dump it into the atmosphere. Unfortunately this covers the land with a very sparse spiderweb of pipes that are deemed "ugly", offending the aesthetic sensibilities of the occasional jackrabbit or some such.
The western US has enormous geothermal potential, but people will have to get used to the idea that there will be vast sections of high desert they never visit that will covered in pipe networks for heat transport. Perhaps they would like a coal plant built next door instead.
The article was succinct and straightforward, and ought to be read by every U.S. Congressman. The arguement on energy sources has been more or less front page since OPEC in the early 70s, but what has Congress done?
Debate, debate, debate, but the U.S. Government Reps, Senators & Presidents have more or less refused to commit the country to policies designed to keep thye U.S. being held hostage to external threats on oil supply, UNTIL the price doubles in a short time. New policy implementation takes the better part of a decade to make a serious impact, so lets start it now.
Coal is a disaster and has been known as such for decades, yet what does our U.S. Congress do about it? The answer is obviously nothing.
How many more debates and decades before we either solve the damn problem or we get throttled by the external forces from the enlightened societies with their wonderful societal standards where the oil comes from.
Um, if we were to convert the earth's thermal energy into electricity, wouldn't that lower the temperature? I imagine much of the electrical energy would convert back to heat, but a lot of it would be converted to mechanical energy. So perhaps this is a partial solution to global warming.
Of course, I'm sure we'd hear some people complaining about the new problem of Global Cooling.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
This coming Saturday, I will be conducting a 1-hour, live interviw with Jefferson Tester, who headed this Geothermal panel and report. It will be broadcast live from 6:00 to 6:55 pm Eastern time. http://pesn.com/2007/01/22/9500449_MIT_Geothermal_ Report/
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
"Most people don't get that a coal-fired electical generation facility puts out more radiation then a nuclear power plant. Go figure."
Most pro-nuclear posters don't realize that coal plants have emission control equipment. Go figure.
You let all the smoke out, and the thing's gonna quit working.
What?
USA and many other countries including Australia has a long way to go to have clean energy. New Zealand gets 75% of it's energy from geothermal.
I used to live in the Puna district on the Big Island, a couple miles away from the geothermal plant. It was really loud - I suppose that was the steam turbines causing all the noise. I always wondered what would happen if one of the pipes exploded. It would not be fun to breathe a giant cloud of hydrogen sulfide gas. Personally I'd feel much safer living near a nuclear plant, but that's just me. I believe nuclear's cheaper too, but maybe the good folks at MIT have figured out a way to bring the setup costs down.
..just as oil is. If demand soars, so does it price.
My opinion as a rookie; what do experts think about this?
One thing that's notable by its absence in the article: how long will this energy last, given current energy usage? For instance, Australia (where I live) is currently exploring nuclear power. The Age ran an article a while ago, suggesting geothermal as a solution to Australia's energy needs that would last 75 years, based upon a single site in South Australia. Add more sites, and that time frame obviously goes up.
... You also can draw your power from any source you care to name, without worrying about whether it can run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All you care about is that it can supply enough power, on average, to run the cities and towns, with a sufficient surplus that you can recharge the storage reasonably quickly. When everything's working smoothly, and you have a surplus, that energy can be applied to other things - desalination, perhaps, or maybe aluminium smelting; anything that uses a lot of energy but which doesn't need it all the time is a potential sink for when the storage systems are fully charged.
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.
Don't assume geothermal energy production has no environmental footprint. Personally I still think Nuclear is the way to go.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
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!
Let me be the first to predict that stealing the earth's warmth will cause global cooling and an imminent ice age. Or else, releasing all the stored heat will contribute to global warming.
