deep enough, below the water table. (if it even exists where you pick a location) no big deal. There’s worse things down there already than moderately low level radioactive metals. It’s not like we aren’t fracking underneath peoples homes now. releasing dangerous gasses, causing earthquakes, yada yada. That’s the other good part about the deep desert: it’s already inhospitable enough that people don’t gather there uniformly in great numbers. If you buy up some land and cordon it off, it’s not really screwing with people. What if you put it deep in the Sahara?
When drilling is suddenly OK, then forego the nuclear reactor and go straight to geothermal.
Geo is a great idea, sadly they have trouble getting it to scale, and locating hot enough pockets proves elusive. If you’re in volcanic areas, medium-sized geothermal is amazing. IIRC Iceland uses it to great effect but it doesn’t work just anywhere. We can’t drill so deep that it gets hot enough to make a difference; you need to find a spot where the crust is already thin.
Now that’s not to be confused with geothermal at the house level for heatpumps, that is straight up awesome but works on a very different concept and can’t really scale at all… well it would be nice if all these fucking datacenters would use that instead of evaporative loops. but that’s a different story.
edit 2 looking at the carbon footprint of concrete, you’d spend more carbon drilling the hole and getting the waste to the hole than the plug you used to fill it. and you’d be able to store decades of terawatts of energy refuse in that hole
And that concrete is 100% carbon neutral and will never be affected by earthquakes.
When drilling is suddenly OK, then forego the nuclear reactor and go straight to geothermal.
Tell that to your nuclear waste buddies who oppose geothermal.
deep enough, below the water table. (if it even exists where you pick a location) no big deal. There’s worse things down there already than moderately low level radioactive metals. It’s not like we aren’t fracking underneath peoples homes now. releasing dangerous gasses, causing earthquakes, yada yada. That’s the other good part about the deep desert: it’s already inhospitable enough that people don’t gather there uniformly in great numbers. If you buy up some land and cordon it off, it’s not really screwing with people. What if you put it deep in the Sahara?
Geo is a great idea, sadly they have trouble getting it to scale, and locating hot enough pockets proves elusive. If you’re in volcanic areas, medium-sized geothermal is amazing. IIRC Iceland uses it to great effect but it doesn’t work just anywhere. We can’t drill so deep that it gets hot enough to make a difference; you need to find a spot where the crust is already thin.
Now that’s not to be confused with geothermal at the house level for heatpumps, that is straight up awesome but works on a very different concept and can’t really scale at all… well it would be nice if all these fucking datacenters would use that instead of evaporative loops. but that’s a different story.