Modern geothermal is dispatchable. It's a really good compliment to wind and solar https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-ge...
Like nuclear, I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs, suggesting that it isn't usefully dispatchable.
But that's too simplistic. A big limitation of geothermal is that rock has poor thermal conductivity. So once you remove heat it takes a while for it to warm up again. If you're running it 100% then you need a large area to compensate. OTOH, if you're running it at a lower duty cycle you likely need less area.
So if you know the duty cycle in advance, then you can likely significantly reduce costs. Yay!
But that also means that you likely can't run a plant built for low duty cycles continuously for 2 weeks during a dankelflaute. It's likely great for smoothing out daily cycles, but not as good for smoothing out annual cycles. That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.
Higher capital costs, but not nuclear high capital costs.
> That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.
It likely would supplement batteries rather than compete against them. A battery buffer would allow a geothermal plant to slowly rise to load and fall as that load goes away.
A very large battery can store 200MWh worth of energy. The largest geothermal plant produces 1.5GW. (A lot of the large plants look like they are in the range of 100->200MW). Presumably those plants can run for more than a few hours which ultimately decreases the amount of batteries needed to smooth out the demand curve.
The largest under construction for go live in 2027 has another order of magnitude, 19000MWh and will deliver up to 1000MW.
Things are changing fast as battery prices drop and experience accumulates.
The UEA are aiming for a longer than usual runtime, but only 19 hours, not 2 years.
What you should worry about is half-lives of under a few years.
> the risk that something gets out of control are extemly high
Except this is false, you are just spreading misinformation. I suggest you confront your current knowledge to different sources and listen to the arguments of the proponents of nuclear energy before you make up your mind. Don't just repeat what you have heard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
With regard to nuclear waste. Here is an example, how it can went quickly out of control:
Safe, clean, too cheap to meter?
Some things never change.
The C.G suits were right as long as the digging operation is not too costly (the more shallow and concentrated the better)
Fossil fuels are nothing short of a miracle because they are so energy dense, but it's a slow poison and has high addictive power.
As long as we didn't (want to) know about negative externalities (chief among them CO2 and CH4) whose cost was borne by humanity, it was ok. Dirty but everyone seemed to think it was worth it.
The advantages of nuclear is not that it would be too cheap to meter (even though that becomes true with time because most of the price is upfront investment).
- It is that you can get energy independence even if you don't have uranium because it is so energy dense that you can just stockpile it. For example France could run its plants for 2 years with its current stockpile of uranium, and it only recycles around 10% of its fuel. Compare that with its oil needs, the oil stockpile would only last 3 months, probably less.
- It is CO2 free
Bonus: Nuclear industry is required to take of its waste products (which are only waste products insofar are we are too lazy/cheap to recycle them, else they are just more fuel)