Either way, the earth's core will probably stop spinning and we'll have to find a way to restart it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Good - let's give some people money to design them instead of the tweaked Westinghouse 1950's dinosaurs that the lobby money is pushing. Accelerated Thorium and others have potential but current production plants are holes to throw money into as well as other problems. Pebble bed advocates have some good points but should hold off on the wildest claims until constuction of the first large scale pilot plant is actually finished (this year in China I believe).
hiya; I live in canada..and on the prarries where it can drop to -40 c (-40F) overnight in mid winter..many of my nieghbors have been using GT to heat there homes for years...small increase to electric costs as the pumps run on electricity..but the savings from turning off the gas or oil make it a huge savings in the end...BTW.. greenland and Iceland have been using GT energy for many years and didn't need a big study and probable millions of dollars like the US gov to figure out it is viable..lol
always more than one way to skin a cat
Perhaps with a series of tubes.
OMG Sorry, just flashed to the future where some Alaskan senator tries to describe the grand oceanic heat pump network as "a series of routers"...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The problem is that most of the designs for geothermal is to use the prevailing heat as a wet well. That is they want to not only use the heat, but the local water. If they had a recycling GT set-up, then there would be a whole lot less impact and fight. But of course, that means spending some real money. A good example was the one in Wyoming next to YellowStone. Some far right wing group set up there and built one that used the water. Funny enough they simply discarded the water rather than re-inject (too much money). Needless to say, nearby springs and gysers lost their pressure. So a court injunction was obtained and they were stopped. Once a recycling GT can be built cheap, and effectively, you will see GT springing up all over here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
For those who have not thought about the issue - consider that the primary purpose of pollution controls is actually to remove sulphur oxides and nitrous oxides. What do you think happens with solids with such a process - do you think it is likely that with the water used they end up in the ash dam and not in the air?
Coal has enough real problems without making stuff up.
no more... "dont leave the door open, what do you think we are heating the rest of the planet?"
You don't need volcanic hotspots, it can be done with a large chunk of granite.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
it would take a moron to think it wasn't viable.
you get free heat from the ground! duh!
that's like saying that solar energy is viable.
I can't for the life of me figure out why there aren't solar panels on the roof of every building we build nowadays!
They're using their grammar skills there.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
..and the devices have been built and are a clear and present danger to the peoples of the earth because the owners are certifiable loons who have already proven they don't care about any other people but themselves. The US "lost" quite a bit of plutonium a long time ago. You can google for that info and and then figure out where it wound up at.
And if you think uranium, raw or enriched, or other plutonium isn't available on the black or gray market you are *quite* naieve. This is the planet earth, ANYTHING on it is for sale if the price is right and the demand is high enough.
As to nuke plants, you knock out the backup generator and compromise the security(like the red teams do in wargames all the time successfully with a very small intruder force, let alone if there were bonafide insiders in the plant willing to help matters along) and you can cause quite a bit of mischief. Or hitting it with a packed airplane or other sort of flying "thing". Or two. Or three. Or four in a row at the same place. Not an empty airliner, a packed one, your choice and best guess what might be packed in it. A business jet packed would do it if it was designed correctly. Or one or two vans with a few guys all using normal anti armor weapons could hit the same place in succession from a reasonable distance while other members of the team could lay down full auto suppressing fire and compromise a nuke plant.
There, I have given you three different totally possible attack scenarios (there are more which I will leave out), and I left out such things as a massive natural quake at diablo canyon.
Your cult like belief in the safety of nuclear plants borders on a flat-earthism parallel. You've been brainwashed by the industry or something. They are just buildings, yes, very tough buildings, but still..just buildings. All the world's major militaries are perfectly capable of taking out a nuke plant using conventional arms, from the ground, and not many at that, which means this knowledge is "out there" and the means to do it is "out there". Common stuff. All sorts of folks have tried to build impregnable bunkers-which is your theory, it is some sort of magical impregnable bunker-no, they are not, no such thing exists, and most of these nuke plants built don't even approach-don't even come close- to superbunker status because they aren't hundreds of feet underground or carved into the side of huge granite mountains.
