{"id":10382,"date":"2026-06-11T15:00:49","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T19:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=10382"},"modified":"2026-06-11T12:30:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T16:30:28","slug":"australia-granite-radioactive-power-plant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/australia-granite-radioactive-power-plant\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian scientists just made the case that the continent already runs a natural nuclear reactor: superhot granite that once powered a plant for 160 days before the wells got plugged and everyone walked away"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australia has managed to argue about nuclear power for fifty-odd years without ever building a single commercial reactor. The argument is in rare form right now. On May 6, the upper house of New South Wales voted 21 to 19<\/a> to scrap the state’s ban on uranium mining and nuclear facilities, the first time a pro-nuclear bill has cleared a house of an Australian parliament since the bans went up in the 1980s. The federal prohibition still sits on top of whatever the states decide. So the country is currently debating, with real feeling, power plants that do not exist.<\/p>\n

Apparently the punchline was underfoot the whole time. Two Australian geoscientists, Juan Carlos Afonso of the University of Tasmania and Heather Handley of the Museums Victoria Research Institute and Monash University, argued in The Conversation<\/a> in late May that the continent already runs something like a reactor: granite, miles down, kept hot in part by the same radioactive decay that fires a nuclear plant.<\/p>\n

No fuel rods, no containment dome, no decade of hearings. Their name for tapping it is Geothermal 2.0, drilling into rock hotter than 662\u00b0F (350\u00b0C) and pulling steady electricity out of the ground around the clock. After decades of development, they reckon, the approach is finally “ready for prime time.”<\/p>\n

The outback granite is doing the same trick as Cornwall’s<\/h2>\n

If a self-heating rock formation sounds familiar, it should. In February, Britain switched on its first geothermal power plant<\/a> at United Downs in Cornwall, fed by the deepest hole ever drilled in the country: 3.3 miles into granite that warms itself through the slow decay of uranium, thorium and potassium. The water down there comes up hotter than 374\u00b0F (190\u00b0C) and now powers around 10,000 homes. That story became one of the most-read pieces we have run, partly because the idea is so pleasingly absurd. A nuclear power source with no nuclear power plant attached.<\/p>\n

Australia’s version is the same physics with the dial turned to continent. Radioactive elements scattered through the planet’s crust throw off heat as they decay, and certain granites concentrate those elements enough that the rock effectively warms itself from the inside. Cornwall sits on one of those granites. So does a serious slice of Australia. The Australian Geothermal Association<\/a> has been pitching this for years as the clean “natural nuclear” energy beneath the country’s feet, and per the assessments Afonso and Handley cite, superhot rock likely sits at depths of 2.5 to 5 miles (4 to 8 km) across parts of Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia. Which puts a meaningful share of it within range of drilling technology that already exists.<\/p>\n

Everything changes at 705 degrees Fahrenheit<\/h2>\n

The 2.0 in Geothermal 2.0 is mostly about temperature. Conventional geothermal needs heat near the surface, which is why the classic plants cluster around volcanoes and geysers in places like Iceland, a country that pulls almost a third of its electricity out of the ground. Superhot geothermal goes after rock above 662\u00b0F (350\u00b0C) at depths of 3 miles and beyond, and the prize at those temperatures is a phase change. Squeeze water hard enough and heat it past 705\u00b0F (374\u00b0C) and it stops being liquid or steam and becomes a supercritical fluid, a state that can carry up to ten times more energy than either. Every gallon you pump becomes worth several, which is the difference between a science project and a power station.<\/p>\n

And if 374 rings a bell from the Cornwall story, check the unit before you get too excited. Cornwall’s water tops out near 374 degrees Fahrenheit. The supercritical threshold is 374 degrees Celsius. Same digits, entirely different league of energy, and no commercial plant anywhere runs on it yet.<\/p>\n

The closest anyone has come is Mazama Energy<\/a>, which announced last October that it had built the hottest enhanced geothermal system on record at Newberry Volcano in Oregon, 629\u00b0F (331\u00b0C) at the bottom of a 10,200-foot well, with a 15 MW pilot planned for 2026 and future wells aimed at 750\u00b0F (400\u00b0C). Drilling has sped up too. Wells that once took months to sink can now advance at up to 98 feet (30 meters) an hour, and the researchers behind the Australian pitch figure a well-managed superhot system could run for 30 to 50 years at costs comparable to wind power.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
TARGET<\/div>\n
The Threshold<\/div>\n
705\u00b0F<\/div>\n
374\u00b0C. With enough pressure, water past this point turns supercritical, neither liquid nor steam.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Energy Per Liter<\/div>\n
\u00d710<\/div>\n
How much more energy supercritical water can carry compared with steam or liquid water.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Australia’s 1%<\/div>\n
20\u00d7<\/div>\n
Tapping 1% of the country’s superhot rock would match 3 billion barrels of oil, about 20 times its 2021 electricity use.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Proven Heat<\/div>\n
471\u00b0F<\/div>\n
244\u00b0C measured 2.6 miles down the Habanero wells, Cooper Basin. The 1 MW pilot ran 160 days in 2013.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Australia already tried this once, and the heat showed up<\/h2>\n

