this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Isn't geothermal mostly nuclear power?
Partially, some of the heat comes from radioactive decay within the Earth, and some is left over from the Earth's formation.
More a potentially infinite (within human lifetimes) heat source from a still-warm Earth interior. Limited in that you can't harness it from anywhere other than local.
Nah it's friction from rocks banging into each other when the Earth was being formed. The surface of the Earth cooled down, but you dig down deep enough it gets really hot. Hot enough to melt rocks, or as the pros call it... "magma". Dump some water down there and you get steam and you can drive a turbine with that steam. Though actual geothermal energy implementations are probably a little more complicated than that. But that's the gist of it.
Well, Wikipedia claims
In that sense, it's the only renewable energy source we have that's not indirectly powered by the sun. It's most similar to (proper) nuclear power, but the latter isn't "renewable" because it requires digging up fuel from the crust.