Nuclear plants make heat,not electricity, heat-and bomb making material. For the most part, all the major nations started their "peaceful" nuclear projects as a source of such material. It has been a stealth military cost that everyone who pays an electric bill has paid. As a civilian power source it is inherently hideously complex and dangerous, and more designed to pick your pockets than not. It has never come remotely near the 'too cheap to meter" stage anyplace it has been used. Right today other sources like natural gas (which they have been flaring off for decades because they have just so much of the stuff) is cheaper as a raw source of heat to make electricity.
The proposed geothermal is a much better alternative. Safer-cleaner and the scaling proposed is quite impressive, a very small scale up yields a huge performance increase. I've been reading the 372 page report off and on all day now. Especially for the hideously huge sums of money involved wit nukes (don't even mention fusion-beyond pie in the sky at this time)and the matter of radioactive waste, which is-no further along in being "taken care of-trust science!"-than it was in the 1950s.
Facts-data-deal
We have enough of a variety of other energy sources right now to not have to deal with nuclear fission power. Now I don't propose immediate scrapping of the plants, but I think they have had a half a century run now, time to move on to the great set of viable alternatives we have and throw the R&D money that way. Nukes have had hundreds of billions of direct or indirect stealth subsidies-time to go elsewhere and give some cleaner and safer alternatives-like this geothermal- some interest and implementation. We as humans can do better than that filthy dangerous stuff.
Wouldn't widespread use of geothermal energy mean that we would be effectively pumping heat directly from subterranean rock into the atmosphere? In other words, all this would achieve in the end would be to cut out the middle-man of the greenhouse effect and heat the atmosphere directly, rather than indirectly?
Otherwise, sounds great...
Read Pynchon.
Read the actual study. This doesn't look that promising.
First, this isn't a renewable resource. Over time, the rock cools, and more wells have to be drilled. "If there is no temperature decline, then the heat is not being efficiently removed from the rock. If there is too much temperature decline, either the reservoir must be replaced by drilling and fracturing new rock volume, or the efficiency of the surface equipment will be reduced and project economics will suffer."
Second, outside of the few locations where you can get steam at 200-300C from shallow holes, the thermal performance of these systems is unimpressive. Efficiency = (Tin - Tout) / Tout, with temperatures measured from absolute zero, remember. So you need big low-pressure steam systems to extract the power. It's 1890s steam technology, low temperature and low pressure. The study assumes that the systems for recovering energy from low-grade steam will improve in efficiency, but heat exchangers and steam turbines have been developed for well over a century, and are mature technologies.
Worse, most of the good locations are in the empty parts of the United States. Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, inland Oregon, and northern Utah have the best heat reservoirs. East of the Mississippi, zilch. (See fig. 1.4) Electricity would have to be transmitted thousands of miles to be useful, and there's no local use for the waste heat. Hawaii looks promising, but that's because it has cities near volcanoes.
Several experimental plants have been built since 1980, and none of them could even pay their own operating costs, let alone recover their capital cost. (Too many DoE "demonstration projects" are like that.) The study actually doesn't recommend building power plants. It recommends ... another study.
A project for deep-heat mining here in Basel, Switzerland, went horribly wrong - after having pumped water into the ground for a couple of weeks, we've started to have earthquakes. First we got a couple of 2.1s, then we had a 3.2, the last one we had was 3.6 and counting. They now stopped the project but the earthquakes continue to rise in magnitude. We've had 4 major ones in the last month alone and about 10 minor ones.
I'd say it's not smart to start such projects in areas with very high population densities.
By the time we've cooled the Earth's Core through geothermal energy, we'll also have lowered the Earth's Orbit to come closer to the sun by accelerating our space craft.
God spoke to me.
