[HN Gopher] Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant...
___________________________________________________________________
Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal
power plant?
Author : tim_sw
Score : 183 points
Date : 2023-04-25 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (constructionphysics.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (constructionphysics.substack.com)
| jdblair wrote:
| The article makes the common (and grating) error of conflating
| power (1.5 gigawatts) and energy (power over time). Put another
| way, "1.5 gigawatts" does not in any way describe a rate. Do they
| mean 1.5 gigawatts per hour? or per day? or per year?
|
| I'm referring to this section: ...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.
| [deleted]
| jmharvey wrote:
| Watts are a rate. Joules per second.
| nynx wrote:
| You made a correct assertion initially "power (1.5 gigawatts)
| and energy (power over time)," but then failed to use it
| correctly. 1.5 gigawatts is a rate, of 1.5 billion joules per
| second.
| jdblair wrote:
| whoops! ok, yes, my physics is all wrong here. thanks for
| correcting!
| [deleted]
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Do they mean 1.5 gigawatts per hour? or per day? or per
| year?
|
| 1.5 gigawatts is 1.5 billion joules per second. If you sustain
| that power for 2 hours it will produce 3 gigawatt-hours of
| energy.
|
| 1 watt-hr is 3600 joules because 1J/s for 3600 seconds.
| mlsu wrote:
| Huh? A watt is a joule per second, [energy/time]. They are
| describing rates.
|
| If you build a 1.5 GW heat engine on top of Yellowstone
| (assuming it's possible) the energy that builds below the
| volcano is 0, because you captured it and turned some of it
| into electricity, and dumped the waste heat into a river or the
| atmosphere.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fooker wrote:
| The best part of this comment is the confidence!
|
| Is it any surprise that LLMs trained over internet comments are
| wrong with a similar confidence?
| 77pt77 wrote:
| This is incorrect.
|
| Power is energy "over" time.
|
| > Put another way, "1.5 gigawatts" does not in any way describe
| a rate
|
| It most certainly does. It's 1.5 gigajoule per second.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Gigawatts is a rate, which gets multiplied by an amount of time
| to measure an amount of energy.
|
| That's why your energy bill is based on kilowatt-hours. If you
| have a device that consumes power at a rate of one kilowatt
| (say a toaster oven) and you run it for one hour, that's one
| kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy.
| fourseventy wrote:
| Your physics is all fucked up dude (very grating).
| yayr wrote:
| that's interesting. Could that be a use case for microwave
| drilling?
|
| e.g. with https://www.quaise.energy
| bell-cot wrote:
| Dear Prof. Hand-Wave,
|
| Please tell me about your heat sink - the one that can soak up
| the heat from a few hundred cubic km or so of molten lava.
| Without major ill effects. On a reasonable budget.
|
| Asking for a friend.
| [deleted]
| sp332 wrote:
| This was linked from the article.
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...
| Along with the JPL's proposal which gets into the crust
| dynamics.
| https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
| bell-cot wrote:
| A critical paragraph in the second one...
|
| > Yellowstone has erupted 3 times in the past approx. 2.1
| million years, with total ejected ash approaching 10^15 kg.
| While the heat energy associated with this ash is some 10^23
| J, this averages to only approx. 1.5 GW continuous magmatic
| thermal power input to the volcano over the span of these
| eruptions, and is well within the capacity of humans to
| safely introduce heat into the environment - a typical
| electrical power plant commonly rejects more heat than this.
| However, this assumes that heat is provided to the magmatic
| system in a steady state manner, which is almost certainly
| not valid, although the degree to which it is invalid is
| unknown.
|
| ...which, by my lights, sounds far too much like specifying
| "able to withstand the local average wind speed" in the
| building code for Hurricane City, Florida.
| stefanos82 wrote:
| Only by reading this article's title, without knowing its actual
| content, two memes come in mind: the "c'mon do something" and the
| "no touchy!".
|
| Am I allowed to be scared, let alone petrified just by thinking
| anything around dealing with a super-volcano?
| cashsterling wrote:
| I think I read a lengthy technical proposal about 15 years ago
| about turning the outskirts of Yellowstone into a massive network
| of geothermal energy plants. I tried finding it real quick but no
| luck. I did work at JPL pre-2016 so I might be conflating
| things... I remember talking about this very topic at JPL over
| coffee at least once.
