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Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
- elihu 9y agoCan the link be updated to point to the original BBC article that has the same information and is better written? http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-plan-to-save-earth-from-a-supervolcano http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-pla...
- sctb 9y agoYes, thank you! We've updated the link from http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/cooling-down-a-supervolcano-and-generate-geothermal-power-a-possible-win-win/?jo http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/cooling-down-a-supervolcano-an....
- elihu 9y agoThanks.
- dawnerd 9y agoThe bbc article has been posted on here before I’m pretty sure as it’s from August.
- iaw 9y agoI like the idea but a $0.10/kWh marginal cost is not the same as $0.10/kWh electricity. If they plan on extracting 6GW they'll need to put it somewhere, what's a people hub near Yellowstone? ... So they'll have to build out high capacity transmission lines which have associated costs for leases, construction, and maintenance. Then finally you get into the real kicker: cost of transmission. If only 5% of your transmitted energy actually makes it to your buyer, without congestion, you're spending $0.10 / kWh but your buyer is paying $2.00 / kWh where the difference all goes to line losses. Maybe building data centers nearby is a good way to mitigate the infrastructure problem. Edit: I also forgot to mention the time value of energy infrastructure. What is the expected time horizon to break even at target rates of return? How do those returns compare to other forms of capital investment? What's the risk profile look like for power producers that require heavy upfront investment? (hint: not good) Edit: Okay, the 5% figure was out of bounds, more realistic is 97% with proper build-out.
- knodi123 9y ago> Maybe building data centers nearby is a good way to mitigate the infrastructure problem. Haha, I'm picturing the pitch on their risk profile. "Yes, it's built on top of an active volcano. But hey, if it goes off, the entire american economy and a large part of the internet will be gutted. So it's unlikely to be your highest concern."
- awakeasleep 9y agoI'm under the impression that a yellowstone eruption would devestate the whole world's economy due to the release of particulates into the atmosphere & associated global cooling
- njarboe 9y agoYes, devastate the economy. As in, no crops could be grown for multiple years.
- Bluestrike2 9y agoThat's actually a pretty nifty risk assessment. Your datacenter is toast if the supervolcano erupts. But if the supervolcano erupts, the bulk of the human race will starve to death in 74 days. So there's very little actual risk to your company from building nearby. You're dead, literally, regardless. Assessing such a project would probably drive an actuary insane.
- make3 9y agowhat are the chances of smaller, non death of all mankind leaks that would damage the data center? likely higher than elsewhere, no? so that wouldn't an be amazing risk profile
- Bluestrike2 9y agoYou wouldn't build a datacenter directly on top of the supervolcano. It's in a national park, after all. Any sort of relatively minor incidents from the geothermal plant wouldn't affect datacenters located outside the park (and they could be a few hundred miles away, if need be). The degree of devastation from an eruption would be so great that the normal risks associated with "hey, build sort of near a volcano" don't really apply in the traditional sense.
- takk309 9y agoSounds a lot like destroy the ecosystem for short-term gains to me. The geothermal features were exploited early on in the history of Yellowstone and that exploitation resulted in impacts to the geyser basins that can still be seen today. Why we as humans seem to think that life can't possibly continue without us has always boggled my mind. Edit: Here is some backup to my claim about messing with the geysers: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yellowstone-geysers-trash-garbage https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yellowstone-geysers-tr... 2nd Edit: Here is an article about tapping into the geothermal waters around Yellowstone. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/17/us/feud-over-geothermal-water-rights-pits-yellowstone-against-a-church.html http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/17/us/feud-over-geothermal-wa...
- sliverstorm 9y agoWhy we as humans seem to think that life can't possibly continue without us It's obviously not about protecting nature from herself, it would be about protecting us from nature.
- takk309 9y agoWhy? We are only a little blip on the time scales that nature works in. Why are we so arrogant as to think that we are the only life in the universe? It is very likely that we are not and even if we are, there is always a chance that life will arise again.
- sliverstorm 9y agoBecause like all life, we have a survival instinct?
- takk309 9y agoI am a nihilist and don't really think that this will affect my life. I suppose that is most of my reasoning in not worrying about things like this. Edit: Messing with it now will affect my life due to the proximity in which I live to Yellowstone. If the park gets messed up and tourism declines, my local economy will take a huge hit. That is something that can happen in my lifetime.
- droopybuns 9y agoI recently visited Iceland. We toured the Krafala area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krafla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krafla There were numerous signs about the "Krafla fires" in the late 70's & early 80's. http://earthice.hi.is/krafla_fires http://earthice.hi.is/krafla_fires The signs in the region very clearly express a possible linkage with early geothermal energy drilling. I want to be gentle with my wording- because I don't recall it exactly, but the writers had little doubt that there was a link between some of boring that was happening the week the eruptions started. It's been interesting to return home & do google searching on the topic. I can't seem to find any references that authoritatively link the eruptions with the geothermal activity- but it seems like an anecdote worth looking into.