Nice try. Unfortunately, as I understand it, you can't beat the Carnot cycle no matter what technology you use.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Iceland sounds great. Solar power makes no apology though, having powered the Earth for billions of years. Only geothermal, nuclear and tidal power are not ultimately solar power. With huge production capacity coming on line, solar PV power is not apolgizing either. Go to http://www.jointhesolution.com/mdsolar to get affordable solar power. Note, also, that building solar production capacity is a lot easier than building new coal or nuclear plants. Build the solar PV plant and it just churns out more capacity every year. Build a coal plant and then you need to build another and keep feeding the first too.
I took it to mean that governments should pay subsidies equally toward any steady source of electric power, not just nuclear fission plants.
You just rented The Core , didn't you?
I always hear people talking about natalie portmans hot grits here, well now we've found another use for them.
!sig
It does sound like an attractive energy source for electricity, but remember that cars use fossil fuels to rapidly expand air which drives a piston, and don't use temperature gradients at all.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I'd just like to remind a bunch of people out there that a geothermal plant is being built roughly on the border between France, Germany and Switzerland, and that they're having a few earthquakes because of it (not very big ones, like between 4 and 5 on the Richter scale, but still). Then again, maybe it's just because they know nothing about engineering...
Throwing nuclear waste down a 65 metre hole in the ground including fissile material and then being surprised when the cap blows off and showers the area with radioactive waste does not appear to be a responsible use of nuclear power to me. Read up on Dounreay power station in Scotland: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=12626 82002
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
Just because he's foaming at the mouth doesn't mean he's wrong.
The richest country in the world should be devoting considerable resources to the solution of global problems like our dependency on fossil fuel. Instead, that money is going to empire building and pork barrelling. These days I am not at all proud to be a US citizen.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
...like they did unfortunately in Basel (Switzerland) when they made tests to use geothermic energy on a new (?) way.
They pumped water under high pressure into rocks several kilometers under the surface to further loosen the stones for later pumping of water through it. Obviously the rocks stood already under pressure which was released through the experiments and caused several earthquakes with a strength between 3.2 and 3.4 on the Richter scale - which is just strong enough to be noticed by humans.
Don't believe it? See the report on tagesschau.de (sorry - german only) from 16.01.2007 and the site of the Swiss Deep Heat Mining Project which makes the experiments.
I lag
Then my work here, is done. Farewell NoseBag, ye shall never see my like again.
*wonders back to the land of Anonymity*
You just don't have to depend on government spending anymore to convert to solar power.
a tion.htm
to see how we can convert a huge amount of our energy supply to solar.
Take a look at this flash presentation http://www.theneighborhoodlive.com/common/present
If you think that works for what you want to do, go to http://www.powur.com/mdsolar and click on "Become an Ecopeneur" to get going. You'll need to take a 25 question test after reading a 14 page training document on solar power.
After that just "Make it so" as Cpt. Pickard used to say.
---
Disclosure: I sell solar power at http://www.jointhesolution.com/mdoslar
Why? You only need 1.21 gigawatts.
:p
I have a background in this reality and would advise anyone reading the source of this thread to take a moment and look up the following 'word set' on any search engine:
u lt.htm
l _powe.php
s onnel_id=477
Geothermal Injection Induced Earthquake
Due to increased seismic activity generated by injection (studies done in Colorado) Hawaii turned down geothermal power.
Here are a few links to get one started:
Man-Made Earthquakes & Press Coverage (Anderson Springs, CA, USA)
http://andersonsprings.org/
Anderson Springs is part of an USGS earthquake area known as "The Geysers"
http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/quakes0_fa
Geothermal Power Plant Triggers Earthquake in Switzerland
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/01/geotherma
Injection induced stresses in geothermal fields. (References)
https://pangea.stanford.edu/people/cv_nav.php?per
Since I choose to be anonymous and this will be marked down and to get something off my chest.
A number of years ago I provided information about a technology that only a hand-full of people are involved with and was called a troll by one of your moderators.
I am IEEE published in the area I mentioned in that post, your moderator obviously could not access, or did not take the time to access these records, and went into name calling.
