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Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

askageologist.blogspot.com

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Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#121

Post by KineticLensman »

saalweachter wrote: post #79
ryanmercer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plenty of wild non-war applications have been proposed for nuclear bombs over the years Yup, Project Plowshare (US) and Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (USSR) looked a lot of interesting/crazy ideas for non-military applications for nuclear weapons. Some of the ideas were just nuts for use on earth (like making bays) but if we ever do start setting up shop on another planet, like Mars, nuclear detonation…

Just out of curiosity, do you know to what extent the various applications (from making artificial bays to sealing wells) depend on it being a nuclear bomb versus "a big bomb"?

> do you know to what extent the various applications (from making artificial bays to sealing wells) depend on it being a nuclear bomb versus "a big bomb"

Well, any of them where emplacing a million tons of TNT might be problematic

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#122

Post by throwawaylinux »

hilbert42 wrote: post #114
throwawaylinux wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "People who think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a restless volcano up close. They are a whole lot bigger than they seem to be in the films. Mount St Helens is a relatively small volcano, yet it still took me nearly 6 hours to walk out of the center crater." Maybe volcanologists who don't think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano j…

"Mt. St. Helens was 7 megatons and 17 megatons of other thermal energy released..." Well, at minimum, that's still between 400 and 700 times the energy released during the Hiroshima explosion. That's over two magnitudes more energy and I'm glad I wasn't anywhere near it at the time. ;-) The Tsar Bomba (which I remember as a kid) had to be made to prove a point but as Kurchatov, Sakharov etc. seemed to realize at the…

It was the point of the sentence I was responding to, which claimed that nuclear bombs were not comparable to volcanoes in terms of energy released. They are, at least volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens.

The Americans made bombs larger than St. Helens too.

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#123

Post by VintageCool »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #34

I've often wondered if its possible to use a fault line as a waste compactor and recycling centre considering all our "man made" waste comes from this planet?

Most subduction zones are quite far underwater, so... the trash would probably just bob to the surface and float.

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#124

Post by senectus1 »

jjk166 wrote: post #12

[0] https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file... You wouldn't want to drill into the magma chamber to relieve pressure, instead you would drill next to the magma chamber to cool the rocks on the edge, shrinking the chamber. Every few decades after the chamber had shrunk, you'd drill a new set of boreholes closer. The expense would be substantial, but well within the range of major government projec…

hasn't the unintended consequences of FRACKING taught us anything?

you go poking fairly stable systems and they will become unstable for us fairly quickly and uncontrollably.

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