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Too much pollution, way too much CO2 for my taste.Physics_Kid said:so then why bother, use oil until tokamak comes online
It is always about the money. Sure, you can create huge underground caverns, but the cost of such a project is completely unreasonable.Blank_Stare said:Forget the money involved, for a minute - I know that's the first thing people attack, to kill an idea, but just for the sake of exploring the concept, let's imagine that it is not financially imprudent.
Let's dig caverns under major bodies of water, where we can install turbos (or whatever hydro uses) to turn the water dumping from the lake/sea/ocean above into the cavern below into electricity. We know such structures are possible, as they already exist, in the (mostly natural) form of salt mines.
A 100 m x 100 m x 100 m hole 300 meter deep (at its center) could store ##(100m)^3 \cdot 1000 \frac{kg}{m^3} \cdot 300m \cdot 9.81 \frac{m}{s^2} = 800~\text{MWh}##. You need 30 of these gigantic holes to buffer the production of a single 1 GW plant for one day.