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To: 3niner
"You are clearly not an engineer."

Nope. Just a PhD Analytical Chemist with Nuclear minor. I occasionally make noises like an engineer, though, sufficient to have 24 issued patents, with more coming, and two R&D 100 awards.

And I say again, "universal geothermal energy" is sheer crackpottery. Having to drill 4 kilometers down to get to a temp of the boiling point of water (not a very efficient thermal differential) is NOT practical, and unlikely to ever BE practical.

78 posted on 08/01/2006 4:25:31 PM PDT by Wonder Warthog (The Hog of Steel-NRA)
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To: Wonder Warthog

The Amoco Oil Company drilled an exploration hole past the 18,000 foot mark in eastern Iowa Devonian shale back in the 1970s. Deep drilling is possible but quite expensive and time consuming.


88 posted on 08/02/2006 7:09:50 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks (BTUs are my Beat.)
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To: Wonder Warthog
Nope. Just a PhD Analytical Chemist with Nuclear minor. I occasionally make noises like an engineer, though, sufficient to have 24 issued patents, with more coming, and two R&D 100 awards.

Then you should know the difference between someone proposing to violate the laws of thermodynamics, and simple matters of efficiency.

In fact, there are geothermal power systems that use even smaller temperature differences, also some of the newer geothermal power plants, that now exist, operate very efficiently using steady state energy extraction.

Professor Tester was merely pointing out that subsurface technology has advanced to the point where it may soon become practical to create, artificially, the conditions which we now use as non-depleting, geothermal, energy sources.

That said, I still think that a much more promising, near term, energy source is to build sodium cooled, fast neutron, fission reactors.

90 posted on 08/02/2006 9:51:45 AM PDT by 3niner
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