Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for October 02, 2016

Yay, Charlie!

Iceland gets about 26% of its energy from geothermal sources.

Too bad it isn’t thermal tested for that. As for thermal power, I would say since it is doomed already so to turn the Yellowstone National Park into an industrial area and build the largest thermal power plant in the world there. Who knows it might help release enough pressure in the caldera to keep the caldera from exploding for awhile longer. It is due to happen literally any time between now and 100,000 years. It could give us megawatts of clean power maybe even as high as terrawatts.-Normally I wouldn’t recommend this since I love our National Parks, but this will give us clean safer power and maybe hold off the destruction that is definite. Because it would take out our country and a big part of the world when it explodes. If we can delay or stop it would benefit everyone.

Middle of the road, oh you mean suicide center?

Charlie’s managed to build a geothermal system that even the Koch Bros, would appreove of.

And now they are building houses up the sides of Mt. St. Helen.

When the Yellowstone caldera blows, the usa and Canada will be destroyed. The rest of the world will starve to death from worldwide crop failures and freeze to death from lack of sunlight.

Smart kid, but that cone will stink when it starts to burn.

Harry Turtledove wrote some fun books on the premise of Yellowstone going off. The effects of the silica are pretty terrifying.

Problem with harnessing the Yellowstone thermal energy is getting the resulting power to where it needs to be. Doesn’t do much good spinning turbines in the middle of nowhere. Even with a revamped and modernized national power grid, long-distance transmission of electricity isn’t there yet.

That looks like he has a still going. Wonder what the product is?

The cartoon has something to do with lighting a fire under a middle of the road cone to produce a little steam and nothing else. Looks like a big idea, but is actually stupid. The flower I don’t quite get. But this is political satire of Trump I suspect.

Nice Charlie, but that road?

Not exactly Jeffree, is he……

Forget about tapping the Yellowstone caldera. Just have a bag of hot dogs and marshmallows handy so that when it blows there will be plenty of food to go around.

Sorry, Charlie. The industrialists who really run this country would never allow for such a thing. A cheap, clean source of energy? That threatens their bank accounts!

I think the little kid is imagining inventing sream power. But his playtime will cause fatal accidents because he took a safety cone out of middle of road. Or it could be political symbolism of right and left crashing. Either way it wasnt funny or effective.

Actually, it came from Mars.

Why do the posts double themselves sometimes?

Wiley, thank you for the idea. I made a hot air balloon for the kids, out of tissue paper of course. I could never think of a way to get hot air into it without lighting the balloon on fire

Sure glad I don’t come here for my science references. I could see that in one of my footnotes: As read in a Go Comic Comment . . .

That’s Demeaning to guys Named Charlie…And it’s none of you business how I wound up on a chain gang anyway1

That’s demeaning to guys named Charlie…And it’s none of your business how I wound up on a chain gang anyway!

Must be in Michigan…lots of road cones here…..

So, power company industrializes the Yellowstone caldera for massive electrical power generation. Terrorists infiltrate the company, and diabolically inject 1000 times the safe amount of water into the system while simultaneously sabotaging the steam reliefs. 90 minutes after the attack starts, Yellowstone caldera undergoes a 1500 megaton steam explosion, blowing the entire top of the caldera and initiating a massive volcanic eruption. Yeah, this makes the China Syndrome movie a real yawner.

Nice imagination Charlie!

@Himbear: Part 1: I’m not an expert, but the basic plan is simple in concept. (The details are probably hellish, but that’s why there are more engineering specialties than anyone can list.) Drill a deep hole – the deeper the better, but obviously you have to stop before the heat softens your drilling tool. Lower pipes into it, connected at the bottom. Pump in water, steam comes back. Run a turbine to turn an alternator, with a condenser and cooling tower at the end.

Part2: For maximum efficiency, a conventional steam plant generates superheated steam at the highest temperature the boiler pipes can stand, and it sends the steam back for a reheat between two or three stages of the turbines. A geothermal plant will be different. I doubt that it’s practical to have reheat stages. I don’t think it’s possible to drill to such a temperature – and you have to remember that the temperatures fluctuate due to magma shifting in geological processes that we don

Darn, Gocomics limits posts to shorter than my paragraphs.

Part3: the temperatures fluctuate due to magma shifting in geological processes that we don’t fully understand, can’t predict and can’t control. So you have to settle for lower peak temperatures to give you a margin of error and reduce the chances of your boiler pipes melting and a volcano erupting from the bore hole.

Part4: And that means the turbine has to be designed and built specifically for geothermal. Maybe the Icelandics have a source of suitable turbines, but you won’t get the economies of scale that a coal power plant gets when it orders a turbine just like the one in hundreds of other plants.

Part5: You have lower thermal efficiency. The heat is free but there will be more waste heat to deal with at the condenser end. What do they do in Iceland, cool it with sea water? In Yellowstone, that’s not an option, and I doubt there’s enough fresh non-sulfurated water nearby to use evaporative cooling towers. You’ll have to build a very large and expensive convective cooling tower.

Part6: All this runs up the cost. An additional cost – you are drilling and putting pipes into an extremely corrosive environment. You’ll have to budget to cover the cost of replacing those pipes on a regular schedule. “Free” energy can be darned expensive.

Part7: then comes the problem some other posters have been discussing: you have a lot of electrical power, and not much demand for it within hundreds of miles. Good news: the biggest city in Montana, Billings, is only 200 miles away by road – right next door the way Montanans figure distances, and a reasonable distance to transmit power. (It’s on the Yellowstone River and the county seat of Yellowstone County.)

Part8: Bad news: the population is only around 170,000. So you can readily sell a certain amount of power, although you have to build around 200 miles of high-voltage, high-current lines. But if that’s all the power you produce, it’s no solution to the national energy crisis.

Part9: If you make enough power to be more than the rounding error in the national electrical demand, you’ll need to build thousands of miles of transmission lines, and you’ll lose a significant part of that power in transmission.

Or you pioneer new technology such as buried superconducting power lines…

Succinctness must be the spirit of desirable commentary.