It’s a shame this was written earlier this year. In Iceland there’s an ongoing magma intrusion event near (and under) the town of Grindavik. There also happens to be a geothermal power plant not far from the town. The progression of this magma intrusion, particularly beneath the power plant itself, seems like it should provide a valuable case study to test the idea presented by this article. If there ends up being an…
I suspect the SCALE required to ease the pressures would be absurd. Warhammer 40k sort of absurd. Having said that, It should be considered to take advantages of clean energy.
Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
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Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#12It’s a shame this was written earlier this year. In Iceland there’s an ongoing magma intrusion event near (and under) the town of Grindavik. There also happens to be a geothermal power plant not far from the town. The progression of this magma intrusion, particularly beneath the power plant itself, seems like it should provide a valuable case study to test the idea presented by this article. If there ends up being an…
Iceland's event is much smaller, but we're not talking about the sort of thing that you can implement in a year.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#13It’s a shame this was written earlier this year. In Iceland there’s an ongoing magma intrusion event near (and under) the town of Grindavik. There also happens to be a geothermal power plant not far from the town. The progression of this magma intrusion, particularly beneath the power plant itself, seems like it should provide a valuable case study to test the idea presented by this article. If there ends up being an…
> At this rate, the energy of the next eruption would be drained after about 16,000 years, and in less than 50,000 years the magma chamber would be cooled completely. Iceland's event is much smaller, but we're not talking about the sort of thing that you can implement in a year.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#14"Regardless of the specifics of the details, in the abstract, such a scheme is in some sense, possible. How should we consider it? On the one hand, building a huge geothermal power station at Yellowstone would generate a large amount of (potentially cheap) electric power while simultaneously reducing a catastrophic risk. " "On the other hand, in many ways Yellowstone is a particularly bad place to try to build such a…
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#15Looking it up, we're of course already on top of harnessing the geothermal there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Valley_Geothermal_Pro....
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#16Could we trigger an eruption by extensive drilling in/around the magma chamber?
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#17"Regardless of the specifics of the details, in the abstract, such a scheme is in some sense, possible. How should we consider it? On the one hand, building a huge geothermal power station at Yellowstone would generate a large amount of (potentially cheap) electric power while simultaneously reducing a catastrophic risk. " "On the other hand, in many ways Yellowstone is a particularly bad place to try to build such a…
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#18It’s a shame this was written earlier this year. In Iceland there’s an ongoing magma intrusion event near (and under) the town of Grindavik. There also happens to be a geothermal power plant not far from the town. The progression of this magma intrusion, particularly beneath the power plant itself, seems like it should provide a valuable case study to test the idea presented by this article. If there ends up being an…
I suspect the SCALE required to ease the pressures would be absurd. Warhammer 40k sort of absurd. Having said that, It should be considered to take advantages of clean energy.
>The size of volcanic eruptions can be expressed by the volume or mass of magma released (table 1), with super-eruptions yielding in excess of 450 km3, or more than 1×10^15 kg, of magma (Sparks et al. 2005).
Wikipedia says the Empire State Building has a volume of 1e6 m3 or 0.001 km3. So the eruption would be equivalent to at least 450,000 Empire State Buildings worth of magma. Mt Everest is some 90km3, so only 5 Mt Everest equivalents.
These amounts are too big for me to comprehend, but yeah. Going to need a bigger boat.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.200...
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the SCALE required to ease the pressures would be absurd. Warhammer 40k sort of absurd. Having said that, It should be considered to take advantages of clean energy.
I don't have a sense of the scale you are talking, but I would love to see more megaprojects. Truly mega. When we aren't getting in our own way, humans do some pretty awesome stuff.
It's the sorcerers apprentice, but a weird variation on it. Just supposed that what the GP says is possible and doable: what guarantees do we have that we fully understand the system we are messing with? How much risk are we willing to take? Who are the stakeholders in these risks?
Without answers to all of these questions we run the real risk of biting off more than we can collectively chew and if and when we do there won't be an 'undo' button to press. Well, technically will have pressed it, but quite possible on a time-scale that we didn't quite envision.
I've seen the most stupid proposals of the kind that you are suggesting: PNE's ('Peaceful Nuclear Explosions') on a scale never dreamed of before to remake the face of the Earth, create new watersheds and so on. And to incidentally put an amount of radiation into the atmosphere that would be absolutely unparalleled. The fact that we can do these things doesn't mean that we automatically have to do these things.
I keep thinking about the discovery of nuclear power: what if we hadn't? Would that be such a huge problem or would we simply have found other, better ways of providing ourselves with power? And if we did, what would be the short term, mid term and long term consequences of doing so? Because the energy stored in the core of the Earth is the ultimate form of fossil energy: between gravity and plate tectonics life had a way of escaping the oceans and without that we'd be fish, mammals in the ocean at best. Good luck with that electronics project you were working on in that environment.
It's tricky: we have one Earth. Any decision that irrevocably removes something from that Earth carries a price tag the value of which may not be visible for a long time to come, so caution would seem to be the best way forward, even if that isn't our nature. Our nature is just to act and then to pass the buck to the next generation.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#20What could possibly go wrong?