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June 23, 2008

Nuclear power as a stopgap to geothermal power

I started to dig into what John McCain's energy policy is vis-a-vis renewable energy. But then I realized that his policy tomorrow may not be the same as it is today or the same as it'll be the day after tomorrow. He has recently called for building 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030. But as I say, that's subject to change on a day-by-day basis.

A couple days ago, during a meeting with Governors, Barak Obama noted that nuclear power doesn't emit greenhouse gases and thus is worth devoting research dollars to. However he noted, "I don't think that nuclear power is a panacea."

An increasing number of environmentalists are calling for the nuclear option as a means of avoiding the impending global warming crisis. but only as a medium-term measure rather than as a long-term solution. James Lovelock (author of Gaia Hypothesis) and Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, are at the forefront of them.

Ausebel explains,

"As a green, I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for nature," he wrote. "To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy such as wind, water, and biomass cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors."

For example, it would have required windfarms covering 301,000 square miles to have met the round-the-clock American electricity demands in 2005. By 2030 our electricity demands are expected to increase by 50%.

Which brings me to The Great Forgotten Clean-Energy Source: Geothermal

If we could extract all the geothermal energy that exists underneath the United States to a depth of two miles, it would supply America’s power demands (at the current rate of usage) for the next 30,000 years.

Geothermal is considered to be decades away from being able to make a significant contribution to our electricity needs. But the reason is more financial than technical. As MIT chemical engineering professor Jefferson Tester says, "It's not as if we don't know how to drill holes and fracture rocks. But we have to demonstrate EGS on a scale that would be useful for commercial enterprise." Another part of the problem is that hunting for good candidate sites for geothermal requires the exact same skilled geologists who the Big Boys are employing hunting for more petroleum sources because that's where the big money is at... currently. Which makes it that much more difficult for the geothermal wildcatters who are currently at the forefront of the business in this country to secure the necessary talent.

Doug Glaspey, chief operating officer of U.S. Geothermal, an Idaho-based company that just finished building a 13-megawatt geothermal electrical plant in southern Idaho, says that it currently costs up to $4 million per megawatt to build a geothermal plant. The 2005 electicity demand was roughly 4 trillion megawatt hours. So the financial costs of actually building geothermal facilities are obviously daunting too. But that's largely because so little research has been put into it. Much of our technology dates back to the oil prices were sky high - the 1970s.

The bad news: "The United States alone pumped the equivalent of nearly 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2005. More than 2 billion tons of that came from electricity generation."

The good news: Obama has pledged to plow $150 billion over the next 10 years into clean/cleaner energy and to double R&D funding for the same.

I know that this is heresy in some circles but I think that Lovelock and Ausebel make a lot of sense.

Posted by Kevin at June 23, 2008 09:01 AM