Title makes it sound like a new method of generating energy was discovered, but really the article is about using geothermal in a new location.
> The development of medium-deep (>400 m) and deep geothermal reservoirs (> 1,500 m) could be a partial solution to provide renewable heat to single buildings, residential or commercial neighbourhoods, or districts of the city of Aachen via the existing district heating network.
Ta-daa. That happens. They found some new geothermal source in Munich as well after I moved into the place I'm in now. It turned out it was very viable.
Nowadays the heat in my apartment is mainly geothermal (The district heating network in my neighborhood has been converted to geothermal energy over the past 10 years.)
Please refrain from putting these 2 in the same bucket. Fracking does lots of localized and non-local pollution. Nuclear is contained and way safer for humans.
The no brain solution is to electrify everything and switch legacy infrastructure to renewables, just like China does. Gas usage is down in the EU anyway.
Long-term, that's the smart and also necessary move. But it can't be done overnight, and the transition has its significant challenges. I hope they don't mess it up it and will address these problems rationally - but given how most EU leaders have acted over these past few years, I remain painfully unconvinced that they will.
Not to sound like an ass but that's your typical HNer hot take on a topic they don't know anything about (which is 99% of topics outside of tech).
I know that I don't know jack shit about the topic, but I can already tell you that if you do what you describe you'll quickly learn about why grids have frequencies, what generate these frequencies, and what happens when they drift.
China still uses a massive amount of coal, and has a lot of southern idle land. Germany has been doing what you say for the last 15 years, it didn't seem to work out so well.
No brain because there is lack of survival instincts in such phrase?
Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe, your lifestyle, way of thinking etc. They claim they are better. Sure , sponsoring this country is no brainer lol.
Germany already financed biggest war in europe since WWII by flooding russia with oil money. Is that not enough? Amount of money EU spent to tame the fire could easily cover building 20-30 nuclear plants across the europe to solve the heat/cooling problem once and forever.
The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars the First, Second, and Cold Wars has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united, they're the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn't happen. - This is a direct quote by George Friedman. This[1] is a good read to entertain the idea more.
That's fantasy. Germany tried very hard to civilize russia through trade over few past decades. Everybody tried. Turned out russia is just to stupid for any kind of advancement. Did not learn a thing. Everybody else did though.
>Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe
There is not a scintilla of evidence for this.
They're trying to keep the same violent and aggressive American dominated military alliance that is currently and actively trying to destroy Iran far away from their most vulnerable border.
They also tried to pursue the diplomatic route multiple times before invading and after invading and were always rebuffed.
They started the largest war in Europe since 1945 and I fervently hope that Putin will pay for that in a way similar to Hitler.
That entire war is a massive, futile attempt to revive their glorious imperial days by annexing lands that they consider their alienated property. Fuck them and their bombs and their disgusting oscillations between paranoia and megalomania.
Contemporary Russia has fewer people than Pakistan and a smaller economy than Italy. It has no business playing a "mighty superpower" role anymore, but it ignored that reality (Putin is very much a person of the past, as is his inner circle of post-Soviet siloviks in their 60s and 70s) ... and it is learning the hard way.
The best possible outcome of this war from Kremlin's point of view is that they will become a de-facto resource colony for China, somewhat benevolently managed by actually competent people.
I'd encourage you to watch John Mearshimer's address to the European parliament because he addresses your narrative of imperial expansion and comprehensively refutes it, with clear, easy to understand evidence:
Ha, you speak about the war between Russia and the US and friends
You are correct. Perhaps deal with all these people in the same way ? It starts with Biden and ends with countless others, all of which are equally guilty, all of which are fuelling a war needlessly.
I have always wondered about the origins of the anti nuclear opinion of Germans.
It has Cold War origins to be sure, but what kind?
I suspect American intelligence has been supporting the anti nuclear movement for some time, for non-proliferation reasons - and not just in Germany. I certainly would be, if I ran the State Department.
Once I had a discussion with a German that is a strong supporter of the green party and his argument against nuclear power was the nuclear waste and no proper was of disposing it and also building new nuclear power plants are expensive and take a long time.
Then I did a deep research and created a PDF and pointed out that there has been many advances of re-using spent-nuclear fuel and minimize the environmental impact since 1980s and also countries like China has been using a cleaver way of using a standardized model of building power plants to cut cost, etc. but he didn't want to accept it as if he was almost brainwashed.
The "nuclear waste" argument is so weird to me. We take radioactive rocks from the ground. Make them less radioactive. Put them back in the ground. There is no output that wasn't dug up out of the ground originally. It would have been polluting the original location already.
