Certainly it could orbit the earth, but the orbit could easily pass through the earth since it does not interact. The reduced gravity from earth while it is below the surface will mean the orbit wonâ(TM)t be an ellipse and i think it would be unstable.

You didn't just cherry pick one of the definitions Google's AI spits out did you? Here is what it told me:

1. perceive the intended meaning of (words, a language, or a speaker).
2. interpret or view (something) in a particular way.
3. be sympathetically or knowledgeably aware of the character or nature of.

Besides an LLM really does not understand anything, because it doesn't generate its own answer as a whole:

(taken from https://www.ibm.com/think/topi...)

I thought there was an explanation that Theia formed in the same orbit as Earth, each at a Trojan point with the other. This is unstable and eventually they crashed into each other. Is this now considered impossible?

That's because the project's value is political, not economic. Yes, generating power by digging a mile-deep hole, filling it with water, and running nuclear reactor at the bottom of it is likely to be crazy expensive and have all kinds of environmental challenges.

But what you have to understand is that the American political system is a zero-sum game and Democrats put their chips on solar, wind, and other renewables. Republicans put theirs on coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Solar and Wind have proved to be the winning bet over petro-products and that has happened fast enough that a lot of voters remember Republican opposition to those power sources. No political movement tolerates being unambiguously wrong about something so the American right is desperate for an argument on the energy front that allows them to validate the arguments they've been making over the past 50 years.

Nuclear is that argument. But to do nuclear you've gotta be able to convince people that they don't need to be afraid of a nuclear plant in their community. That's a heavy lift and what this technology really provides is a new argument beyond getting the general public to trust a bunch of nuclear and civil engineers when they say it's perfectly safe. Your average voter may not understand how a modern nuclear containment unit works. But "it's buried under a mile of rock" has a simple elegance to it.

What you don't do: slow down

Not a big fan of this, but I'm pretty certain they need that money to actually replace all the working parts of the reactor. Only the concrete shell will be reused. They could probably use the same amount of money to fix reactor 2 the same way, they are just not touching it because of history.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.