Taming the Magma
ELSEWHERE IN SUBSTACK, today's edition of the always edifying Construction Physics newsletter, by Brian Potter, brings together two different apocalyptic futures with the question "Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?" In case you haven't already been warned about one of these apocalypses, Yellowstone National Park sits atop a geological hotspot that occasionally erupts as a supervolcano, at intervals of a few hundred millennia. The big eruptions have been comparable to major asteroid impacts, burying huge swaths of the continent in hot rock and ash and blotting out sunlight on a planetary scale. Right now, vast reservoirs of magma underneath the park are just waiting to burst free.
Unless...we cool the magma down first, as part of a zero-carbon electrical generation scheme, staving off human-made global warming and a volcanic global winter at the same time?
If heat could be bled off of the magma chambers, cooling and solidifying them, not only would that stop the volcano from erupting, but the heat could be used to generate electric power with a geothermal energy plant. Depending on the size of the plant and how quickly it bled off the heat, this could be a very large amount of electricity - enough to power the entire US.
Could it really work? Read Potter's analysis and find out!
PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS DEP'T.
Joe Biden Is the Only Choice
JOE BIDEN IS running for president again. His debut reelection commercial opened with images of the MAGA hordes of January 6 assaulting the Capitol—tear gas, a flag in distress, a line of cops struggling to hold the barricades together. Then came a protester holding up a plaintively handmade sign reading "ABORTION IS HEALTHCARE" outside the Supreme Court. Two branches of government heard from, and then the White House, and Biden facing into the camera, saying "Freedom."
As the commercial said, freedom is, in fact, under threat in this country. The political movement led by—and, in an all-important feedback loop, followed by—Donald Trump is atavistically attacking liberal democracy, and liberal society in general. Reactionary judges and governors and legislatures are unwinding the gains of the past half-century or more, defying the will of the voting public, and harassing people in public and private life alike. They are, as the commercial points out, banning books.
So it is time to vote for Joe Biden. What's the alternative? Bernie Sanders immediately endorsed him. The radical solidarity and possibility of four years ago—"Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know?"—is now the resignation of being stuck in one very big, very crowded foxhole, indefinitely.
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