|
| Key points I recall from the technical report I read:
|
| - could power much the US... of course, distribution of power
| from this remote location is a big problem by itself.
|
| - most of the geothermal plants would be >95% underground and
| would pose little blight on the landscape. Many geothermal plants
| are largely subterranean anyhow. Of course, things would ugly AF
| during construction.
|
| - power transfer network to connect the locus of small power
| plants together and to switching stations could use cryogenic
| high-temperature superconducting wire (YBCO or MgF2)... the power
| transfer needs and relatively short distances may make it the
| best solution economically.
|
| - modern drilling technology make doing this a lot easier than it
| used to be.
|
| - might help avert a super volcano disaster
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I read one more recently and managed to find it:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Imagine if a asteroid impact worked like a shape charge, leaving
| behind a dent in the deeper layers, that becomes the base for a
| future volcano. Something like the Chicxulub Event would leave
| two "dents" one at the impact site and one at the opposite site,
| were the pressure wave would meet into a spike.
|
| To test that pet-theory yellowstone would need to be on the
| antipodde of a huge impact crater from million years ago, roughly
| around https://eng.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande-Terre.
| javajosh wrote:
| This is the seed of a science fiction novel that takes place in a
| far future dystopia where humanities remnants scavenge in the
| ruins, and who's brightest members are kidnapped by a mysterious
| group that turns out to be an AI run organization executing the
| Yellowstone mega project on a 50kyr timeline. And so on.
| fabian2k wrote:
| There is a plot point a bit along those lines in the DLC for
| Horizon Zero Dawn with a project to prevent a Yellowstone
| eruption that is controlled by an AI.
| hyperbole wrote:
| I think you just described the show "Travelers"
| enono wrote:
| holy shit don't bring this show up I'm crying. Why did it
| have to get cancelled
| xg15 wrote:
| I found the whole issue of Yellowstone being "overdue" becoming
| significantly less urgent when I learned that by that definition,
| it was already overdue back when humans were still hunting wooly
| mammoths with sticks.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| The whole overdue thing is also a logically fallacy.
|
| If something has an x% chance of happening per year and it
| hasn't happened for many years it has an x% change of happening
| next year, not some greater percentage.
| [deleted]
| SerChudTheThird wrote:
| [dead]
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| no.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Could we accidentally cause Yellowstone to erupt by constructing
| a giant geothermal power plant at the wrong place?
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Firstly, Law of Headlines - the answer is no. But secondly,
| Volcanologists are not even worried about Yellowstone erupting
| anytime soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts
| boxed wrote:
| But in this case: yes. Surprisingly easily.
|
| And this seems like a thing it's better to start with BEFORE
| volcanologists believe there's an imminent danger :P
| more_corn wrote:
| Could we accidentally trigger a world-ending super volcano while
| trying to prevent one by drilling bores for huge power plants?
|
| Yes, yes we could.
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| Best to leave that earth-sized zit unpopped.
| AbsoluteCabbage wrote:
| No, but you could probably start it erupting.
| [deleted]
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Short answer: no
|
| For a slightly longer answer, here is the conclusion of the
| article:
|
| Trying to build an enormous geothermal power plant and associated
| transmission lines(!) in one of the most beloved National
| Parks(!!), which there's specifically a law against (!!!), and
| which could potentially trigger a civilization-destroying
| volcanic eruption (!!!!) is like the final boss of the permitting
| reform movement.
|
| Also, most volcanologists don't expect Yellowstone to erupt
| anytime soon, if at all.
| thesis wrote:
| Anytime soon is one thing, but "If at all"? It's been happening
| for millions of years, and it sure seems like there still
| "activity" there.
|
| Not sure what kind of scientist could say they don't expect it
| to ever erupt again?
| [deleted]
| lkbm wrote:
| If we can be pretty confident it'll be 100 years, that's long
| enough for technology to progress _a lot_ before we fiddle
| with it. Not sure what "soon" means in this case, but I
| suspect they don't mean "within a couple years".
