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The worst dam idea: evaporating the Mediterranean to power Europe
- t_mann 4y ago> What was needed was a project so ludicrously ambitious, yet so immeasurably beneficial to all the European powers, that it would at last force them to put aside their differences and cooperate Let's be honest, has that idea ever worked?
- bandibus 4y agoThe final part of a trilogy of stories I ran in my newsletter - and since the first two were well-received on here a few months back, and got me some generous & good advice on tightening them up, I thought I'd push my luck a final time. Plus, this topic's both wtf-barmy and perhaps timely, considering Europe's energy supply issues right now.
- dvh 4y agoSmaller scale project - Czech dam (the red lines are dams): https://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/screenshots/7/3/242837-ceska-prehrada-predstaveni-projektu-8343853096564140216.jpg https://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/screenshots/7/3/242837-ceska...
- faebi 4y agoWouldn‘t that take forever to fill up?
- dvh 4y agoApproximately 100 years. Then it would produce 2 PWh of power (300x average nuclear power plant). Volume 160x Three Gorges Dam. More here: https://prehrada.hrach.eu/en.html https://prehrada.hrach.eu/en.html
- Youden 4y agoIf it takes 100 years to fill the dam and emptying the dam will generate 2PWh, then the expected average power is 2.3GW. That's closer to 3 nuclear reactors.
- dvh 4y agoYou will not empty the dam. You need 100 years to move water level 500m up, then you will use the current flow of the Elbe but raised 500m up. That gives you the power increase.
- rightbyte 4y ago"The Czech basin can be conveniently used to build a giant reservoir" I like his use of convenient. But the concept is quite interesting, barring the practicality of flooding Prague and half the country.
- alexanderchr 4y agoI believe this project would greatly improve the capabilities of the Czech Navy. http://cz-fleet.info/index_en.htm http://cz-fleet.info/index_en.htm
- D-Coder 4y ago"At present, the Czech Republic is working on the design of their own non-nuclear aircraft carriers. Planned to build at least two aircraft carriers." Neither Wikipedia nor a quick DDG have anything about this. Fake site probably.
- throwawayffffas 4y agoIt's a joke, the Czech Republic is landlocked.
- dukoid 4y agoWith rising sea levels perhaps it might be an option to keep the levels in the mediterranen? Seems at least more feasible than the Norther European Enclosure Dam* *) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_European_Enclosure_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_European_Enclosure_Da...
- xyzzyz 4y agoThe rise in sea levels is extremely slow at human lifetime scale. We are looking at less than 1 meter (just over 3 feet) by year 2100 in the worst case scenario analyses by IPCC. This is not nearly enough to make Gibraltar power plant practical, as it is on the order of magnitude of existing difference between high and low tide.
- Bronze_Colossus 4y agoSince parts of Northern Europe still experiences Post-glacial rebound and will rise faster than the expected rise of the ocean level I find this project unnecessary. (I am still a sucker for megaprojects though)
- Someone 4y agoOn the other hand, parts of Western Europe also still experience Post-glacial rebound and will drop, increasing the effects of rising sea levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound#Vertical_crustal_motion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound#Vertical_...: “the post-glacial rebound of northern Great Britain (up to 10 cm per century) is causing a corresponding downward movement of the southern half of the island (up to 5 cm per century)” IIRC, the Low Countries also are sinking because of post-glacial rebound.
- tomtomistaken 4y agoThere are strong currents at work in the strait of Gibraltar. Would be interesting to harness their energy in some way.
- moistly 4y agoLike an underwater turbine. Japan is apparently going to give it a shot: https://www.inputmag.com/tech/japan-kairyu-ocean-turbine-deep-currents-power-generation-renewable-energy https://www.inputmag.com/tech/japan-kairyu-ocean-turbine-dee... Looks like Scotland’s is a roaring success: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-45246445 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetl... No need to evaporate the sea.
- zamalek 4y agoThis also draws energy out of the sea, a net positive for climate change mitigation.
- bandibus 4y agoAgreed. There's a tidal turbine off Orkney, the most powerful in the world, that just went live: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid It's powering 2,000 homes and an electrolyzer creating green hydrogen. A few of those - or a few arrays of them- in the Strait might do wonders.