- caf 9y agoThe BBC article linked in an earlier comment has this: “The most important thing with this is to do no harm,” Wilcox says. “If you drill into the top of the magma chamber and try and cool it from there, this would be very risky. This could make the cap over the magma chamber more brittle and prone to fracture. And you might trigger the release of harmful volatile gases in the magma at the top of the chamber which would otherwise not be released.” Instead, the idea is to drill in from the supervolcano from the lower sides, starting outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park, and extracting the heat from the underside of the magma chamber. “This way you’re preventing the heat coming up from below from ever reaching the top of the chamber which is where the real threat arises,” Wilcox says.
- FuckOffNeemo 9y agoI highly recommend you read the book Super Freakonomics. The section of the book about an incubator (the name escapes me) in the US that's coming up with a suite of brilliant, non-intuitive ways to tackle greenhouse gasses and produce green energy (such as the one shown here) are fascinating.
- agumonkey 9y agoI like the idea of tapping into potential disaster for energy. Next topics: - lightning - quakes - tsunamis / tide - avalanches
- mchannon 9y agoWhen you inject cold water into hot brittle rock, fracturing can occur. You'll notice western Oklahoma is now replete with earthquakes, when they were never there before. From fracturing. I liken this idea to defusing a bomb with a circular saw- sure, you might chip away at the explosives, reducing the yield when it goes off, but you also might short the detonator out and trigger an eruption. Luckily, looks like the economics of this are prohibitive and likely to stay that way.
- elihu 9y agoIn the BBC article, they talk about tunneling under the magma pocket and cooling it from the underside, which is supposedly a lot less risky.
- hueving 9y agoYou're two analogies are fracking and a circular saw to a bomb. Is there really any justification for the comparison?
- ewhanley 9y agoThe earthquakes in OK aren’t a direct result of fracing. With a few rare exceptions, oil & gas fracs are accomplished through hydraulic force rather than thermal effects. The induced seismicity in OK is a product of water disposal wells which can raise pore pressure causing faults to slip. The microseismic events that occur during the actual fracing process can only be measured with highly sensitive geophones.
- gnaritas 9y agoEven if they're an indirect result, they're a result of it.
- lexxed 9y agoWhat if someone drop a bomb into it ?
- Semiapies 9y agoAnd I look in vain through the article, trying to find any quotes from someone identified as a geologist. (Brian Wilcox, of course, is an electrical engineer and roboticist.). This article may be better than the original link, but it's still fear-mongering with breathless appeals to the geological and ecological expertise of a guy who designs robots. https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Brian_Wilcox/personFull.cfm https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Brian_Wilcox/person...
- vixen99 9y agoFear has already been extensively mongered if one looks at the literature. Justifably, it appears. For instance, Biogeosciences, 10, 669–687, 2013 "Impact of an extremely large magnitude volcanic eruption on the global climate and carbon cycle estimated from ensemble Earth System Model simulations" J. Segschneider et al.
- glennon 9y agoErik Klemetti, an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University, wrote a response in Discover Magazine after news outlets reported about the NASA project in August. His article discusses the notion of an overdue Yellowstone eruption, the context for the NASA exercise, and the state of existing technology. Klemetti concludes, "It is a fun science fiction short story...but it isn’t any sort of real plan to save the planet from Yellowstone." http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/rockyplanet/2017/08/31/2250904/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/rockyplanet/2017/08/31/225... As an aside, I hold a Master's in Geoscience with an emphasis in hydrogeology, and have studied the Yellowstone geothermal system since about 2000. The NASA thought exercise is certainly worth considering in the very long term, and we should aspire to advance technology and our understanding of the associated environmental systems to afford it. However, more immediately, there has been immense political pressure to allow geothermal energy exploitation outside the national park -- with unknown and poorly understood consequences for the geysers and thermal system inside the park. In 1994, a law that would cease any nearby geothermal drilling if Old Faithful Geyser was disrupted failed to pass in Congress. I worry that this type of article, the original post, is being floated to promote that drilling agenda: a near-term excuse for private industry gains under the guise of saving humanity and at the expense of one of the world's most fantastic landscapes.
- jlebrech 9y agoSaving earth != saving the human race.
- Joakal 9y agoWouldn't it be better to dig it out? Yes, digging out a volcano from a mountain! A mammoth task and a boring one at that. But considering the destructiveness, heat would be released more quickly through less compressed rocks. It doesn't have to be all the way down to magma. Drilling down and injecting water may cause quake issues and make it more likely to erupt as I'm not sure if they can see if superheated water will seep to the side of the drilled hole(s)?
- vectorEQ 9y agonasa's ambitious plan to slurp up tax dollars
- pokemongoaway 9y agoThink they should probably drill into dozens of small volcanoes first to prove that doing so can't set them off?