Friday, October 28, 2011

In Bolivia, a Supervolcano Is Rising

I am coming at this from an uneducated viewpoint, but would appreciate an answer from someone a bit more educated...

If we were to drill into this forming volcano, use geothermal energy to create electricity, could you delay, decrease or prevent the volcano from erupting? It seems like a really good win/win situation where you get almost free energy and prevent a small country from getting obliterated.

70km across (35,000m radius, about 4 billion square meters)... you were planning on extracting energy using maybe 30cm diameter pipes? Say, generously, these pipes can pull heat energy from lava up to 30m away from themselves (3000 square meters), To drain heat energy from just 1% of the surface of the dome, you'd need 13,000 pipes - how deep are you planning to sink them to have an effect? Even if you solidify the cap to a depth of 5km, I'm not sure that the forces underneath would be contained, they'd probably just divert to somewhere nearby, and likely explode with even greater force from a smaller area.

It would be a big project - if you put all the oil drillers in the western hemisphere on the job, you might make an ineffective cooling "cap" a few km deep within a few hundred years - all that heat being dumped into the ocean (unless you have a preferable heat sink?) would have a devastating effect on thousands of square km of sea life, and sure, there'd be "free" geothermal energy until the volcano blew, but only as far as you could transmit it.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/snUanoV9hBM/in-bolivia-a-supervolcano-is-rising

texas a m cochlear implant navy football navy football 50/50 50/50 dreamhouse

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.