"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.
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.
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
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.
Fair, but the sandstone and clay in that area is generally pretty awful. TBH most of the ancestral Puebloan structure are crumbling apart despite being protected by overhanging rock "roofs".
You're right about the pueblos specifically. They're still extant mostly because the climate is so dry there.
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.
It depends on whether they are occupied or not. I worked on an upstate New York farm with a barn that was post and beam, with a stone foundation. It was ~350 years old but had a good roof for that entire time.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
stainless steel rebar and polymer coated rebar are also options for reinforcing concrete that have a lot of potential, as the issues is moister induced rusting of the rust rebar expanding and cracking the concrete there are multiple solutions that i don't know that we have data on the long term durability of yet. I wonder how one would go about artificially aging something embedded within a block of concrete to test for that.
It appears that coated rebar just offers a channel for the ingress of water, and thus corrosion, if there is a break anywhere in the coating, like a wick in a lamp.
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 way the Romans used concrete to form structures that could be plausibly carved out of raw rock. The dome of the pantheon is an impressive feat of engineering, but the general shape bears similarity to rock caverns. Which is great, because concrete is essentially rock.
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.
What exactly is keeping us from making concrete with salt water, for things like sidewalks?
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 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.
>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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
We know ways that worked a few times and failed many thousands of times more often.
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.
Evidence would seem to point toward not many. Even the Bent Pyramid, which may have come before Egyptians perfected the math behind building pyramids, still stands. Throw in the numerous ones found in various jungles by LIDAR and they seem to hold up quite well.
Who's "we"? The people who built structures 1000 years ago are all dead (I assume).
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.
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.
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.
We have a lot of stone or concrete buildings from 2000 years ago still standing, and even more from 1000 years ago, so those would be safe bets. No surprises there. There's a glass window just shy of 1000 years old in a Cathedral in Germany, and other slightly younger ones scattered here and there, so glass definitely can make it. It just isn't very impact resistant, and it's also a fairly new material so there are fewer examples to draw from. Similarly, materials like Bronze would do just fine over 1000 years, and have done so in the past, but they tend to be appropriated for new building projects even if their original building is still standing.
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.
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.
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?
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".
>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.
> 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.
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.
All of the problems you listed sound to me like earth-engineering problems, except for the "problem" of private property. I strongly disagree with the premise that social engineering raised us from tribal groups. It was agriculture and domestication and fire. The data suggests global farmland is reducing [1] and becoming more and more productive [2].
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.
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.
> 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...
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Technological advancement doesn't happen Inna vacuum. To get good at things you have to try them. Getting good at the sort of technology required to build such a project requires trying such a project. It's not a matter of waiting 100 years, it's a matter of trial and error for 100 years.
This is true, but large engineering projects aren't a single technology. There are a lot of ways we'll improve relevant technologies without actually working on this directly. Presumably the fracking industry is improving our ability to model the subsurface, for example.
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.)
The issue is drilling into a very deep magma chamber. It's not like drilling the edge of a balloon. It's more like drilling into progressively softer jello. The hole will collapse on itself before you can release a useful amount of heat.
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
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?
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.
I watched it and sure it makes sense but I'm an idiot, and so do climate change denial videos if I don't look up counterarguments.
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
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Sure kick the can down the road ... just like the dinosaurs did.
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.
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?
How sure are they that disrupting whatever equilibrium the Yellowstone caldera has reached won't have unexpected consequences, like potentially changing the rate of eruption, or even triggering eruption, earthquakes, etc?
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.
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.
That's not generally the case when dealing with things involving plate tectonics, which often have a build up of pressure over time (tens, hundreds, thousands of years). The tension can slowly build up at a plate boundary before snapping to relieve the tension.
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.
The odds of some natural event happening aren't always independent from year to year. If a volcano eruption is caused by a buildup of pressure past a certain threshold, and pressure is actively building in an area, then going longer than expected without an eruption absolutely would increase the chances for upcoming years.
The gambler's fallacy. It's landed on black for the last 20 rolls, it must land on red soon! No, it will land on red with 50% probability, just like the last 20 times.
ELI5: Why not make underground magma pipes from places like this to power plants near cities or better yet, why not generate steam for both heating and power generation supplement?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.