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| Narrator: But what they could not have known at the time was that
| activation of the geothermal power plant would subtly perturb the
| magma flows in such a way as to hasten the supervolcanp's
| eruption. [just an alternative take, not based on any firm facts]
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Just build a lid with a bunch of vents. Bunch of turbines that
| can variate their resistance so to not spin too fast.
|
| How much pressure is it conpared to Starship?
| its_ethan wrote:
| "If heat could be bled off of the magma chambers, cooling and
| solidifying them, not only would that stop the volcano from
| erupting..."
|
| Where does the confidence to make this claim come from?
|
| I can imagine that the consequence of this might actually just be
| strengthening the "barrier" the magma has to erupt through, and
| when it finally builds up enough energy to do that, it'll be
| stronger in proportion to how strong the newly cooled down
| barrier had become? Unless the suggestion is that we could
| effectively bleed out ALL the heat from that system? Seems a bit
| unlikely imo lol
|
| Still, geothermal sounds really cool and we should do more of it.
| [deleted]
| hristov wrote:
| Well, consider the fact that the vast majority of the earth
| surface, in fact, almost the entire surface of the earth is
| entirely volcano-less. Look under your feet -- no volcanoes!
| Move over a couple of steps and look again -- no volcanoes.
|
| So it is safe to say that a certain thickness of rock would
| serve enough to prevent volcanoes. You just have to provide
| enough cooling to ensure a sufficiently thick layer of magma
| solidifies into solid rock.
| pl90087 wrote:
| That's not how this works. Plate tectonics won't stop if you
| cool down things a little bit. The amount of cooling you'd
| need to do amount to have _that_ stuff stop is comparable to
| creating forests and oceans on mars. Not gonna happen, we 'll
| kill off humankind before that.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Look under your feet -- no volcanoes!
|
| What if whoever built this McDonald's/Chevron amalgamation
| did so atop a volcano? How would I know?
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Yeah, but how much? The crust is far deeper than humans are
| capable of penetrating. It's probably a fair concern that
| it's also far deeper than humans are capable of cooling.
| hristov wrote:
| Well, lets ponder this a little further. Currently there
| are no volcanoes in Yellowstone. So we know that the rock
| layer is sufficient. We also know that the rock keeps
| losing heat with time because it has higher than average
| temperature. But we also know that the rock keeps gaining
| heat from magma pushing up from some deep underground
| crack.
|
| What we have to do is measure the net heat gain and
| calculate how much additional heat a geothermal plant has
| to extract from the rocks to turn it into net heat loss. Of
| course the plant will have to extract it from the hotter
| spots in order to prevent any local maximums from causing
| volcanoes. But that is the most efficient option for a
| geothermal plant anyways.
|
| As far as measuring the net heat gain -- it should not be
| that hard. All you need is to sprinkle a couple of hundred
| sensors in the rock, monitor them for a while to be able to
| remove surface effects (like the sun and ambient air
| temperature) and you should be able to get a decent
| estimate. In fact I would not be surprised if seismologist
| already have a pretty good estimate of the heat gain.
|
| Then, when you build the plant, you can be certain that as
| long as heat is being drained from the rock, magma will
| keep solidifying and the rock layer will keep getting
| thicker, etc.
|
| Of course a good earthquake can screw up all of these
| plans, but an earthquake can destroy any power plant. But
| then again Yellowstone is one of the most earthquake prone
| areas of the world, so that perhaps is the biggest danger
| of this plan.
| jdmichal wrote:
| TFA gives this number as ~1.5GW per year -- I believe
| calculated by the JPL proposal.
| [deleted]
| sp332 wrote:
| The linked JPL proposal is exploratory and, while it has a more
| serious engineering perspective, it does not have "confidence".
| https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
|
| The USGS is very unconvinced. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-we-
| drill-yellowstone-stop-it-e...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Any allowed geothermal extraction would lower the pressure
| on the existing geysers and hot springs, altering their
| behavior and, in many cases, causing them to disappear.
|
| Oh no. Saving the lives of ten million people might make a
| geyser stop working. How awful.
| fahrradflucht wrote:
| Have you read the whole thing? It says it is not at all
| clear that this will save lives. It also could cause an
| eruption.
| bradwood wrote:
| This is HN. No-one reads the whole thing. Some don't even
| read the beginning!
