Steven Novella
speaker
1,536 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4 Jul
Steven Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Make it worth it, yeah.
It depends on what kind of geothermal you're doing.
So the easiest type is when you have a hot spring, right?
Like, again, in Iceland, the water's already there.
You're just tapping into a hot spring.
You pump up the steam, basically, and that turns your turbines.
But far and away, the most common geothermal is what we call a dry well geothermal.
because you're not tapping, you have to put the water down there yourself.
So then you have to drill two different types of wells, a production well, which brings up the hot water, and an injection well, which sends down cool water.
And that's J where you get to this closed loop system.
You're sending water down, it gets heated up at depth, then you pump up the hot water and you use that to generate steam.
But there's two different ways you could generate steam from bringing up the hot water.
One way is you essentially pump that water up under pressure.
So now you have water that's at greater than 100 degrees Celsius, which is the boiling point, right?
So let's say you're at greater than 150 degrees Celsius.
Again, this is the most common type of geothermal.
Typically operates greater than 150 degrees Celsius.
This is called the flash steam system, where you bring up this superheated water, and then when you release the pressure, it flashes into steam, and then that steam turns to turbine.
And then some of that condenses back down, or the water that doesn't turn to steam, you pump back down.
It's cooler water, so it gets reheated.
Showing 321–340 of 1,536 · page 17 of 77
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