I wish the best for the geothermal industry, but the phrase “could outperform” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Geothermal thermal has essentially zero growth, in the US, in the last 20 years. And there is basically no growth planned in the near future, or at least nothing on the EIA’s or FERC’s upcoming generation list.<p>I’m skeptical that geothermal will ever make a significant impact in the US. Though it might make a difference in much farther north places, where solar struggles.<p><a href="https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser</a><p><a href="https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T01.02#/?f=M&start=199209&end=202405&charted=1-2-3-4-6-13-9" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T01.02#/?f...</a>
No amount of batteries can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of "bad" weather. It's like range anxiety in an electric car. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.<p>Nuclear fission is the answer.<p>Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.<p>Nuclear fission is expensive up-front but once built the power plant can last 50 years (maybe 80, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.<p>This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build but then fuel costs accumulate rapidly. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse gas emissions.<p>Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514</a><p>In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. You just don't hear about it... yet.<p>Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
Two not insignificant earthquakes (3.4 and 3.5) were triggered in two attempts to drill for geothermal power plants in Switzerland. Switzerland is a seismically active area and it should theoretically be possible to generate significant power but these man made earthquakes set back projects for many years.
So if I understand correctly, you create a network of fractures that connect to two boreholes and you pump water into one and out the other. Won’t the fractures erode significantly over time? Do we know what happens when we continuously erode a network of fractures deep underground? And won’t the amount of water that’s required to stay pressurized get larger and larger as the fractures erode?
Nuclear fission is basically pushed by those who don't think to worry about: (1) nuclear accidents/terrorism (2) nuclear waste.<p>Th hallmark of a great civilization is one that saves its future self from problems, not one that piles on problems for its future self to deal with. In this light, nuclear is not great.<p>Geothermal using fracking toxins is not great either if it irreversibly pollutes the water supply as fracking often does.<p>Solar and wind have no such issues for us to deal with, considering we don't domestically produce the solar panels anyway.
Two hamsters on a treadmill could outperfom nuclear power 8-/<p>Nuclear is the biggest boondogle in electric generation history. And a huge fraction of that bloated cost is still hidden in externalities, as the overwhelming majority of all spent fuel is still sitting in "temporary" storage onsite with the reactor where it was used.<p>Geothermal aside, using money to increase grid storage is a vastly better investment than nuclear can ever be.