Hacker News Reader

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Well, assuming we can drill very deep, I would think the supervolcano calderas have massive amounts of energy that we could exploit and ... possibly ... avoid future extinction-level-event eruptions.

I also wonder how deep would be sufficient to "dump" nuclear waste. I would think once you get to a sufficiently viscous level, heavy-element nuclear waste would slowly descend into the core.

What could go wrong?

View on HN

People have pondered cooling Yellowstone's magma chamber by surrounding it with geothermal wells.† The result would be 5GW (for comparison that is 1/6th of California's needs) of clean energy at about $0.10/kWH for thousands of years and a significantly reduced chance of a supervolcano eruption event killing millions of people.

It might alter or stop the geysers though, so it isn't going to go anywhere.

[†] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170817-nasas-ambitious-...

I doubt it's about preserving the geysers for tourists... seems more likely that a multibillion-dollar pricetag combined with the relative uncertainty of an eruption is what has cooled enthusiasm for the plan[1]. But that is a lot of power, so it's not impossible to imagine, if the investment paid off in the long term.

1: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/no-nasa-isnt-g...

Why do volcanoes erupt? Because pressure builds up that is stronger than a weak/thin spot in the crust can take. If we drill a hole then the strength of the crust at the hole is... zero. Doing that in the neighborhood of a supervolcano might not be wise...

If I read the article correctly, Geothermal energy extraction involve pumping cold water in and hot water out. If I wanted to put nuclear waste somewhere underground, it would probably be very far away from the place I pump water from.

Would probably be ok to just use for heat transfer.

I expect the amount of heat one could extract would be absolutely negligible compared the the amount of heat in a supervolcano caldera, so I doubt there would be any affect at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com