below and penetrating the water table with the potential for short and long half-life transuranic fissile products and a path of least resistance for any runaway conditions which is directly to an uncontained well head... with the extra bonus of installation proposed in 'spent' hydrocarbon bearing regions which implies reduced density substrates with all the tiny seismic outcomes and risks.
I greatly dislike this sort of "doesn't work perfectly everywhere by default therefore doesn't work" take. The steam engine didn't replace all the mules at once.
It should be pretty trivial to pick and choose geologies and depth where it is safe. Maybe that's a lot of places. Maybe that's a few. But it should be trivial regardless.
The USSR built a nuclear district heating system in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) but never commissioned it because of the general anti-nuclear sentiment at that time.
It's certainly possible and not even very hard (by nuclear standards) because the reactor can operate at ambient pressure.
The biggest issue is inefficiency and cost of district heating except for places like Finland. It's now cheaper to install heatpumps instead.
Bohunice Nuclear Power Plant is used for nuclear district heating.
"Upon development of a district heating supply network in the town of Trnava near Bohunice NPP, V2 switched to co-generation. Part of this system is a heat feeder line commissioned in 1987. In 1997, a heat feeder line to Leopoldov and Hlohovec was created, branching off from the Trnava line."
We don’t need any new and untested technology to solve to stop spewing out greenhouse gases. We just need to scale up current green tech. It’s not know how and technology that is lacking, it is political will.
I don't say we shouldn't do research. What I do say is that we do have all the technology we need. And more importantly, we don't have the time to wait for some future technology that potentially could solve all our problems. The climate disaster has already started (and this [0] is not "the new normal", this is just the beginning, a hint of what we should expect).
The only reason we are in this shithole is because of the lack of political will. It would have been comparable trivial to solve if we just had started 30 years ago when scientists started to yell about that it was getting urgent.
We don't need new technology, it took France only about 20 years to replace it's coal and oil based electric generation with nuclear power generation (between 1976 and 2000).
Because of lack of political will in US and many European countries we continued to burn fuels to generate electric energy.
If by "we" you mean the whole world, then we have to do a gigantic scale up of the current green tech, as current green tech produces on minuscule part of the global primary energy.
Page 7 looks like a single point of failure in an unmaintainable device that would result in a well of contaminated water a mile deep that passes through the water table that could never be fixed.
Also, I want to add on that if you lined the well to be single fault tolerant you will still be vulnerable to a high likelihood common mode failure from a single seismic event. Truly just the worst. The founders should pivot hard and fast.
And how many of those places have we dug 100 mile deep holes in and verified nothing has changed? It doesn't take a long look at fracking research to see that this line of reasoning doesn't hold.
How does this look in practice? You need the water to transfer the heat, so in response to a disaster that has already poisoned the water table you need to extract the water, put it somewhere, and backfill with concrete, all while you've already poisoned miles of water table and fighting from spreading further and damning all workers involved? For what gain?
How exactly will it poison the water table? A mile is in bedrock much deeper than the water table and any radioactive material will stay at the bottom because it is heavy.
Seismic activity collapses the well, trapping the nuke underground, pressure find a way to escape via polluting a "faraway" aquifer, or it doesn't escape and you have a man-made volcano in the works
Not a plausible scenario. The entire point is that by putting these a mile deep that they will self seal if they meltdown. They can't create a volcano because they are only 15MW. If the reactor cracks the radioactive fuel can only contaminate the water at the very bottom of the shaft because it is a mile deep.
I thought the whole point was that the reactor would deliver heated water to the surface for utilization...? But it will magically stop trying to do that if the main shaft is obstructed and there is a separate egress?
Or are you also burying the turbine and power lines a mile deep?
perfectly safe /s