| MisterTea wrote:
| From the USGS article:
|
| > Scientific research has proven again and again that
| depressurization is one of the factors that drives magma
| toward the surface to erupt.
|
| The first time I heard of this idea my immediate thought was,
| "so you want to shove a needle into a massive magma balloon."
| I know I wouldn't.
| version_five wrote:
| > I can imagine that the consequence of this might actually
| just be strengthening the "barrier" the magma has to erupt
| through, and when it finally builds up enough energy to do
| that, it'll be stronger in proportion to how strong the newly
| cooled down barrier had become?
|
| Certainly the movie version has the one rogue scientist working
| late into the night redoing the calculations and realizing that
| as soon as the plant goes live it will trigger the volcano.
|
| In real life, I have no idea how this kind of thing gets
| analyzed, and what kind of uncertainty is involved. It feels a
| bit like those "put a bunch of reflectors in space to stop
| climate change" ideas. On the other hand, removing energy from
| a system seems like a good way to make it safer...
| its_ethan wrote:
| > In real life, I have no idea how this kind of thing gets
| analyzed, and what kind of uncertainty is involved.
|
| This is similar to what I was trying to get across -- how do
| we know something this complicated will have only the
| intended effect that the author is describing?
|
| The comparison to reflectors in space to address climate
| concerns is a great one - something where a first pass/ back
| of the envelope makes it seem interesting, but any amount of
| detail added reveals that we'd have no clue what would happen
| macintux wrote:
| > Certainly the movie version has the one rogue scientist
| working late into the night redoing the calculations and
| realizing that as soon as the plant goes live it will trigger
| the volcano.
|
| Jor El in any number of them.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > On the other hand, removing energy from a system seems like
| a good way to make it safer...
|
| Nope, that one rule of thumb can't help you. There is way too
| much energy for that to make any difference.
|
| Just notice how the timescale of an active disaster is
| completely different from the ones estimated for success.
| elil17 wrote:
| I have a lot of skepticism about anything I read from
| constructionphysics.substack.com. I'm a mechanical engineer,
| not a civil engineer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt,
| but it reads like it's written by someone who does not have a
| solid understanding of engineering fundamentals. For example,
| they suggested in their "How to design a house to last for
| 1,000 years" series that you'd want to build such a house out
| of stainless steel because it "has extremely high corrosion
| resistance." Even my introductory courses in materials science
| it is very clear that stainless steel _might_ last for 1,000
| years, but it would depend entirely on the environmental
| conditions and the type of stainless used.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| I mean, it would be exposed to the normal conditions any
| residential construction is exposed to. How often is your
| house dunked into seawater?
|
| 800 years from now something terrible could happen that turns
| all the rain into sulfuric acid but then all residential
| buildings everywhere are screwed.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > How often is your house dunked into seawater?
|
| Hopefully the house ain't in Florida. Or California's
| Central Valley.
| nickff wrote:
| Not a civil engineer, but I think different areas have very
| different considerations, and I'm not sure there is a
| 'normal' residential construction. A beach-side house in
| Florida probably has very different issues from a house
| built somewhere like Las Vegas. Salt, humidity, wind,
| earthquakes, soil, and other considerations vary.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > How often is your house dunked into seawater?
|
| For people hit by hurricane Sandy the answer is at least
| once.
| elil17 wrote:
| Over that long a time period it could be damaged just by
| rain - it's hard to say because corrosion tests aren't done
| with respect to a 1000 year operating life in mild
| conditions. I'm sure an expert could figure that out, but
| it would require looking at the corrosion rate of the
| specific steel, the exposure to any kind of forces that
| could damage the oxide layer (e.g. scratches), and the
| thickness of the member.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I reached a point where I treat anything from substack the
| same way I treat I links from medium; assume the content is
| crap and / or useless and move on. Which is a pity, I know,
| but I simply don't have time to find the rare gems in all the
| useless "content".
| dieselgate wrote:
| I trust any engineer who responds with an "it depends.." over
| someone who has an absolute answer. Stainless would probably
| do ok but I'd assume stone or fiberglass/FRP would be
| superior over time out in the elements. But not the best
| stuff to build a house with.
|
| Oh what about titanium?
|
| Edit: lol oh well even timber structures Can last a millenium
| if maintained
| avodonosov wrote:
| Why not simply use gold?
