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Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

Neither the article nor the comments here (so far) address the implication that this project would turn one of our most beautiful national parks into an industrial site.

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It proposes 100 sites over a 1200 square mile area. Each site would be at least 3 miles away from any other site. Energy generation, except nuclear, either uses a fair bit physical space or causes pollution, and doing energy generation in Yellowstone means other areas of the country don't have to.

So where would the 35x35 mile cube of industry be, within the park? What about the electrical transmission lines? What about the roads needed to access each site? What about the support infrastructure? A super-volcanic eruption is not a certainty, just as another ice-age is not.

Nature is beautiful. But if this were a possibility, to create clean energy to power a nation, wouldn't you think that's more beautiful? I mean, is it any worse than hydroelectric dams?

Mount St. Helens wasn't very beautiful when it erupted....

All the more reason to attempt to harness this insane amount of power if we can also alleviate potential devastation by sort of venting that natural build up of energy resulting in eruptions.

Exactly. Huge natural disasters happen with regularity, and kill large numbers of people. Why shouldn't we look for ways of avoiding them, especially if we can also derive electrical power from them (and thereby avoid burning fossil fuels)?

Of course, they're also a huge technical challenge, and their feasibility is questionable, but that shouldn't stop us from at least investigating and researching the issues.

This is fair, but also if the supervolcano goes up, you have also lost the national park.

I wonder if this would be a good case to try various concepts for including nature in our engineering design. How much could we ensure is zero emission, mostly underground, and reducing impact to plants and animals.

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