Drilling is one of those things which used to be extremely expensive but has very gradually come down in price. Thanks, ironically, to the oil industry. It's unsexy because there's no "silver bullet" waiting in the wings.

It's also quite hard to find suitably hot rocks suitably close to the surface.

Focusing on fusion .. I think that's a legacy of 60s SF, when the fission revolution was still promising "energy too cheap to meter".

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buu700 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To be fair, that promise of fission made sense from a purely scientific and mathematical perspective, before running into the practical realities of how its externalities interact with real-world politics. Fission is expensive because in practice it turns out we care quite a lot about proper waste management, non-proliferation, and meltdown prevention.

In a world where anyone could just YOLO any reactor into production with minimal red tape, consequences be damned, fission energy would actually be extremely cheap. Hence the optimism around fusion. The promise of fusion is an actualization of last century's idealistic conception of fission. It can be a silver bullet for all intents and purposes, at least once it's established with a mature supply chain.

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psunavy03 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I fully understand that waste management of fission reactors is a Very Big Deal. But I still stand behind the argument that opposing nuclear power in the 70s and onward is possibly the biggest own goal the environmental movement has ever achieved.

At worst, nuclear waste contaminates a discrete section of the Earth. Climate change affects literally everywhere. The correct answer would have been to aggressively roll out fission power 40-50 years ago and then pursue renewables. You can argue that other solutions would make fission power obsolete, but we would have been in a much better spot if it'd at least been a stepping stone off fossil fuels. Instead, we have 40-50 years of shrieking and FUD from environmentalists over an issue that can be kept under control with proper regulation. The US Navy has operated reactors for over 60 years without incident, proving it can be done with proper oversight.

TL;DR nuclear has issues, but I'd take it over coal every day and twice on Sundays, at least until something better can scale.

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davidw 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of housing politics from 'old school' environmentalist groups are a pretty big own goal as well.

Denser urban living is pretty energy efficient, and forcing lengthy commutes on people because of NIMBYism is a huge waste.

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psunavy03 9 hours ago | parent [-]

People want houses. Planners can either yell and stomp their feet about this or adapt to circumstances. It's like electric cars. People want cars. Better they have the ability to have an electric SUV or pickup, because if you try to force them into little tiny econoboxes or lecture them about how they should really be using mass transit, they're just going to flip you the bird and walk away.

Similarly, better to have people be able to have reasonably energy-efficient houses than demanding they all live in apartments.

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spankalee 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Allowing people to live in apartments is not demanding that they do.

Reversing the downzoning of the 70s - 00s is about allowing construction in cities again.

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davidw 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People want a place to call home. Those come in many shapes and sizes. Denser living does not mean a smaller living space. By building 'up', you can provide both.

The only ones demanding anything are those who show up to try and stop apartments.

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pjc50 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People want houses, but absolutely hate other people having houses.

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inglor_cz 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"People want houses."

(Source needed. This probably depends on a lot of variables in play.)

Plenty of people in dense urban areas are happy with living in an apartment and, where I live, buying a condo in the city is at least as frequent as buying a house 20 km away from it for the same price.

Living in suburbia has its downsides - long commute, very limited entertainment and cultural possibilities, very limited choice in schools. Not everyone loves cutting the lawn etc. either, I surely don't. If any of your family members has any disease that could flare up, ambulance response time tends to grow worse with the growing distance.

Of course, a lot depends on factors such as "is the transport authority willing to make public transport actually safe and nice". That requires keeping raving drugged lunatics out of it, plus paying enough money for it. AFAIK in the US, Republicans have an ideological problem with the "paying money for it" part and the Democrats have an ideological problem with the "suppressing antisocial behavior in it" part.

	▲	davidw 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		People want a lot of things, many of them conflicting. I'd love a huge house on a large lot in a walkable area and it to be cheap, and also close to nature. Letting markets work is a good way of resolving people's revealed preferences. Some will prefer a condo in a walkable area, others a large lot outside a less expensive city, others will pay through the nose to have a single detached unit in a high cost of living area.

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pjc50 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Back then, it affected everyone in two ways, which were the things Greenpeace campaigned against: nuclear weapons, especially overland testing, and dumping waste at sea.

Chernobyl took out Welsh farming for years, and in a few places decades, because it spread a thin layer of bioaccumulative poison over the whole of Europe.

	▲	psunavy03 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Neither of these have anything to do with running a well-regulated nuclear power program. Chernobyl happened because of the apathy and incompetence endemic to any Marxist-Leninist system, not because a modern democratic state is incapable of regulating the nuclear power industry. Know what else spreads a thin layer of poison over the whole of the world? Coal power.

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buu700 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree. I think the correct environmentalist position at that time wouldn't have been to oppose nuclear, but to advocate for improvements, streamlined approvals of improved designs, and public investment or incentives.

I wasn't really commenting on the merits of 20th century environmentalist movements, more raising the general point that fission power has inherent costs which weren't reflected by narrow 1950s analyses of how much energy was extractable from U-235. Operation of a fission plant requires much more capex and opex than it would if we didn't care about cleanliness (waste management), security (fissile material theft prevention), or safety (meltdown prevention).

Fusion power is more complex to invent and practically depends on modern technologies that didn't exist 50 years ago, but once the first demonstration plants are operational, marginal costs to deploy and operate more should be much lower and ultimately become very low at scale.

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Animats 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Drilling is one of those things which used to be extremely expensive but has very gradually come down in price. Thanks, ironically, to the oil industry. It's unsexy because there's no "silver bullet" waiting in the wings. It's also quite hard to find suitably hot rocks suitably close to the surface.

That's basically it. Most geothermal plants today are in locations where there are hot rocks, maybe geysers, close to the surface. "Deep geothermal" gets talked about, because temperatures high enough for steam are available almost everywhere if you can drill 3,000 meters down. There are very few wells in the world that deep, not counting horizontal drilling runs.

The economics are iffy. You drill one of the most expensive wells ever drilled, and you get a medium-pressure steam line. Average output is tens of megawatts.[1]

[1] https://pangea.stanford.edu/ERE/db/GeoConf/papers/SGW/2020/A...

	▲	hluska 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The economics change when you’re in oil country. My beautiful little province has oil wells drilled between 250 and 2900 metres. Due to corporate ‘issues’ many of these wells are orphaned and remediation becomes a provincial problem. With deep holes and provincially owned electricity and gas companies, geothermal makes more economic sense; it’s robbing a benefit from a big cost centre. I went to high school with two guys who are working on geothermal as a means to remediate orphan wells. I’m biased in their favour, but the numbers make a lot of sense.

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tastyfreeze 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Plasma drilling is a recent development that looks promising for unlocking deeper wells for geothermal.

	▲	rini17 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Remains to be seen, it has serious trouble with water getting into the borehole.

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hodgehog11 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Many others here have talked about the difficulties of geothermal, which doesn't really get to the heart of my question: why the lack of hype around breaking down those difficulties? I appreciate that you took the time to comment on why it isn't so sexy, the SF argument probably has a lot to do with it.