- labster 4y agoThe Qattara depression portion of the project still seems worth doing. While I’d prefer the freshwater flavored version, it’s not hard to imagine it turning into another Salton Sea as droughts occur.
- 100k 4y agoNot mentioned in this article: In Philip K. Dick's alternative history The Man in the High Castle, in which the Nazis and Imperial Japan won World War II, the Nazis execute this plan and drain the Mediterranean. As the author mentions, there wasn't much care for what happened to the people living in Africa. In Dick's book, the Nazis visited some unspeakable holocaust on them.
- throwaway49374 4y ago
- CrazyStat 4y agoWhy are multiple throwaways posting almost identical comments?
- throwawayasdfgf 4y ago
- CrazyStat 4y agoWhy are multiple throwaways posting almost identical comments?
- meroes 4y agoSomething like this kind of drew me into geology. The inside jacket of my intro textbook explained the Mediterranean used to be damned naturally at Gibraltar or whatever the inlet is called and that so much salt water evaporated there where miles deep salt land features. Was instantly hooked
- fractallyte 4y agoI'm sure I read about this in one of the later editions of Principles of Physical Geology by Arthur Holmes...
- treeman79 4y agoEpic XKCD comic on this topic. https://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
- pawsforthought 4y agoThis article links to another which discusses exactly that [1] — some geological event dammed the Mediterranean from the Atlantic 6 million years ago, after which the sea mostly dried out, then subsequently the entire thing refilled in the space of a couple years in the Zanclean Megaflood (at least, there’s mounting evidence that it happened in one cataclysmic event). First the western Mediterranean filled up to Sicily, then the eastern med, via a 1500m (5000ft) high waterfall! [1]: https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/in-search-of-a-flood-like-no-other https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/in-search-of-a-fl...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AlbertCory 4y agoSomeone with more engineering sense than I can debunk this: The Baltic is dramatically less saline than the Atlantic. That's why the Vasa [1] was so well-preserved after 300 years at the bottom. So could we not take advantage of that salinity difference, somehow? [1] https://www.vasamuseet.se/en https://www.vasamuseet.se/en Edit: Every engineering student sees the movie of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsing. To me, the Vasa is a much better career lesson: Marketing dictating a stupid Engineering decision. "Hey, let's put another gun deck on that thing! It'll be so much more imposing."
- mongol 4y agoIt is not the salinity as such that protected Vasa, but the absence of the ship worm, which does not like the Baltic brack water.
- AlbertCory 4y agoTIL. I did go to that museum and I thought that was what they said. What do you mean by "brack water"?
- chucksmash 4y ago> Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. > Some seas and lakes are brackish. The Baltic Sea is a brackish sea adjoining the North Sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brackish_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brackish_water
- mongol 4y agoBrack water have a salinity between sea water and fresh water.
- caseysoftware 4y agoI visited the Vasa museum in late 2019 and it was stunning. Not just how well it had been preserved but how few people died in it. They noted that one of the biggest contributors to its preservation was simply the location: since it had barely left the harbor, it was shielded from most storms and buried in mud in relatively shallow water. Even better, when it sank, the Vasa was still just a few hundred feet from shore so only a few dozen people died instead of the hundreds onboard.
- nickdothutton 4y agoI get a feeling that the author may have a teeny-weeny ideological axe to grind. A large underwater turbine with totally predictable generation cycle might indeed be a useful thing for Europe and north Africa.
- bandibus 4y agoHah. Not at all! If it sounds like that, I've misrepresented myself - I agree with you here, and the Strait is the perfect place to do it, using something like this: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid
- ethbr0 4y agoIt definitely sounds like that. > But - purely as an exercise in trying to answer hilariously daft questions - how much would it cost to lower the level of the sea? Never answered? > But this is far from the worst thing about Atlantropa. > It’s alarming to look back just a century and realise just how deeply baked and widely-disseminated these kinds of racist assumptions were in Europe. > It’s proper shivers-down-the-spine stuff. > Atlantropa may have been wildly unfeasible for countless reasons, a perfect turducken of Nopes. Which reasons? I got to the end of the post and was still waiting for content...