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| Gold attracts vermin.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| How poignant, that the obvious solution is the worst
| "solution" of all, due to human nature.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Concrete, bricks and granite can also work pretty well...
| as the Pantheon in Rome proves.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Not to mention the wooden beams, under the portico, which
| are also original. They of course, are out of the rain;
| so are a solution to a lesser problem, where aging is
| concerned.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| We don't make concrete like the Romans did though.
| XorNot wrote:
| We do actually, it's just not as useful and used in more
| demanding applications.
|
| The biggest problem is rebar spalling though, not the
| concrete.
| elcritch wrote:
| Still concrete will still last longer than most other
| materials.
|
| The biggest issue with modern concrete construction is
| the usage of reenforced concrete using iron or steel
| rebar which tends to corrode quickly. Reenforced concrete
| seems to have a half life of ~50 years.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Stone and adobe, in the right conditions.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloan_dwelling
| s
| breischl wrote:
| In those conditions even plain, untreated wood lasts a
| long time. Many of those structures still have wood beams
| in pretty good condition.
|
| ie, the durability of those structures is more due to
| where they are, than what they are made of.
| ghaff wrote:
| Although (at least the right) stone is almost certainly a
| pretty good answer in general. There are plenty of
| historical examples and I'm skeptical that anything else
| exposed to the elements would do better. And if not
| exposed to the elements that feels like cheating.
| elil17 wrote:
| Fiberglass/FRP is an interesting one. I believe the
| limiting factor there would be that the polymers used would
| slowly degrade/weaken over time due to chemical aging.
| Fiberglass boats last up to 50 years but that is in a
| harsher environment - not sure how long you could go on
| land. Perhaps some polymers could be formulated to last
| that long, I'm not sure.
| mikem170 wrote:
| UV from sunlight degrades fiberglass/FRP over time. I
| believe that boats are painted to protect them from this,
| and need to be recoated periodically because the uv
| sunlight will degrade the paint eventually, also.
| svachalek wrote:
| Yeah I've seen old boats turn to dust. UV utterly
| destroys fiberglass given a little time.
| elil17 wrote:
| Seems unlikely that you'd have a reliable source of paint
| for 1000 years, which might be the limiting factor.
|
| But there's always some rate of chain scission, even in
| the absence of UV/water/whatever. I just have no idea
| whether that has a meaningful impact on material
| properties over 1000 years.
| dieselgate wrote:
| They can last a lot longer than that but that's about the
| duration that frp has existed for boats, probably early
| '60s is when production boats started to use frp hulls.
|
| Frp is great for fuel tanks and exhaust systems - it's
| superior to stainless for these applications (corrosion
| resistance being key factor). But yes as mentioned by
| sibling UV will definitely degrade
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >I trust any engineer who responds with an "it depends.."
| over someone who has an absolute answer.
|
| That heuristic matches on the hordes of liars who try and
| sound smart while hedging their claims with a liberal
| application of weasel words to avoid being provably wrong.
| And those people outnumber the "good engineers" probably by
| at least an order of magnitude...
| HPsquared wrote:
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure."
| renewiltord wrote:
| It is, however, far more interesting to me when people are
| able to split the hypothesis space well. For instance, take
| the question "Is drinking 1500 ml of water daily good for
| you?". Well, that depends on what other fluids you consume,
| whether or not you are on an IV as well, and whether or not
| you are drinking it by accidental consumption via
| waterboarding. It even depends on whether or not Baldur the
| Interstellar Water Hunter exists and will kill you for
| every drop over 1499 ml that you consume.
|
| It's true, it does depend. But machines can exhaustively
| describe the hypothesis space now. Comprehensiveness is not
| the only virtue of a human.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > because it "has extremely high corrosion resistance."
|
| Isn't this true though? Especially relative to other
| materials that can corrode?
|
| It seems like you're reacting as if he said it _cant_
| corrode.
| rngname22 wrote:
| It's an oversimplification to merely use a single property
| of a material as justification for choosing it when every
| material choice involves many factors - hardness vs
| toughness vs strength, weight, cost, repairability, density
| etc.
