My Google Alerts net brought me this odd little story about Larderello, Italy, where geothermal heat was first transformed into electricity in 1904. Apparently, the town’s geothermal history museum recently reopened while a delegation of Philipino journalists was in town.

The town of Larderello is a virtual showcase for geothermal energy. From the large turbines of the power station to the gas pipelines snaking around the area, picturesque Larderello lives and breathes geothermal. A museum, founded by Larderello SpA in the late 1950s, is located in the restored Palace de Larderel in the town center. It had been under renovation for some 10 years now and was reopened at the same time the Filipino journalists were there. The whole townsfolk and Enel executives as well as the mayors (called sindaco) from the three neighboring towns where the Enel geothermal facilities are located—Alberto Ferrini of Castelnuovo, Alessandro Giannetti of Monterotondo and Loris Martigioni of Sasso—showed up for the reopening ceremonies. Inside the museum, you can find the history of geothermal energy in all aspects—from research to drilling, to the various systems for using geothermal fluid for the generation of electricity, thermal power and mechanical power. Original models, photographs, machinery and equipment cover the history of drilling in the area. Entrance is free of charge.

Tutti in Piazza! For the geothermal celebration! Who doesn’t love Italians?

Here in the U.S., both Boise and the Northern California area known as the Geysers were early sites of geothermal development.

This excellent data comes to us courtesy of the paper, “A half century of US federal government energy incentives:
value, distribution, and policy implications” by economists Roger H. Bezdek and Robert Wendling of Management Information Services. Granted, renewable energy has gotten more backing since 2003, but the overall trends are still good.

Paired with my previous All You Need to Know post about energy R&D, you can see how little the U.S. government has really invested in developing non-fossil, non-nuclear power. I’ll have more on these issues soon, but if you want a good primer on U.S. energy tax policy, particularly as it relates to the oil industry and the “depletion allowance” take a look at this succinct Congressional briefing.

In the top graph, it’s important to note that I included big hydro — you know, the Hoover Dam, etc — into the green tech number. Otherwise, as you can see in the bottom graph, Federal support for green tech has been miniscule. Renewables have received just about 5% of total energy incentives from the government. Add in geothermal and you get to 6%.

Here’s the Google doc that generated the charts above.

Tomorrow, Inventing Green and the whole project that it represents will get a big boost. The book based on this research is headed to auction and it appears it will be sold to one of several great publishers. For the last few months, there’s been a lot of waiting and wondering. From here on out, expect much more regular updates to the blog.

But I haven’t left history waiting. In my day job, I’ve been writing about the history of objets d’espace and the use of nuclear bombs for civilian ends. In the course of the latter, I had the opportunity to talk with Milo Nordyke, an engineer on Operation Plowshare — which aimed to build nukes for simple excavation tasks like building new harbors in Alaska and a new Panama Canal — at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

After finding his name on a patent for “stimulating hydrocarbon production” from oil shale, I found his actual phone number in the white page. (The white pages!) He still lives in Livermore, California and after Plowshare lost steam in the early 70s, served out his time with the lab working on nuclear weapon disarmament.

When he answered the phone, I imagined that I had just caught him in a late afternoon nap. His voice was a little gravelly and he cleared his throat several times as he began to explain what he’d been up to for more than years of his life.

Among the many intriguing things he told, one stood out for this blog: the Plowshare program had looked at nuclear weapons as a way of capturing geothermal energy. The problem with geothermal is that, currently, it requires very fortuitous geology. You need a pool of water sitting over hot rocks that have enough seams to allow the water to flow when you drill into it. Not many places offer such kind circumstances.

So, geothermal backers came up with the concept of “enhanced geothermal” back in the 70s — what was known then as “hot dry rock” geothermal — wherein humans would simply create the fractures that the Earth had neglected to provide. Then we’d pump water down one well and wait for it to come up steaming hot through a second well. It sounds great, but it hasn’t really worked. It turns out that fracturing the rock is hard.

Well, if you need to break some rocks, nuclear explosions sure can do the trick. After my article on Plowshare came out, the all-around excellent sustainability writer Chris Mims got in touch to say that he was pretty sure there was a patent for geothermal energy via nuclear bombs. One quick Google later and look what we have here, “RECOVERY OF GEOTHERMAL ENERGY BY MEANS OF UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR DETONATIONS.”

It’s pretty straightforward actually. The abstract reads:

Geothermal steam is generated by setting off an underground nuclear detonation above a naturally hot stratum of igneous rock and thereafter introducing water into the formation above the hot stratum which has been made permeable by the nuclear detonation.

Now, we mostly just pump pressurized water down to fracture the rock, but that hasn’t actually worked very well. A nuclear explosion could work, as the patent notes, creates cylinders of fractured rock with permeability that is normally “between 25 percent and 40 percent.” Importantly for geothermal, nuclear detonations can also create a big underground cavern, which you could fill with water that would get hot and come up through a well.

Of course, the water could become “excessively radioactive,” — and that’s probably a dealbreaker. As Nordyke said, geothermal field production through nuclear explosions, “never really developed that much.”

From: NREL Energy Analysis Office

I love when Idahoans get all proud of their green tech heritage, as in this story from today’s Idaho Business Review:

Idaho has a long history of geothermal home and business heating, starting with the Boise Water Works wooden geothermal pipeline built in 1892. Today Boise has the largest direct use geothermal system in the country, supplying the Boise Capitol Mall Complex, the Fort Boise Veteran’s Hospital and surrounding homes and businesses with geothermal heat.

The city’s current system appears sustainable, too. They now inject 100 percent of the water back into their aquifer.