That's part of it, but if you lived through months of news about where milk is unsafe and how to wash your vegetables and how much iodine to take. You'd maybe think differently too.
All the "oh, but it's different now, it's really safe" implies that the scientist at the time of the Chernobyl disaster didn't give assurance that it's totally safe either.
I am in favor of nuclear power and think that closing the plants was a huge mistake, but it's not somehow fully irrational to opose nuclear power. Not everyone has the hubris of thinking they can evaluate the risks when being shown some data. Nor can they distinguish the difference between "the experts then said it's safe" and "the experts now say it's safe".
Some good answers below already. I think the anti nuclear movement already started before Chernobyl. I believe it was one of the founding ideologies of the green parties (the danger of high CO2 emissions was not yet front of mind for a lot of people back then). So the opposition to nuclear energy kind of laid the foundation for the modern (European) green parties. But these were all young people back then (in the 70s) and a they have now become the dominant generation in politics. So just like in any other country the 50+ years old are in charge and that cohort in Germany happens to have fond memories of opposing nuclear energy.
And just a little side note because I've looked it up recently: EU produces about the same amount of nuclear energy as the US - and that's despite Germany shutting down all reactors. So it's not like the US or any other region has a much higher usage.
The 1st reason is waste. Germany is more densely populated than the US so you can't store it far away from humans. The solution tried before was to just store it deep underground. Turns out that might even be worse than storing it on the surface as it turned out and it has been a total disaster (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine). There have been more cancer cases in this region compared to neighboring regions as well, which might be linked to it. It is now planed to retrieve the waste again and store it somewhere else. Where is currently not known afaik. The whole thing costs billions of Euros already and is going to cost even more and didn't even deliver on it's promises. So for that reason alone wanting to produce more nuclear waste when we can't even deal with what we already have is obviously unpopular.
The 2nd reason is cost. As shown above the storage of nuclear waste has been an expensive fail for Germany, but it doesn't end there. We don't have any nuclear reactors left, so we would need to either reactive existing ones (expensive as they haven't been maintained for continuance operations) or to build a new one. How well that works we can see in either Finland or the UK... both have huge cost overruns and aren't even on-time. I think we had enough of those projects (BER, Stuttgart21) that another one that would likely end up like this is nothing anyone wants. Building more renewables such as solar and wind together with energy storage and gas/hydrogen power plants as backup is just a lot cheaper as we don't need more base load power plants, but ones that are a lot more flexible and can be turned on/off quickly depending on solar/wind output. And any new gas power plant is planned to also work with hydrogen, which can be produced when we have too much solar/wind and then act as the storage medium. So basically a long term way to store energy that is more flexible than batteries (at least on this time and size scale).
In the past reasons were different, but those aren't really relevant now.
* If the cold war had turned into a hot war, almost all of Germany would have been nuked. The expectation was not to be able to stop the soviet invasion, but to nuke them in western Germany.
The Soviets are a more likely culprit, as then just like now most of their revenues came from oil and gas exports. They secretly supported the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhof) terrorists via the Stasi, so funding the Greens to stymie intermediate range ballistic missile deployments in Germany, with securing hydrocarbon sales as a cherry on top, would not at all be out of character.
Back when I was in high school in France in the 1980s (before Chernobyl), I was already very aware of global warming and deeply resentful of the various Green parties sabotaging the one solution we had at the time.
I'm still very pro-nuclear, including Thorium and fast-neutron breeder reactors (but not small modular reactors, that are a boondoggle outside nuclear submarines), but I recognize solar or renewables combined with grid scale storage are more economical.
45 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] thread> The development of medium-deep (>400 m) and deep geothermal reservoirs (> 1,500 m) could be a partial solution to provide renewable heat to single buildings, residential or commercial neighbourhoods, or districts of the city of Aachen via the existing district heating network.
Nowadays the heat in my apartment is mainly geothermal (The district heating network in my neighborhood has been converted to geothermal energy over the past 10 years.)
Except when it de-contains itself.
I get that it’s a a form of clean energy and we kind of need that in the EU but a remote, “protected”, isolated location would be my first choice.
One could argue it is nominally safe.
I know that I don't know jack shit about the topic, but I can already tell you that if you do what you describe you'll quickly learn about why grids have frequencies, what generate these frequencies, and what happens when they drift.
Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe, your lifestyle, way of thinking etc. They claim they are better. Sure , sponsoring this country is no brainer lol.
Germany already financed biggest war in europe since WWII by flooding russia with oil money. Is that not enough? Amount of money EU spent to tame the fire could easily cover building 20-30 nuclear plants across the europe to solve the heat/cooling problem once and forever.