- kelnos 4y ago> Which reasons? The article notes that even just the dam in the Gibraltar Strait (ignoring the others) would have required more concrete than existed in the entire world at the time. I think that single reason is enough.
- ethbr0 4y agoYes, that's one reason. But if you're going to take the words and sentence to refer to reasons... list the reasons. Or, don't refer to them and write about something else. The entire post felt like "We're going to go over {X}. So here are a bunch of things that are {not X}."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andix 4y agoThe idea is part of a very problematic episode in European history. But would the idea be really that bad?
- almog 4y agoWhile not directly related, it reminded me of another plan (from 1963), sponsored by the US to create an alternate to the Suez Canal, through the Israeli Negev Desert using... 520 nuclear bombs: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-planned-suez-canal-alternative-israel-blast-with-nuclear-bombs-1960s-2021-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/us-planned-suez-canal-altern...
- suzzer99 4y agoThey had a similar plan to blow a second Panama Canal through the Darien Gap with nuclear bombs. Just batshit crazy stuff.
- metadat 4y agoUn-paywalled: https://archive.ph/muZg5 https://archive.ph/muZg5
- Barrin92 4y agoThe US had an entire national project around using nukes for excavation and construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
- TacticalCoder 4y agoThe Mediterranean sea is, to me, the most beautiful place on earth. Be it mainland Spain (with, sadly, way too many concrete all along the coast), France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, ... It's just beautiful. Then the islands: Corsica, Sicily, Ibiza, Formentera, ... It's heaven on earth. I drive my kid to school on the french riviera, along the coast and among the vineyards every day. Famous poets and painters would go and settle there. It requires a very special kind of a sad fuck to want to destroy that.
- bandibus 4y agoCouldnt agree more. (I grew up in Cyprus.) From what I could tell, it didn't occur to Sörgel what effect the dams and evaporation would have on sea-life, and on the coastal economies depending on it. Probably catastrophic. But one thing that was encouraging about the Orkney turbine mentioned elsewhere in these comments: they ran a trial first, to see how wildlife would be affected. Result: negligible impact. So a modern-tech version that respects all that beauty does seem to be possible - if mining the raw materials required to build it is factored in, because that is a massive ongoing issue.
- tomrod 4y agoI'm pretty sure he was a "change it all and we will make our own opportunity" type of dreamer, per the article.
- zen_1 4y agoAgreed, my childhood summers spent on the Egyptian North Coast/Sahel are some of my favorite memories.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> It requires a very special kind of a sad fuck to want to destroy that. On the other hand it's recreating a different entirely natural state the sea was once in, beautiful in its own way. I'd still say it's wrong but I don't think it's a "special kind of sad fuck". The status quo is not king.
- ngcc_hk 4y agoIf it is done can it easily for 1 country to threaten the whole euro … instead of nuclear bomb, we will bomb this dam. Giving the whole ww1 he has experienced can he just believe all countries are in it for peace. Also who will share the costs of losing the sea and maintain it.
- blacksqr 4y ago> What was needed was a project so ludicrously ambitious, yet so immeasurably beneficial to all the European powers, that it would at last force them to put aside their differences and cooperate Interesting, so he was a sort of inverse Ozymandias.
- hinkley 4y agoIf global warming continues to raise sea level, it could well become the case that such a project is undertaken but with the goal of keeping the Mediterranean roughly where it is, which would simplify changes necessary elsewhere to keep the Black Sea a sea and keep harbors navigable. Lowering the Mediterranean a few feet and running turbines at a flow rate to counteract evaporation might work, especially since evaporation and power usage track somewhat. Hot days evaporate more water, and require more air conditioning. The volume of the reservoir would allow quite a bit of buffer if you wanted to time shift some of that usage, aiming for monthly or quarterly averages instead of daily.
- wmil 4y agoAny thoughts on the idea to expand the Mediterranean with the Sahara Sea idea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea
- kardos 4y agoHow much sea level rise would it mitigate?
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]