Either fusion or drill baby drill is necessary. Watt’s steam engine was absolutely horrible, but it was the worst steam engine ever built. If Finland builds the worst deep geothermal ever that still works, we can hope for better ones.

Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?

▲

distances 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?

The Finnish 7 kilometer geothermal drilling failed commercially, I guess that's what you're referring to. Is there any reason to assume drilling deeper would work?

Ref. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaniemen_syv%C3%A4rei%C3%A4t

▲

baq 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that’s the one. Economics of this are hard - but money is numbers in computers, it’s just a question of how serious the government is with getting it done - physics-wise it gets like 10-15C warmer with every km, which is important for the delta T obviously. I know nothing about drilling the extra couple km, though, only assuming it can be done with enough engineering.

▲

distances 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I understood that temperature wasn't the problem. How it works is that you pump water into one well, and get it out from an adjacent one. The main problem was permeability, they couldn't get the necessary flow rate between the wells.

	▲	baq an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ah good to know, I for some reason thought it wasn't hot enough. Sounds like they need to figure out horizontal drilling 8km deep in volcanic rock.

▲

Tuna-Fish 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or just fission, we know how to do that.

8-10km is not anywhere enough, the Baltic Shield is ~50km thick.

▲

baq 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You don’t need to drill to magma, just deep enough to get to 120-130C rock. (‘Just’)

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]