[1] https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-crisis-in-ukraine-is-not-ab...
There is not a scintilla of evidence for this.
They're trying to keep the same violent and aggressive American dominated military alliance that is currently and actively trying to destroy Iran far away from their most vulnerable border.
They also tried to pursue the diplomatic route multiple times before invading and after invading and were always rebuffed.
That entire war is a massive, futile attempt to revive their glorious imperial days by annexing lands that they consider their alienated property. Fuck them and their bombs and their disgusting oscillations between paranoia and megalomania.
Contemporary Russia has fewer people than Pakistan and a smaller economy than Italy. It has no business playing a "mighty superpower" role anymore, but it ignored that reality (Putin is very much a person of the past, as is his inner circle of post-Soviet siloviks in their 60s and 70s) ... and it is learning the hard way.
The best possible outcome of this war from Kremlin's point of view is that they will become a de-facto resource colony for China, somewhat benevolently managed by actually competent people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1U3HDNQ24o
Ha, you speak about the war between Russia and the US and friends
You are correct. Perhaps deal with all these people in the same way ? It starts with Biden and ends with countless others, all of which are equally guilty, all of which are fuelling a war needlessly.
It has Cold War origins to be sure, but what kind?
I suspect American intelligence has been supporting the anti nuclear movement for some time, for non-proliferation reasons - and not just in Germany. I certainly would be, if I ran the State Department.
Then I did a deep research and created a PDF and pointed out that there has been many advances of re-using spent-nuclear fuel and minimize the environmental impact since 1980s and also countries like China has been using a cleaver way of using a standardized model of building power plants to cut cost, etc. but he didn't want to accept it as if he was almost brainwashed.
All the "oh, but it's different now, it's really safe" implies that the scientist at the time of the Chernobyl disaster didn't give assurance that it's totally safe either.
I am in favor of nuclear power and think that closing the plants was a huge mistake, but it's not somehow fully irrational to opose nuclear power. Not everyone has the hubris of thinking they can evaluate the risks when being shown some data. Nor can they distinguish the difference between "the experts then said it's safe" and "the experts now say it's safe".
And just a little side note because I've looked it up recently: EU produces about the same amount of nuclear energy as the US - and that's despite Germany shutting down all reactors. So it's not like the US or any other region has a much higher usage.
Noting that France has one of the highest shares of nuclear in the world, offsetting some of Germany's shutdown.
The 1st reason is waste. Germany is more densely populated than the US so you can't store it far away from humans. The solution tried before was to just store it deep underground. Turns out that might even be worse than storing it on the surface as it turned out and it has been a total disaster (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine). There have been more cancer cases in this region compared to neighboring regions as well, which might be linked to it. It is now planed to retrieve the waste again and store it somewhere else. Where is currently not known afaik. The whole thing costs billions of Euros already and is going to cost even more and didn't even deliver on it's promises. So for that reason alone wanting to produce more nuclear waste when we can't even deal with what we already have is obviously unpopular.
The 2nd reason is cost. As shown above the storage of nuclear waste has been an expensive fail for Germany, but it doesn't end there. We don't have any nuclear reactors left, so we would need to either reactive existing ones (expensive as they haven't been maintained for continuance operations) or to build a new one. How well that works we can see in either Finland or the UK... both have huge cost overruns and aren't even on-time. I think we had enough of those projects (BER, Stuttgart21) that another one that would likely end up like this is nothing anyone wants. Building more renewables such as solar and wind together with energy storage and gas/hydrogen power plants as backup is just a lot cheaper as we don't need more base load power plants, but ones that are a lot more flexible and can be turned on/off quickly depending on solar/wind output. And any new gas power plant is planned to also work with hydrogen, which can be produced when we have too much solar/wind and then act as the storage medium. So basically a long term way to store energy that is more flexible than batteries (at least on this time and size scale).
In the past reasons were different, but those aren't really relevant now.
Another relevant note here is that Germany is heavily investing in nuclear fusion, which is probably a better use of funds. https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-fusion-germany-bets-billions-o...
Nuclear fusion is very iffy while we know nuclear fission works very well.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#History
* The nuclear industry in Germany was plagued by scandals and big parts plain criminal: https://www-deutschlandfunkkultur-de.translate.goog/hanau-de...
* And ineptitude was common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
Back when I was in high school in France in the 1980s (before Chernobyl), I was already very aware of global warming and deeply resentful of the various Green parties sabotaging the one solution we had at the time.
I'm still very pro-nuclear, including Thorium and fast-neutron breeder reactors (but not small modular reactors, that are a boondoggle outside nuclear submarines), but I recognize solar or renewables combined with grid scale storage are more economical.