I suspect it would work as well as building a giant system of dykes protected New Orleans from flooding in a hurricane.
Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
31–40 of 137 posts
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#32> 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 ene…
No, it says that energy is bleeding at 4.5 GW and accumulating at 1.5GW. To get accumulation to 0, you need to boost bleeding by that amount.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#33Earlier 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.
I invite you to find yourself a copy of any or all of
The Control of Nature by John McPhee,
A River Lost by Blaine Harden, and
Marc Reisner's books Cadillac Desert and A Dangerous Place.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#34We should take Montana and push it somewhere else.
According to the article, this was originally Idaho's problem, but they pushed it to Montana.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That is very much not how the atmosphere works. The jet stream as one example moves over the US at hundreds of miles per hour, and more generally speaking gases disperse through the atmosphere very quickly.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#36Earlier 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"
In the article it's said the proposal already included 160 plants in a big ring around yellowstone, resulting in the 16,000 years figure.
So to get it down to 100 years you'd need 160^2 = 25,600 geothermal plants.
Perfectly reasonable, let's do it.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
half jokingly I thought "so we just need 160 power plants to bring it down to 100 years"
In the article it's said the proposal already included 160 plants in a big ring around yellowstone, resulting in the 16,000 years figure. So to get it down to 100 years you'd need 160^2 = 25,600 geothermal plants. Perfectly reasonable, let's do it.
Plus you’d take a great step towards solving our energy problems.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#38Depending on the depth this can be risky.
Switzerland had two larger projects to dig deep enough for a geothermal power plant and both got cancled due to the triggered earth quakes. [1]
There may be another attempt but it's risky and I think doing this at Yellowstone maybe a lot more risky.
[1] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/strom-aus-erdwaerme-trotz-sc...
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#39Probably 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).
A federal law can easily be changed by simply passing another federal law. It's not like a constitutional change.
Of course, this requires political will too, but unlike various other issues, I doubt that some old law protecting national parks is going to be held as sacrosanct as the second amendment. The GOP certainly doesn't care about protecting NP resources, and the Dems will agree too as long as enough scientists tell them it's a good idea.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#40I can't help but wonder if the yellowstone caldera going off would also trigger the cascadian subduction zone into doing it's thing sympathetically.