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West Virginia Is Geothermically Active
sciencehabit writes "Researchers have uncovered the largest geothermal hot spot in the eastern United States. According to a unique collaboration between Google and academic geologists, West Virginia sits atop several hot patches of Earth, some as warm as 200C and as shallow as 5 kilometers. If engineers are able to tap the heat, the state could become a producer of green energy for the region."
Makes me think researchers are idiots; folks who live there have known about the hot springs for hundreds of years.
Places with names like 'White Sulphur Springs' suggest anything? And there's a cave I've been in nearby (admittedly over the line in Virginia) with water temperatures over 100F.
OTH, somebody like Google will have no issue with putting in their OWN system, setting up a data center, and shipping bits/bytes out. What would that do to WV? It would lead to a massive influx of money seeking to do the same. And that would lead to the high tension lines as well. For WV, this is the best thing possible.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Uhhh...have you actually SEEN the slushpits around the mines here in the USA? It ain't like the EPA has had any teeth in years buddy, sad to report. Instead of doing what would be sensible, forcing mines to pay into a fund so when the ore runs out the money for cleanup will be there, no our corporate booty kissing government just gives them carte blanche to do as they please, and then when the mine runs dry they just dissolve the company and leave We, The People, to clean up the mess. As an example you might want to read up on a little slice of heaven known as a superfund site.
I'm not a NIMBY, which especially don't apply here since I'm not in WV (thank Jebus), and I'm all for nuclear and mining, but I'm just as much for corporate responsibility which sadly has been DOA here for a couple of decades here at least.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Too bad Senator Byrd passed away, he could have diverted tens of billions of dollars to WV to fund this effort, then we could have had the Robert Byrd Hot Air Energy Generation Facility, and his legacy would live on!
Ken
Current drilling tech gets us to 10 kilometers or so, so the short answer is "yes."
Considering we're willing to (and do) drill for oil that deep I can't see depth being the real problem here.
=Smidge=
Which makes me think of a question maybe someone here at /. can answer: Can miners/drillers set off enough "little ones" to cause a big one?
Yes. Doesn't even have to be mining. Deep well injection set off a series of earthquakes in Denver in the 1960's -- when what they were injecting was millions of liters of nerve gas from Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Yes, indeed, your government funds at work: make hundreds of thousands of pounds of wildly toxic weapons of mass destruction in contradiction to signed treaties, and then when you have them all and don't know what to do with them, pump them into a 25,000-foot-deep hole. They lubricated an old slip fault and caused a half a dozen earthquakes.
The thing is: it's not easy to tell, prima facie, whether you're going to cause a bunch of little earthquakes, or one big one, by doing this. It has been proposed that we should try to set off small earthquakes on purpose, to reduce the strain on tectonic plate boundaries and reduce the chances of a much larger quake, but there's no way to ensure that it would do that rather than just setting off the larger quake right now. If we do that, even if it just sets off small quakes, the situation is no longer an earthquake that's an act of God, but an earthquake that's an act of man, meaning even if it's much smaller than it would have been, specific people are now liable for causing an earthquake, and that's a legal minefield.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.