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A comment on Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano. Parent comment

Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by xyzzyz on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:45PM (#15598673)
> Presumably any process that can use the heat directly rather than converting to electricity would be more cost-effective, as you lose most of the energy in that conversion.

All practical electricity generation technologies do it through heating water just the same, and they produce hot water as a waste product too. So, if your industrial process can use heat directly, it might as well use waste heat from existing power plants.

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by jopsen on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @12:40AM (#15598816)
And some places this is how entire cities are heated...

Well, usually they run out of excess heating in the winter.

Perhaps, Yellowstone and Iceland ought to have some heavy industry.

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by njarboe on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @02:21AM (#15599159)
Iceland has some large aluminum smelters and aluminum is 40% of their export income[1]. They do heat their homes with geothermal. It's basically free and when I was there the lowest setting for the heat in my apartment was 22.4C (72F).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by lostlogin on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @03:54AM (#15599481)
Interesting link. 800,000 mtpy is a lot of aluminium. While the ‘zero environmental imapct’ claim is controversial, the environment impact is definitely lower than many other producers.
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