I have waited for years for the following to show up on the Internet and somebody finally posted it. I believe all moderators should be required to read it (from 1981):
Fairwitnessing
The Case for a New Social Role
(From a talk presented at the FORTH Interest Group meeting, May 23, 1981.)
Four pages, starting here:
http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/ct15.html
Before I start, keep in mind that I'm Canadian - so I'm immune to American partisan party politics. Democrat, Republican... all the same to me.
And I'm a soldier too.
Nobody would be happier than me if we could just scrap all the military apparatus in the world and spend all that money on things that would really benefit all of humanity - honest, no foolin'.
But the sad state of the world today (although I think things are getting better) is that there exist people willing to exert deadly force on other people for personal gain - or to settle old scores - or just because they like it.
Look at the Balkans, or Israel/Palestine, or the Sudan, or Rwanda, or Afghanistan... the list is extensive.
Don't we, as a people, have a duty to protect the weak from would-be wolves? I say "yes".
We're not very good at it yet. We're transitioning from a period where armies and warfare were legitimate means of conducting "intense diplomacy" between each other to a period where armies and warfare are used as instruments of stabilization and protection for people in states unable to provide either function for their own citizens. This is new stuff, and we're bound to get things wrong from time to time as we adopt to our new roles.
But the end state is a world without genocide, without terrorism, without the impending threat of mass destruction and loss of life. A world where nobody has to worry about having their children hacked to death with machetes or blown to fragments by explosives.
Is that not a worthy goal?
Now I'll grant you that the USA's record on this of late is spottier than it should be. I honestly do not understand why Iraq was invaded; as all the reasons put forward by the current administration were clearly bullshit. And I agree with you that the American Iraqi Adventure has damaged, not improved, global security. (although now that you are there, you have to win!)
But the power to correct that is in YOUR hands (you are an American citizen, right?) You have the ability to get yourself and your friends involved in the political process, to ensure that the people with the ability to deploy armies choose the good missions (like Afghanistan) over the unnecessary adventures (like Iraq).
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I worked for a company once that had geothermal as a side business and am aware of its short comings:
(1) The ground reservoir require constant "care and attention". Drill holes block up from mineralized water gunk much like some parts of the country see inthere house water pipes. Circulation pressure is fickle. It cant drop if there are new cracks in the rocks. You have to pump or re-drill.
(2) There are waste products- generally highly mineralized water that no one else can use. Hawaii is avoided geothermal development for this reason.
(3) A "dry" field may require a consistent water source. The US West is short on water supplies.
(4) You can set off earthquakes when you pump fluids. Rocky Mountain flats is the classic example, but this has happened to a lessor degree in the Salton Sea, CA and Geysers, CA area, both in seismic areas.
Still the benefits may outweigh the drawbacks. No carbon pollution.
Oil field and coal methane development have similar drawbacks too.
I'm feeling down on subsidies and I'm not sure they are needed. Regulation is still needed since electricty, at least at the retail level, is still single source for the most part.
One of the neat things about solar panels is that they are so valuble even after they have degraded by 20% (typically in 30 years). They are still solar grade silicon so they are worth about $25/kilo as raw material for new solar panels. This pretty much ensures a cradle-to-cradle type-treatment http://www.mcdonough.com/ for solar panels, and this is certainly part of our business model. Did you get my question on your blog about vondage?
I think I'll blog on cap-and-trade soon (note to Sierra Club Board: don't support it!) but that mechanism might be a little bit in line with Adam Smith.
Current wind power installations are generating ~50 GW, whereas current geothermal installations are generating ~8 GW. How can you say that wind power is decades from delivering affordable massive power when it's clearly not true?
I have a friend who is generating 37.5 MW off of the back few sections of his ranch from wind power: one family, one ranch, generating power for 30,000 homes. And that's not some aberration: the middle 1/3 of the US has reliable winds capable of producing at an investment of about $1 per watt (at peak output).