| [deleted]
| elil17 wrote:
| In general, it's true compared to other metals. Compared to
| other materials in general (e.g., glass) it's certainly not
| true. Over the scale of a thousand years, there could be a
| big difference between something that is corrosion
| resistant (stainless steel) and something that doesn't
| corrode at all.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| But are you suggesting a non corrosive material would
| outlast stainless steel? Otherwise I don't see the point
| in your distinction. Obviously your example of glass
| wouldn't.
|
| I guess I would have thought stone would last longer.
| rurp wrote:
| Not to mention, we know how to build structures that can last
| 1,000 years because it has already been done before! Using a
| dubious material in place of a known good one is not the best
| engineering approach.
| tvb12 wrote:
| Straying off topic, are there any discussions going the
| opposite way? Is it possible to build a structure that lasts
| maybe 10 or 15 years, then either disassembles or decomposes
| without too much damage to the surrounding area? Something
| actually livable, and nicer than a tent.
| Arrath wrote:
| Mud bricks, wattle and daub, thatch, and the like? Then
| build out the interior with rough sawn planks.
|
| What's old is new again!
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| I read it as meaning _at least_ 1,000 years. Modern humans
| started living in caves in Europe about 100,000 years ago,
| and their cave-houses still exist. So, if your house is also
| a cave you should be able to get at least that.
|
| If they want the house to last for _exactly_ 1,000 years then
| I 'm not sure what to tell you. Maybe something based on the
| milleneum clock? Or explosives and a really long fuse, Wile E
| Coyote style?
| elil17 wrote:
| I read it the same way?
| lisper wrote:
| > Where does the confidence to make this claim come from?
|
| I have no idea, but I can give you a data point from my
| personal experience: about ten years ago we visited Rotorua in
| New Zealand, which promotes its geothermal activity as a
| tourist attraction [1]. We were told by the locals when we were
| there that the geothermal activity had reduced noticeably since
| a geothermal power plant was installed some years prior,
| resulting in controversy over the wisdom of having built it.
|
| Rotorua's geothermal activity area is a lot smaller than
| Yellowstone, but as an anecdote it indicates that reducing the
| risk of eruption is not entirely implausible.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://www.waiotapu.co.nz/
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Good comment, but had to automatically downvote because of the
| use of "lol".
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines aside. I feel like the scale of
| the topic is almost completely human inconceivable when trying
| to tie it to a realistic engineering task. It seems like a fun
| what-if, but when you do that you are using making giant hand
| waving excuses, and not anything that looks like a factual
| claim.
| rcoveson wrote:
| > Betteridge's law of headlines aside.
|
| Godwin-Bettridge-Graham law: Any headline that ends in a
| question mark which is posted to HN will have Bettridge's law
| of headlines mentioned at least once in its first dozen
| comments.
| its_ethan wrote:
| What's the law for when someone has to point this out too,
| I wonder?
| [deleted]
| m348e912 wrote:
| Agreed. Geothermal energy can be cheap and awesome, but there
| are reasons why it's only practical in certain parts of the
| world.
| Clamchop wrote:
| The article states that the JPL plan only considers the
| energy generation to be a useful byproduct.
|
| If the risk were truly imminent and quantifiable, I assume
| it would be pursued however absurdly exotic and fanciful it
| seemed on its face.
|
| On the other hand, defusing a volcano on a timeline of a
| thousand years or longer would be politically challenging.
| That might see the dissolution and construction of multiple
| states (here, electric power generation may help assure
| survival). Add in that civilization can't seem to get its
| head on straight about comparatively faster-acting climate
| change, for example, and can barely prepare for an
| earthquake.
|
| At least imagining an exploding apocalyptic supervolcano
| may elicit more visceral emotions.
|
| Still, it doesn't appear there's much cause for worry so
| it's only a brainstorm.
| anecdotal1 wrote:
| We should be able to use the latest horizontal drilling
| tech from fracking to tap Yellowstone from miles away
| [deleted]
| erulabs wrote:
| Yeah not to mention the construction of the plant itself! I
| wouldn't want to be operating the drill that punctures the
| magma chambers!
|
| I'm optimistic. If we spent less time engineering society and
| more time engineering the earth, I think we'd all be a lot
| happier.
