Credit: Photolibrary
There's a way, but is there a will?
We get comparably high sub-surface temperatures in Australia, where I believe the future for geothermal power is potentially unlimited. It's green and safe, and exploration licences for geothermal power prospects are booming – a pilot plant is already working in the Cooper Basin in northern South Australia.
There is also another option: the enrichments in heat producing elements are what give us our extraordinary uranium resources. Olympic Dam in South Australia is the biggest uranium deposit in the world and it's no coincidence the deposit is found in heat-producing, element enriched rocks.
We export uranium overseas, where it's used to generate enormous amounts of low carbon-emission energy. All over Europe, people live side-by-side with nuclear power plants: they recognise nuclear power as an efficient, cost-effective, carbon neutral energy source.
In Australia, we have the raw materials, but choose not to use them for our own benefit. The potential for both geothermal and nuclear power in Australia is huge. There are almost certainly undiscovered highly lucrative uranium deposits out there, but equally lucrative geothermal resources too.
In exploiting either, though, we will have to overcome obstacles, such as how to deal with nuclear waste, and – for geothermal energy – the engineering advances necessary to extract energy and transfer it to the electricity grid more efficiently.
But the biggest hurdle could be our attitudes. Governments have yet to address our energy potential in a considered, scientific manner. Our reliance on fossil fuels cannot continue given the likely repercussions, and the solution could well lie under our feet.
Sandra McLaren is a Centenary Research Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Uranium, The Last non-Renewable Fuel
Australia is also one of the richest sources of renewable and clean solar energy! Once Science and technology find a way to separate Hydrogen from water effectively, and combine with it carbon, preferably from the atmosphere, to make a liquid fuel, like diesel, a non flammable, clean burning, non-corrosive, high energy fuel for our beloved piston engines, Solar will be the king of fuels. The remaining Uranium in the world can be used to establish the 'seed' solar plants that will eventual take over except in those cases, like ice-breakers and submarines, where Uranium will reign supreme. Recycling spent reactor fuel is another area of interest. McGill University, in the mid 1950's developed a low-grade fuel reactor called the 'Slow Poke', and then stopped moving in that direction. The urgent quest for new energy sources in the world today may rekindle interest in methods of extracting usable energy even from low grade 'spent' reactor products, to extend the useful life and mitigate the safe storage problems associated with Uranium as a fuel.India has a Thorium reactor planned that does this quit well, and China will soon show its scientific prowess and possibly show the way to the energy future. American schools are underfunded repositories for the entitled, not necessarily the 'smart' part of their population and have fallen by the wayside in Science and Technology. We can expect less from them than in the past.