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Fantastic post, and I agree completely -- though I am highly skeptical that the "end state" is a world without terrorism and genocide, partly because I'm just cynical but also because we've done such a piss-poor job of preventing it since we first said "Never Again".
Anyway, that's not the point. The point is, the sad thing is, that we could combine both your very lucid statement that global security and thus military spending is necessary and good to pursue, and the GP's request that we stop spending so much money killing and instead spend it fixing our energy dependency problem in a real way.
Just by getting rid of the foolish mission -- Iraq, of course -- and diverting the same amount of money to doing as much as possible to replace fossil fuels, we could basically accomplish what the GP wanted, and still spend the necessary money for military missions that are actually worthwhile, like Afghanistan.
So we don't really have to do either-or, we just have to be smarter. Well, smarter and more concerned about our future. The other sad truth is that in peace time we would never spend Iraq-level monies on developing non-fossil energy because of the obvious strain on our governments budget and the economy such spending causes. Only war can get us to open our purses that wide...
P.S. I just wanted to congratulate Canada and Canadians on their excellent discernment in when and how to cooperate with the U.S. in the Global War on Terror -- for example, by identifying when a mission has something to do with the GWT, and when it has fuck-all to do with Terror (until after we invade and then it has a lot to do with Terror).
The enemies of Democracy are
He's an agent, lead is just another metal, it is dense so it makes an even better antenna! If you reall want to block the signal, the only real solution is lunch meat affixed to the head with peanut butter. Bologna and Extra-Chunky works best.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
you are very wrong, get more informed ->
> Sure, and when used "correctly" a coal plant doesn't emit anything much either.
Millions of tuns of CO2 (besides other nasty stuff) is nothing?
> The problem with conventional fission power is a) it is relatively easy to use incorrectly
so how often does it happen in the last 20 years? None? Hmmm...
> b) when it is used incorrectly you have an expensive pile of radioactive scrap metal where you power plant used to be
Actually no, even in metdown you only loose a small part of it. In many cases (in the 60's for instance) the core was removed, repaired and not only the powerplant, but even the reactor was restarted.
>>Nice try. Unfortunately, as I understand it, you can't beat the Carnot cycle no matter what technology you use.
I'm not sure why the above post was rated informative. I'm not even sure what the point was. The grandparent post was talking about developing new technologies for extracting work from smaller thermal gradients, and the parent said it's not possible because the Carnot Cycle is the most efficient technology. That makes no sense. No engine in history uses the Carnot Cycle. There is no Carnot Cycle engine. There may be engines which approach its efficiency (namely the Stirling engine), but none of this discussion has any bearing on the fact that currently it is a difficult engineering challenge to harness energy from diffuse energy sources with low temperature gradients. Was I missing the point of the above post?
if you take by ratio of people then Iceland is using more of it per head. However this is great news, go ahead use it and stop funding terrorist states by buying oil. (not saying all those states are like that, but a few are).
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Three Mile Island is an example of the worst case scenario for an American Style nuclear plant, and the average radiation dose received by those near the plant was similar to the amount you receive from a chest Xray. The containment worked, and though the failure was costly financially, and more importantly in terms of public opinion, the safety measures in place in Three Mile Island worked. You'll notice that the grandparent post didn't mention USSR as an example of safe use of nuclear power. The kind of containment used in the US did not exist in Soviet style reactors. Had Chernobyl been built with proper containment, it would have been as relatively minor an occurance as Three Mile Island. The fact is that a Coal Plant located at Three Mile Island would have released more radioactivity into the surrounding community that Three Mile Island ever did, and Three Mile Island is the only example you have. A relatively benign event which has occurred once in 40 years, yea, I'd call that pretty safe.
geothermal doesn't have to be just on a large scale. home-sized installations can be effectively used to generate a nice cool breeze when combined with a solar chimney. such systems skip the production of electricity all togethor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney
First, Nuke is not TOTALLY ideal. If we put 100% dependancy on it and then find some weakness in our designs and have to take them off-line, then we are screwed. As it is, very few saw the issues that oil and coal cost. We may find that Nuke do the same thing. The simple fact is that you do not want a total monopoly/oligolpy in any base item such as power and transportation (which is also why I am against pure public transportation; the public should own the rails, not run the train).
