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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Please don't. Yellowstone is a pristine nature reserve. There's many other areas in nearby Idaho you probably could tap into similar thermal energy without ruining the first National Park. Yellowstone is also in one of the least densely populated areas in the country so it's very difficult to transport without massive energy loss by resistance.

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I absolutely understand your concerns.

There are approximately twenty supervolcanoes around the world, so I wouldn't worry to much. There is an almost supervulcano in Italy that is also much closer to where power is needed [0].

Remoteness is not that much of a problem though: (ultra) high-voltage direct-current ("(U)HVDC") power lines have losses in the order of 3% per 1000km (that's 620mi) which is very acceptable. China has power lines that move the power equivalent of several nuclear power plants over thousands of kilometers for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegraean_Fields

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

> There is an almost supervulcano in Italy

And the Mediterranean can provide a lot of water for cooling at the same time the extra heat can easily be used for desalination.

Yellowstone is not just "a supervolcano", as mentioned it's a natural preserve and generally beautiful place. I'm pretty sure there are enough other geologically active sites closer to populations and with less history that there's no reason to bother with Yellowstone

As I already said, I absolutely understand the concerns. That does not mean that it might not become inevitable to do something about it one day. In the long run, the choice seem to be that it either blows up right away (in the geologically-near future) or to extract enough energy to at least delay the disaster.

Edit, as reply to child comment: here is the NASA report that concludes that it is possible to cool supervolcanoes:

https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...

It's naive to believe that you can extract enough energy from the earth's core to prevent supervolcanic eruptions.

Well, it's also native to believe that we could dunno enough CO2 into the atmosphere to affect global mean temperature, yet here we are.

Multiply any activity by a non trivial fraction of humanity and you get non trivial side effects.

maybe, but if not, and (hypothetically) if it could solve the problem of carbon neutral energy and therefore halt global climate change, destruction of Yellowstone as a 'beautiful place' could well be a price worth paying in the long run. i don't think it's likely though, fortunately for Yellowstone!

Think bigger! Imagine it as the maintenance node and transportation hub for the new coast to coast hyperloop network! All subterran! Not only powered by renewable energy, but powering the entire network and nation by subterran HVDC also!

For accuracy's sake: resistance losses in long-distance high-voltage AC or DC transmission are actually quite low. On the order of 6%.

The majority of generating losses (about 60% of input thermal energy) is due to Carnot efficiency losses, not transmission inefficiencies. There's also some loss in transformers (ramping voltages up or down), and rectifiers (converting AC to DC and vice versa).

But the biggest losses are in going from thermal to mechanical energy itself.

There have to be some additional tradeoffs with distance? What city would you hope to power with energy from Yellowstone? Seattle? Denver? What would be the realistic costs of getting energy to those places? How much infrastructure build out would be needed? Would the tradeoffs be clearly worth it?

Much of the central US lies within easy reach.

Keep in mind that the same general region is a major coal-producing zone presently, and much of that coal is burned locally for generation: it's cheaper to move the electricity than the coal used to generate it.

This also means that a substantial amount of the transmission infrastructure is already in place.

High voltage transmission losses are a few percent.

We don't need to make a mess in Yellowstone, but 'massive energy loss by resistance' is just wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

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