Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?
constructionphysics.substack.com
constructionphysics.substack.com
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.
Oh what about titanium?
Edit: lol oh well even timber structures Can last a millenium if maintained
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloan_dwellings
ie, the durability of those structures is more due to where they are, than what they are made of.
Something like granite would be a much more long-lived structural material in wetter climates. Indeed that's the primary stone used in, say, Machu Picchu.
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.
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
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.
[1]: https://www.compositesworld.com/news/tprc-research-studies-v...
Basalt fiber rebar might be a better way to go, as it won't oxidize. Studies will be needed to find out if it actually is better in the long run.
The biggest problem is rebar spalling though, not the concrete.
Meanwhile, the kinds of beams and walls we make out of concrete wouldn't work if carved out of rock, they are only structurally sound because we put steel rebar in the concrete. But rebar expanding due to rust is how concrete usually fails. Plus using rebar prevents you from using salt water in your concrete, which is one of the ways in which Roman concrete might be better than ours.
In the northeast US, sidewalks frequently are in horrible condition after only a few years, because of the salt used in the winter. Sidewalks do not use steel rebar; they're just simple poured concrete. So why can't they make them with a better mixture that doesn't corrode so easily? (I'm guessing the answer is: replacing them frequently makes a lot of money for some concrete company that the town mayor is friends with.)
It's true, it does depend. But machines can exhaustively describe the hypothesis space now. Comprehensiveness is not the only virtue of a human.
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...
800 years from now something terrible could happen that turns all the rain into sulfuric acid but then all residential buildings everywhere are screwed.
For people hit by hurricane Sandy the answer is at least once.
Hopefully the house ain't in Florida. Or California's Central Valley.
How many buildings of the same type didn't survive?
If your goal is to use a method that has _any_ chance of success, however small, then the old ways are probably a good bet. If you want the highest chance of success you should probably at least evaluate new methods.
Just because some humans somewhere figured out something in the past doesn't mean that humans somewhere else today know how to do it. Lots of knowledge has been lost to time.
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.
I guess I would have thought stone would last longer.
(Of course they have all had lots of maintenance done...)
What's old is new again!
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?
It's quite possible that if you want a newly built structure to last that long with the highest probability, you should pick new materials.
The USGS is very unconvinced. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-we-drill-yellowstone-stop-it-e...
> 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.
Oh no. Saving the lives of ten million people might make a geyser stop working. How awful.
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.
Years of Dwarf Fortress have prepared me for this moment.
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...
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.
It is funny that we see things exactly opposite!
1. https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/article/2021/0....
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.
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...
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
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.
Jor El in any number of them.
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.
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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.
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.
What if whoever built this McDonald's/Chevron amalgamation did so atop a volcano? How would I know?
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.
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.
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.
Not sure what kind of scientist could say they don't expect it to ever erupt again?
Like there being infinite number of infinities that are ever larger, there's a seemingly infinite number of soons, each further away in time than the previous.
So I propose we invent something like aleph[1], but for soon. This way we can communicate clearly just how soon soon is.
This also means other industries (such as fracking) would learn a lot from a massive Yellowstone geoengineering project, but other projects and smaller geothermal projects should make this one more feasible and predictable.
(This is how I feel about geoengineering in general: it's expensive and risky, but may end up being necessary, so let's practice on a smaller, safer scale before massive, dangerous projects become urgently needed.)
https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
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.
That's what I didn't get about that video, all these laypeople are like "great!". Like sure, a once in a 600k year event, and maybe not even that, great . Doesn't mean some generation of humans or otherwise arent going to get whacked someday
Because that's what they got their grant money for and what they want more grant money for.
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
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...
Yes, yes we could.
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.
> 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.
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.
Mitigating risk of an extinction level event from an asteroid seems much like a supervolcano. Sure the risk in any given year is low, but losing a 1-8 billion is a big loss, even if it's every few million years.
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.
In general with phenomena like this it makes less sense to start from the assumption that the root cause for something is just a random number generator that the Earth's programmer decided to hook up to add variability.
Rather, things in the real world have actual causes, and if they typically happen on the order of 100,000 years apart, there's probably a time-need reason for that.
(There are plenty of phenomena that are just statistics, of course.)
Also, even if it would be possible to compute that an earthquake/eruption is overdue I've yet to see it done correctly. Obviously I don't know where the person I'm replying to got their statistic. But if you Google something like "Yellowstone overdue" the results use very poor logic, often just extrapolating from three data points millions of years ago.
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.
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.
And this seems like a thing it's better to start with BEFORE volcanologists believe there's an imminent danger :P
e.g. with https://www.quaise.energy
How much pressure is it conpared to Starship?
Am I allowed to be scared, let alone petrified just by thinking anything around dealing with a super-volcano?
[0] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-sol...
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.
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.
1 Watt (unit of power) is 1 Joule (unit of energy) per second. So "1 Watt-second" is just a needlessly-long way of saying "1 Joule".
Instead of using the idiotic kW-h units, they should just use kJ. (1 kW-h = 3600 kJ or 3.6MJ.)
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.
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.
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.
Is it any surprise that LLMs trained over internet comments are wrong with a similar confidence?