could it work in 50 years? maybe. probably not.
it's not working in 7 years, which is the climate change timeline.
it's time to stop trying to chase new inventions, and just build 1970s nuclear.
A very respectable amount of utility power is generated geothermally, and has been for decades without mishap. What is new here is a drilling method. Power extraction from a hot borehole is mature tech.
which produce 778 billion kwh in the united states
.
> A very respectable amount of utility power is generated geothermally
16 billion kwh
.
> and has been for decades without mishap.
More deaths have occurred from geothermal, total, than nuclear, despite that nuclear delivers 48x the power.
Guatemala City: 33.
Dieng: 41.
Fenton Hill: 12.
Sorik Marapi: 5.
Soultz-sous-Foretz: 19.
Calpine: three times. 1, 5, 4.
El Salvador: 12.
Sumatera: 6.
Leyte: two incidents: 5, 17.
Sarulla: 18.
Brisbane: 14.
Reykavik: 2.
It'll get worse. AltaRock had to be stopped twice for causing earthquakes. Strasbourg was permanently stopped. So was dover. Pohang's earthquakes put a city under lockdown and killed two people.
There exists no decade since the launch of geothermal power where at least 25 people didn't die. Nuclear has only had that count once.
Oh, you haven't? My mistake.
Iceland sits on a big magma chamber, so they would need to proceed differently. Still, they have a lot of practical experience with utility-scale geothermal energy extraction the rest of us ought to learn from.