| pl90087 wrote:
| Or exactly the other way around.
|
| Without "engineering society" we'd still live in tribes
| killing each other at first sight. We have reduced that
| substantially. Some societies are a bit behind (like allowing
| lethal military-grade weapons at home), some are further
| advanced. Overall, it seems a good idea to use our intellect
| to advance societies and we've come a long way from the dark
| ages.
|
| Our earth engineering has come so far that with the exception
| of a few national parks and reserves, we've used every little
| corner to cut off and kill everything that existed on it and
| turned it into less-and-less usable farmland. A few areas are
| cities or golf courses or transportation highways, the rest
| are terrible monocultures or their next stage: deserts. We've
| extinguished more species than we know and of those that we
| have not, we have brought lots to close to it. 95% of all
| fish are dead. Sea levels are rising rapidly. Large areas
| have water shortages. We need less "earth engineering", not
| more of it.
| hellcow wrote:
| > I wouldn't want to be operating the drill that punctures
| the magma chambers!
|
| Years of Dwarf Fortress have prepared me for this moment.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I wouldn't want to be operating the drill
|
| This is where AI applications could actually be of benefit.
| Also, instead of sending Harry Stamper and a bunch of misfit
| roughnecks to some asteroid of doom, we could just train AI
| on Harry's knowledge of deep well drilling. It'll be fine.
| lelanthran wrote:
| It doesn't matter whether a human or a robot drills into
| Yellowstone, the resulting eruption will kill off all
| humans on earth anyway.
| dylan604 wrote:
| which is exactly what the AI is attempting to achieve
| dexwiz wrote:
| Why do we need AI for this when remote controlled
| operations would work just fine, especially terrestrially?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Because you can't get VC funding for your new venture if
| you don't have AI some where in your slide deck
| keneda7 wrote:
| The article mentions one proposal that specifically says they
| would drill holes around the magma chamber as drilling into
| the chamber itself could possibly cause an eruption.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The JPL plan doesn't actually puncture the magma chambers.
| erulabs wrote:
| I felt the ignorance in my fingers even as I typed it.
| That's awesome!
| [deleted]
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > I wouldn't want to be operating the drill that punctures
| the magma chambers!
|
| Even if that happens, I wonder if the hole would be so deep,
| that the magma cools and solidifies in the borehole before it
| reaches the surface. Similar to how pristine sub-glacial
| Antarctic lakes are sampled by drilling straight into them
| (!) and letting the water flow up into the hole, where it
| freezes.
|
| https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-drilled-
| in...
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm in favor of free geothermal energy, but we should consider
| the risks--imagine if we built a big geothermal plant, only to
| find that we messed with the pressure too much and prevented a
| giant eruption that could have saved us from Wyoming, Iowa, and
| Montana.
| cubefox wrote:
| tl;dr: Theoretically, probably yes; practically, probably no.
| phkahler wrote:
| What about drilling (maybe nuking) a hole to create a "small
| volcano to relieve pressure?
| MisterTea wrote:
| The thing is, think about what are you relieving: magma. It's
| not gas. It's literally liquid rock being squeezing up a
| channel pushing against the weight of the earth above it. If
| the pressure of the earth is greater than the magma it can
| start to spread horizontally and forms a chamber like a
| bladder. Then it keeps building pressure lifting the earth
| until it either bursts or maybe the earth shifts and pressure
| is relieved or moved elsewhere, or or equalizes and just hangs
| around. It's like a pimple really. Don't pop it unless you want
| to clean up after it.
| cjensen wrote:
| The pressures involved have a bad habit of enlarging any hole
| when venting.
| dylan604 wrote:
| so in order to reduce pollution from the creation of energy,
| we're just going to replace the CO2 with radiation? yeah, that
| sounds like a winning strategy.
| glitcher wrote:
| This sounds like it came straight out of a "What If?" book from
| Randall Munroe :)
| ramblenode wrote:
| This highlights the risk of ordinary geothermal, which extracts
| heat energy by changing the structure of the underlying earth,
| making it potentially unstable. Like fracking, it is now well
| known to cause earthquakes [0]. It could be useful for siphoning
| heat in volcanically active zones, but I wish the risks elsewhere
| were better known. Fracking has caused widespread structural
| damage from seismic activity in areas that were previously quiet
| and we should not see that mistake repeated.
