We should take Montana and push it somewhere else.
According to the article, this was originally Idaho's problem, but they pushed it to Montana.
Time to unleash a potato blight.
Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
51–60 of 137 posts
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't. The reason is that even though we are probably capable of doing so we lack the responsibility required to do this without the chance of massive negative side effects. Every time we've upped the scale in our abilities it has only resulted in more damage, not quite balanced out by more progress. This is a real problem: we can get ourselves into the kind of trouble that we don't seem to be able to get ourselves…
The problem is that inaction is also fraught.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Some time ago scientists were concerned that the Earth was headed into another ice age. Then we started burning all of this carbon, so that's not happening anymore. Great, catastrophe averted. Now we're burning way too much and going hard the other way.
Damn it.
Okay, so the status quo is no good, maybe we should build a whole bunch of nuclear plants so we can stop burning coal. What could possibly go wrong?
Or we could do this geothermal thing.
Indolence is fatal. Pick your poison.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus you’d take a great step towards solving our energy problems.
We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production - the final cost of power is a big ???. Most people want cheap power. Anything over around 20 cents a kWh makes it uncompetitive to fossile equivalents (e.g. wood / oil / gas heating).
> We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production
Not theoretical at all:
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/americas-fir...
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#54Could 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.
Upheaval is the load bearing word in your sentence. This is what causes the extreme pressures.
Anything to relieve the pressure can, by definition, cause an eruption if there is an inadvertent feedback loop.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those numbers aren't that large. They aren't small in anyone's estimation, but the Empire State Building is a lot less than the amount of material a motivated earthmoving company can get through in a year. There'd be some interesting technical challenges tearing down Everest, but it is conceivable. The part that requires creative thinking is why it would be worth it spending that much money.
To build the Panama Canal, excavators removed enough spoil to fill a city block 19 miles high.
You all are talking quantitatively about volumes, but there’s also the qualitative difference between soil and magma.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#56"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…
One option would be to set up a big industrial district. Call it Shenzhen II. Cheap power and some industrialist-friendly tax laws and maybe the US could keep pace with the Chinese. People'd start building and finding uses for that power extremely quickly.
I find it very much laugh-or-you'd-cry that the US would rather have Yellowstone winding up for a big one than allow geothermal power projects near a national park. Talk about catastrophically bureaucratic priorities.
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production - the final cost of power is a big ???. Most people want cheap power. Anything over around 20 cents a kWh makes it uncompetitive to fossile equivalents (e.g. wood / oil / gas heating).
California is 50c/kwh…
According to https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/archive/2021/ the average retail price for California was 20..
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#58> The authors note that 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.
That sounds overly simplistic. Volcanic eruptions aren't caused by energy accumulation alone (otherwise every eruption would have the same magnitude), and AFAIK it's mostly the accumulation of gas that triggers eruptions, and in many cases the gas is in fact steam…
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#59Could 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.
Given that eruptions are primarily driven by the ejection of gas, the “earth popping like a balloon” analogy is more apt than you think it is (even if it's not exactly like that, and more like opening a shaken bottle of Champaign after you won the Grand Prix).
Re: Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus you’d take a great step towards solving our energy problems.
We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production - the final cost of power is a big ???. Most people want cheap power. Anything over around 20 cents a kWh makes it uncompetitive to fossile equivalents (e.g. wood / oil / gas heating).
In theory the cost of the whole thing blowing up should offset this investment costs but Don't Look Up (2021) convincing the folk about potential natural disasters.