🚀 go-pugleaf

"Addinall" <addinall@addinall.org> wrote in message 
news:1167544085.362178.229360@42g2000cwt.googlegroups.com...
>
> Landy wrote:
>> "David Moss" <q0320811@mail.connect.usq.edu.au> wrote in message
>> news:MPG.2000942a106031ce98a258@news.bigpond.com...
>> > In article <en4jub$rl8$1@news-02.connect.com.au>, dontemailme@all.com
>> > writes...
>> >
>> >> So tell me what's wrong with this form of energy as an alternative to
>> >> coal?
>> >
>> > Isn't geothermal just another kind of nuclear energy?
>> >
>>
>> Well yes, but one is nuclear fission and the other is not.
>
> Nope. Both fission.  Exactly the same process the Green
> nuts get all pantieless over.  What's more, it's not
> contained.
>
> Environmental Pollution in Sindh, Pakistan
> By Mrs. Farzana Panhwar
> September 2004
>
> [...]
>
> Mass awareness and education program.
> Pollution- the contamination of air, water or soil with substance
> harmful to life -has been a seemingly inevitable by-product of
> industrialisation and urbanisation, should be reduced.
> Geothermal power brings thermal pollution of air and surface water,
> contamination ground water, increase, hydrogen sulphide and sulphuric
> oxide pollutants in the air, create problems in the disposal of salts.
> These carefully monitored and their pollutants should be controlled and
> checked at an International Standard to bring sustainable activities in
> the country.
> http://www.eco-web.com/editorial/040924.html
>
> [...]
> ------------
>
> Of course if you pump a load of water down a hole that
> is being heated by a load of radioactive rock, some of that
> radioactive material will be dissolved or kept in supension
> in the water, and it's going to come up to the surface.
>
> It WILL also find it's way into the water table and aquifiers.
> Water is the slipperiest molecule in the universe.  It
> will get everywhere once pumped into fissured
> rock.
>
> This is a big scream for the "NO NUKE" crowd, if something
> weally bad hapens, like tewwowists or a WEALLY big earthquake,
> you could leak nasty stuff into the WATER TABLE killing
> all the chilrun for at least 200,000 years.  So THERE.....!
>
> Sorry to tell you kiddies, injection driven geothermal power generation
> does that from day one, week one.
>
> In a country like Australia, devising a scheme to take huge
> quantities of fresh water and polluting it to generate electricity
> is criminal.  And insane.
>
> On the other hand, a closed fuel cycle reactor, metal cooled,
> will sit there and chug along producing not only power,
> but nice clean drinking water as well.
>
> Here we go.  A few dozen of these little babies
> all around the coast.
>
> http://www.llnl.gov/str/JulAug04/Smith.html
>
> Plug-n-Play Power.
>
> Mark Addinall.
>
>
>> cheers
>> Bill
>

That's not my understanding of geothermal energy (though I may be wrong).

Pump salt water down one hole, and tap it as steam out the other hole. The 
salt is left behind; fresh water is the waste product. Because heat exchange 
(Carnot cycle) engines are so inefficient at comparatively low temperatures 
(a few hundred degrees C), you actually get a lot of fresh water produced 
for each kWh you produce. When the "mining" is completed, you have a huge 
amount of salt from the sea buried deep underground and the other waste 
product - fresh water - available for consumption.

The initial cost is high, because you have to build a salt water pipeline 
from the coast. As soon as your mine is operational, you start drilling 
another one a few kms away, and extend the salt water pipeline and 
transmission lines to this new location. You are always buiding the next 
mine as you use the previous one. The cost of second and third mines is far 
lower, because you only need local water and power reticulation.

The real guilty secret is that to make the process efficient on a large 
scale, you have to be able to fracture a cubic km of granite a few kms 
underground. I know an excellent, cheap way to fracture a few cubic kms of 
rock underground, which will also give you a nice hot underground cavity a 
couple of hundred metres in diameter which can be used as a boiler. But even 
mentioning this technique will completely destroy the acceptability of 
geothermal energy to the public at large, so none of the potential operators 
advertise this far more cost-effective approach.