alt Hacker News"Geothermal also has two key advantages over nuclear generation. Nuclear power plants are dependent upon a finite resource (uranium), and nuclear waste disposal is both controversial and costly. In contrast, geothermal generation depends on a virtually infinite source (heat generated in Earth’s interior), and there are no long-term waste issues."
1) Scientific consensus is that the Earth is also finite.
2) Also, the heat generated in the Earth's interior is...nuclear power.
3) Nuclear waste disposal is a political problem, not a technical one; it is "controversial" and "costly" precisely because it's used for these sorts of unserious comparisons.
I love the idea of geothermal, but this sort of nonsense has to be called out and shamed.
Replies
4) Thorium nuclear waste disposal would be orders of magnitude easier than for U/Po.
Wow, that comment is extremely misleading and exaggerated.
1) Everything in the universe, including the sun's solar radiation, is finite. It's just a matter of scale. The heat in the earth's core is practically infinite for humanity's current and near-term needs.
2) The heat generated in the earth's core is a combination of fission decay and residual heat from the earth's initial formation. The fission reaction is locked away 5000 KM deep (as in 5 million meters), deep-enough that it poses no threat even if you drill down thousands of meters to tap into that. That is very much not true of man-made nuclear fission.
3) There is still no long term storage mechanism that is guaranteed to keep nuclear waste for the several million years it would take to decay to safe levels, considering possible things that could happen over that time scale.