|
| [0] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-
| sol...
| heisenbit wrote:
| So there is heat coming up. We tap the top and cool it. That
| makes the top layer cooler and harder. This allows less heat to
| escape so if we can not transport all heat away with technical
| means the heat again builds up. So we have delayed the eruption
| but how will this affect the size of the eruption?
|
| My experience with leaving pots on the stove where a skin builds
| at the top would make me anxious if I believed anyone actually
| tried that on super volcano scale.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| Even if we could, to do so would be an ecological disaster, and
| it would destroy the natural wonders of Yellowstone.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Ultimately it's a giant volcano that's going to eradicate
| anything within a few hundred miles with the force of a nuclear
| blast. As ridiculous as it sounds, if we can find a way to
| diffuse it that does a lot more for both the natural world, and
| for the humans that live in proximity to it.
| pl90087 wrote:
| The risk that this happens until we have technical means of
| avoiding the ecological disaster that current proposals
| entail is orders of magnitues closer to zero than the next
| pandemic wiping 50% of humans off the earth within your
| lifetime. Have you proposed the next lock-down yet?
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| If the chances of that happening in the next 1000 years are
| one in a million, I would say it is absolutely not worth it.
| [deleted]
| aurizon wrote:
| Tapping the hot plume would not penetrate the magma chamber. They
| would drill down and created a number of holes turned
| horizontally in the hot rock zone above it. They would then drill
| a number of holes horizontally - which they would fracture(frack)
| and inject cold water - in one set and get steam from another.
| The steam used in turbines and then returned. Minerals and ions
| would make this water very corrosive and the pipe alloys would be
| chosen for long life(?). As to whether or not they can reduce
| volcano risk = accurate models and assessment of the existing
| heat flux that now makes Yellowstone bubble might give some ideal
| of any hope for success. In any event, they should at least
| create and study these models and assess in the rate of migration
| of the hop spot - since it is a slowly changing steady state, it
| may be that removing enough heat can change when the next
| eruption occurs. The actual magma may be too hot for pipes to
| carry water in as the metal may be so close to the melting point
| that they will explode from the flash steam. An intermediate heat
| transfer fluid could be used(such as melted sodium) to get closer
| to the hotter zones with a lower risk of pressure explosions. The
| other aspect is what % of the heat could be extracted this way -
| if it is 0.1% - it might not be worthwhile. The Icelandic ongoing
| work in this area is worth looking into.
| skywalker69 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| coltonv wrote:
| Just so everyone knows, the whole "Yellowstone is a supervolcano
| that could erupt any minute and cause cataclysmic effects on the
| planet" is just not true. It was made up for TV "documentaries".
| Yellowstone does not pose any real threat to society at large.
| Volcanologists are practically unanimous in that belief. See this
| video for more information:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts
| zzzeek wrote:
| why did what we would presume are fairly professional level
| engineers and scientists at JPL (at least not working for TV
| "documentaries") write a whole paper called "DEFENDING HUMAN
| CIVILIZATION FROM SUPERVOLCANIC ERUPTIONS" which has all of its
| emphasis on Yellowstone?
|
| https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
| pl90087 wrote:
| > why
|
| Because that's what they got their grant money for and what
| they want more grant money for.
| coltonv wrote:
| Kinda weird to just go for an argument of authority huh? I'd
| recommend watching the video for a non-authority based series
| of arguments based on multiple sources and a lot of data.
|
| Anyway, the reason they wrote that paper is probably because
| they are talking about extreme hypotheticals themselves.
| Notice how their comparison is that it's twice as likely as a
| 2km asteroid impact, which are once in every few million year
| events. So we're still dealing with something extremely
| unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Posing an extremely large threat at 1/1000000 odds still
| seems like something.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This definitely feels like an "The answer to all titles posed as
| questions is No" example.
| vuln wrote:
| It is exactly that.
|
| Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
|
| Edit: To all the down voters, please cite where in the article
| it proves the answer is _yes_. Because it looks like a lot of
| _ifs_ and no real data or science to back it up.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-25 23:00 UTC)