Solar is NOT ideal. In fact, your hottest days are not clear, but overcast and holding in the heat. OTH, winds tend to blow all day long in various locations. The problem with most alternative is that they are either intermittent or they are costly to do low volumes.
In fact, the problem with power is that you always have to scale for the worse time and can not run at a constant speed 100% of the time. So what is needed (as I have said several times in my journals over the last couple of years) is that storage is needed. In fact, the same is true of using current power. We could run a nuke at 100% nearly 100% of the time and charge a system during the night, that then powers during the day. Add ALL forms of alternatives in the mix and you have a great low cost set-up. If a state is really going into alternative energy, they should focus on true energy storage and not the jokes such as hydrogen.
In addition, they do nothing for you at night.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
okay, so now that we've destroyed the ecosystem balance of the earth's surface, now our crusade is to go into the core? wtf?
He and his Tokyo Institute of Technology colleagues say that in a billion years the Earth could be dry as Mars. Basically, we've been losing water since 750mya because the mantle cooled enough to trap water. First read about it in Discover Magazine, but the second link has the best summary I've found.
http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-99/rd/newsofsci encemed1735/ m l#note6
http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/dec99/newsnotes.ht
My point was that even if you theoretically could build an engine close to the theoretical efficiency limit of a Carnot cycle engine, the efficiency when the temperature gradient is small is very poor.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I guess there are those who think that this will help global warming. Well, I doubt it.
There is stacks of enery there for the taking, just look at molecules wobbling about with "brownian motion." What we need is a difference in energy levels so, we can take advantage of the flow. E.g. a boiler makes cold water hot, a PV cell increases voltage, a heat pump "makes" usable energy from heat differences.
Pumping heat (sorry, I should have said energy) out of the ground will just end up with the energy in the atmosphere. I expect the atmposhpere to get hotter, despite the fact the greenhouse gasses might now stil increasing.
We need to work to decrease our overall energy reqirements (air con. seems the most stupid waste of energy to me), in order to stop the world growing hotter and hotter.
And the far-east is developing rapidly and chucking even more energy into the atmosphere. Shit!
bL.
You deserve mod points. That was good.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Your absolutely right! This is one of the funniest aspects of the whole thing. The only power source we can't compete with on price is hydro. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Wind, hydro, tidal and solar only need to be maintained, they don't need to be fed. If feeding you power source becomes awkward then the cost goes up. So, coal, gas, oil and nuclear end up rising in cost is response to demand owing to problems with fuel transport and difficulties that arise from having used up the easy to get stuff already. Only a small fraction of the actual clean up costs for nonrenewables is reflected in the production cost for nonrenewables so while this conributes a bit to our competitiveness, you have to mainly use this as a consumer preference thing after reaching price parity.
s -selling-solar.html
While a portion of our cometitiveness arises from reduced distribution costs, the main trigger is the high price of fossil fuels. In your area, you've been immune to this. Once we're fully scaled up, we might drop in cost below your hydro, and I'd be happy about that because the ecosystems that large scale hydro disrupt are a huge loss, but for now don't anticipate walking across Puget Sound on the backs of salmon right way.
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Slashdot users can help you switch to solar! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The point is that the security guards, even if they've got a damn pot plantation growing in the grounds, are not getting spent fuel past the gate, because without the specialised, truck-sized transport casks you can't move them without them killing you before you get very far. Yes, they are that radioactive. You go anywhere near a spent fuel rod without lots of shielding, you die. It doesn't matter whether you're a terrorist, corrupt security guard, or just some schmuck who didn't read the safety manual and went diving in the cooling pond. You're still dead.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)