Australia has already drilled this hole. Starting in the early 2000s, a Brisbane company called Geodynamics went after the granite under the Cooper Basin near Innamincka, a South Australian outpost about as remote as the continent gets. Six wells went down between 13,780 and 16,112 feet (4,200 to 4,911 meters) into a body called the Innamincka Granite, and the rock delivered: temperatures from 446\u00b0F to 507\u00b0F (230 to 264\u00b0C), with the reservoir measured at 471\u00b0F (244\u00b0C)<\/a> some 2.6 miles down. In 2013 the company circulated water between two of those wells and ran a 1 MW pilot plant for 160 days. The original corporate ambition had been 100 MW.<\/p>\n

Then it died, and the reason matters. The granite was not the problem. “The technology worked,” Geodynamics’ then chief executive Chris Murray said at the time, but hauling that electricity from one of the loneliest places in Australia to anyone who could pay for it cost more than the power would ever earn.<\/p>\n

The wells were plugged, the company moved on, and Habanero became the cautionary tale Australian energy people reach for whenever geothermal comes up. What the new pitch amounts to is an argument that the two things that killed Habanero, drilling cost and modest temperature, are exactly the two things that have changed since. Per ARENA, the federal renewables agency, granite in the Cooper Basin runs to temperatures beyond 536\u00b0F (280\u00b0C), and a Habanero-era rig never had a shot at supercritical territory.<\/p>\n

The drills it needs are already in the country<\/h2>\n

The case for Australia specifically is less about geology than about who already lives there. This is a nation that drills, blasts and core-samples for a living, with a mining industry that has spent a century learning the subsurface and a government geoscience agency that maps it obsessively. Afonso and Handley’s point is that the skills, rigs and crews superhot geothermal needs are largely the ones the fossil fuel business will be shedding, so the overlap is the opportunity. The numbers they attach to it are the kind you read twice.<\/p>\n

Tapping just 1% of Australia’s superhot rock, by the Clean Air Task Force’s preliminary estimate, would yield the energy equivalent of 3 billion barrels of oil, roughly 20 times what the entire country used in electricity in 2021. The same group’s global math says 1% of the world’s superhot rocks could cover planetary electricity demand eight times over. Today, geothermal supplies about 1% of the world’s renewable electricity, so the gap between what it does and what it could do is the whole story.<\/p>\n

Long-time readers will recognize the genre. This is the third entry in what is quietly becoming the resource story of the decade: the stuff under industrial countries’ feet turning out to be worth more than anyone bothered to check. Saskatchewan drilled a well and natural hydrogen flowed to the surface on its own<\/a>. Alberta ran the numbers on the salty wastewater its oil crews had been dumping for 75 years and found close to a trillion dollars in lithium<\/a>. Australia’s version of the jackpot is heat, and the authors already have a customer list in mind: hydrogen production, data centers and critical minerals processing, alongside ordinary homes and industry. A tidy loop, using the mining country’s heat to refine the mining country’s metals.<\/p>\n

Nobody has written the check yet<\/h2>\n

Deep drilling is still expensive, and predicting the exact temperature you will hit 4 miles down remains closer to educated betting than engineering. Superhot wells that are run carelessly can lose flow, pressure or temperature over the years. Some of the best Australian resources, like the Great Artesian Basin, sit far from transmission lines that would have to be built from scratch. And the private money that turned American geothermal startups into a venture-backed scene has so far not shown up for Australian heat, which Habanero’s ghost does not help. What Afonso and Handley actually ask for is modest: a national roadmap for deep geothermal that pulls the new drilling tech together, backs a pilot or two, and plugs Australia into the work being done by the US, Iceland, Japan and the rest of the superhot crowd.<\/p>\n

Whether Canberra bites is anyone’s guess, and the reactor argument will keep running either way; it is practically a national sport at this point. Still, there is something genuinely funny about a country tearing itself apart over nuclear plants that may never get built while sitting on a continent-sized reactor that finished construction a few hundred million years ago. The heat is there. The drills are there. The only part of this power station anyone still has to build is the plumbing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australia has managed to argue about nuclear power for fifty-odd years without ever building a single commercial reactor. The argument … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":10390,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","resize-featured-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10394,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10382\/revisions\/10394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}