Comment by MarkusQ
5 hours ago
"Geothermal also has two key advantages over nuclear generation. Nuclear power plants are dependent upon a finite resource (uranium), and nuclear waste disposal is both controversial and costly. In contrast, geothermal generation depends on a virtually infinite source (heat generated in Earth’s interior), and there are no long-term waste issues."
1) Scientific consensus is that the Earth is also finite.
2) Also, the heat generated in the Earth's interior is...nuclear power.
3) Nuclear waste disposal is a political problem, not a technical one; it is "controversial" and "costly" precisely because it's used for these sorts of unserious comparisons.
I love the idea of geothermal, but this sort of nonsense has to be called out and shamed.
Wow, that comment is extremely misleading and exaggerated.
1) Everything in the universe, including the sun's solar radiation, is finite. It's just a matter of scale. The heat in the earth's core is practically infinite for humanity's current and near-term needs.
2) The heat generated in the earth's core is a combination of fission decay and residual heat from the earth's initial formation. The fission reaction is locked away 5000 KM deep (as in 5 million meters), deep-enough that it poses no threat even if you drill down thousands of meters to tap into that. That is very much not true of man-made nuclear fission.
3) There is still no long term storage mechanism that is guaranteed to keep nuclear waste for the several million years it would take to decay to safe levels, considering possible things that could happen over that time scale.
> Wow, that comment is extremely misleading and exaggerated.
Wow, quite the oversell there! Modern nuclear reactors are widely recognized as safe by nonpartisan sources. And why do we need to solve for millions of years of storage? In a couple centuries at most, we'll be able to blast the stuff into space if that's what makes us comfortable.
This is getting very off topic, but this "let's dispose of nuclear waste by shooting it into space" is such an insane idea. In which universe is the risk associated with a frickin space launch lower than a deep underground geological repository?
1) With proven technology, nuclear is "practically infinite" in the same sense (available fuel will out-last the sun, even at 10x current energy usage).
2) The "residual heat" is long gone, and my whole point here was that saying nuclear was limited when geothermal is a form of nuclear was disingenuous/misleading. Trying to turn that into a scare / safety issue is exactly the sort of nonsense I was objecting to.
3) There are lots of viable long-term storage options, including grinding it up, mixing it with the tailings and putting it back into the same hole we dug it out of. Or dropping it into a subduction zone, and letting it fuel future geothermal plants. But we won't do any of those, because it's far too valuable. If you are worried about things being "misleading and exaggerated" you probably shouldn't be bringing up the nuclear waste "problem".