Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

construction-physics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 137 posts

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#21

Post by 7thaccount »

fbdab103 wrote: post #17
hutzlibu wrote: post #2

"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…

Given what would likely be billions of dollars to build such a plant, I am not sure why the transmission infrastructure is more than a footnote on the project. There is a lot of engineering know-how on moving electricity large distances. Less so on building the world's largest power plant in the efforts to avoid a global catastrophe.

Transmission is crazy expensive and hard to permit for. Something like this could easily be in the billions depending on how much would need to be built and the associated upgrades.

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#22

Post by corethree »

Probably could. I doubt the US has the ability to do it. CA can't even finish the bart and they can't even finish the high speed rail.

Huge infra structure projects like this are no longer feasible in terms of cost and political/collective will in the US.

It's almost a 99% guarantee this will never get built ever. At least not by the US. Any time you see speculative stuff about big projects in the US that aren't related to the military it's a pretty much a guarantied pipe dream.

The only way I see it getting built if they angle it as some kind of military thing to stay competitive with China. But that's really a stretch.

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#23

Post by zdragnar »

jeffbee wrote: post #14
hutzlibu wrote: post #2

"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…

I don't even see why you'd need transmission lines. Just use the enormous quantity of free energy for direct carbon capture, at that site.

At ~400 parts per million CO2 concentration, that would be wildly wasteful. We could more easily take the money that would go into building the plant and put direct capture on existing fossil fuel power plants.

Better yet would be to put up short transmission lines out of the park, and set up a dirt cheap energy district for energy intensive manufacturing- smelting, data centers, that sort of thing.

The magma chamber stays cool, there's a nice new tax base, good potential for reducing emissions, everyone wins except for the people who want Yellowstone to be untouched wilderness.

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#24

Post by chii »

michaelbrave wrote: post #13
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

half jokingly I thought "so we just need 160 power plants to bring it down to 100 years"

hehe, or drilling down into the magma chamber 160 times causes it to erupt prematurely.

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#26

Post by zdragnar »

corethree wrote: post #22

Probably could. I doubt the US has the ability to do it. CA can't even finish the bart and they can't even finish the high speed rail. Huge infra structure projects like this are no longer feasible in terms of cost and political/collective will in the US. It's almost a 99% guarantee this will never get built ever. At least not by the US. Any time you see speculative stuff about big projects in the US that aren't rela…

There's already federal laws against setting up geothermal power generation in Yellowstone.

Any discussion on the topic has to begin with assuming the usual red tape has been cut (however much I agree with the impossibility of that happening aside).

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#27

Post by salawat »

jeffbee wrote: post #14
hutzlibu wrote: post #2

"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…

I don't even see why you'd need transmission lines. Just use the enormous quantity of free energy for direct carbon capture, at that site.

What are you going to do? Pipeline air/build giant fans to mix carbon rich air from elsewhere to the One Carbon Capture Plant You Spent Way Too Much making?

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#28

Post by firebones »

Strong "I drink your milkshake!" vibes from these proposals.

Both of these proposals require political stability we're unlikely to see over 600 or 50,000 years. You have to be thinking some kind of self-sustaining and monumental Pyramids-type project.

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#29

Post by thaumasiotes »

jtriangle wrote: post #16
fooker wrote: post #8

Could we trigger an eruption by extensive drilling in/around the magma chamber?

No, it's not like a balloon, an eruption isn't the earth popping, it's an upheaval from the mantle eventually surfacing through a weak spot that causes it.

> Drilling into, or above, the magma chamber below Yellowstone would be fraught with problems. For one, it could potentially cause the volcano to erupt, the very thing we’re trying to avoid.

Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?

#30

Post by thaumasiotes »

> given the size of past Yellowstone eruptions, and the span of time between them, the rate that energy builds below the volcano is only around 1.5 gigawatts - less heat than a typical power plant sheds. Yellowstone currently bleeds heat at a rate of about 4.5 to 6 gigawatts, mostly through heated water moving below the surface. You'd thus (theoretically) only need to increase the heat bleed by around 35% to stop energy accumulating and stop future eruptions.

Doesn't this say that the heat bleed is already at least 300% of what's necessary to stop energy from accumulating?

Post reply on HN