71–80 of 137 posts
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.
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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.
> hard to permit for The legislative of any state can basically write a law saying "this project is exempt from review". This isn't a complicated problem like interstate water rights with American Indian treaty obligations.
(Unless of course you are a fan of the chinese modell and want to implement that - but even they fear people revolting over unpopular big decisions)
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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.
> hard to permit for The legislative of any state can basically write a law saying "this project is exempt from review". This isn't a complicated problem like interstate water rights with American Indian treaty obligations.
You're like a walking, talking poster child for Dunning-Kruger.
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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.
Big fan of WH40k as the exemplar of massive scale. This article[0] defines a super volcano as >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 a…
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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…
It's not a case of "would they rather", that's ridiculous. It's flat out not feasible to do and wouldn't work even if we did. The scale and forces are far too massive for us to do anything about it. It's like saying "why don't they stop earthquakes by removing earthquake faults".
The scale and forces behind fossil fuels are both larger and it looks like we'll have managed to run through all the easily available stuff in about a century. "The scale is really big!" isn't an argument that something can't be done. Modern humans have done a bunch of stuff that was on an unimaginable scale 500 years ago. You'd have been arguing the moon landing was impossible a century ago because the forces involved are too large.
We're not going to overcome technical challenges by banning attempts to overcome them.
> It's like saying "why don't they stop earthquakes by removing earthquake faults".
That should be an option that gets explored. I doubt the economics will work out, but if we figure out a way to extract the energy building up in fault-lines that would be a win-win-win scenario for everyone involved.
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> hard to permit for The legislative of any state can basically write a law saying "this project is exempt from review". This isn't a complicated problem like interstate water rights with American Indian treaty obligations.
Depends. Because transmission lines usually cross over private property. And that can get very, very complicated. (Unless of course you are a fan of the chinese modell and want to implement that - but even they fear people revolting over unpopular big decisions)
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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).
Not only does it already exist, it's cheap enough that Kenya has some and wants more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_Kenya Judging by the price tag of 9.1 Ksh/kWh listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Kenya (and looking up historical exchange rates because of the date of the link and their persistent inflation), that's about 0.085-0.090 USD/kWh.
Geothermal is however one of the electricity sources with the fewest negative externalities so definitely should be pursued where possible.
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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…
I agree with everything except your conclusion. Even if we could resist our fundamental nature how do we know that our current values are more correct than the evolutionary forces that have kept us alive for millions of years? We keep getting in to trouble and getting away with it. What if whoever didn’t get into trouble also didn’t survive.
The ultimate survivorship bias.