🌋 Limitless energy, the Yellowstone supervolcano, and the Elon Musk Effect

💡 5 Quick Questions for … aviation historian Dan Grossman on the past and future of airships

In This Issue

The Essay: Limitless energy, the Yellowstone supervolcano, and the Elon Musk Effect

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … aviation historian Dan Grossman on the past and future of airships

Micro Reads

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Quote of the Issue

"Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!" - Thomas Edison

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The Essay

🌋 Limitless energy, the Yellowstone supervolcano, and the Elon Musk Effect

A great comment from one of my favorite economists:

Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok

Of course a society that freaks out over kids walking to Dunkin Donuts isn’t going to approve nuclear reactors. Nor will the kids when they grow up. reason.com/2023/01/30/dun…

Given the obvious pro-nuclear perspective of this newsletter, it’s no surprise that I hope Tabarrok is wrong.

But let's take a different perspective: If a society were to fully embrace a geothermal project of revolutionary proportions — one that would involve inserting 100, 5-mile long, engineered copper cylinders into the Yellowstone Caldera magma chamber and connecting them to 10 powerful steam turbines — to extract an astonishing 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy to power a country's entire electrical grid, what might we surmise about their existing energy infrastructure? I venture that such a society would already be covered in coast-to-coast solar farms, towering wind turbines, and thrumming nuclear reactors of all types, to the extent that a radical supervolcano energy project would be deemed unnecessary. This much we can all agree on, yes? Permitting rules are probably not a big problem in this scenario.

Still, as thought experiments go, it’s a pretty fascinating one. Talk about a technologically sweet solution to a problem. Well, three problems, actually, in the view of Thomas F. Arciuolo and Miad Faezipour in their late 2022 analysis, “Yellowstone Caldera Volcanic Power Generation Facility: A new engineering approach for harvesting emission-free green volcanic energy on a national scale,” which appeared in Renewable Energy journal. These are the problem such a project would supposedly address: