Butch’s energy blog on geothermal energy, which is, “heat from the earth, and when the conditions are right…those areas are close to the surface, along with underground water reservoirs that are heated. The whole process works almost like a steam engine. The pumped water is conducted to a control house, where it is distributed to schools, houses, hospitals, small electrical turbines and…heats the sidewalks that we use to conduct everyday business. The problem with this clean and hardly used energy source is that the only ideal spots on which to drill are on fault lines. Then you run the risk of manufacturing your own earthquake.” (Criswell, 2010).I took interest to this blog because I found geothermal energy to be very interesting in that it seems like it would be a safe form of conducting energy, as it is a renewable, non toxic energy source, however, it could potentially be extremely destructive to our society with the induced seismic activity. Like nuclear energy, geo-thermal energy could be extremely beneficial and also potentially dangerous, but in a completely different way. Butch describes an incident in Basel, Switzerland in January of 2007, where they had injected water into the ground to widen the fractured rock to form a reservoir and they ended up manufacturing a 3.4 earthquake. Since that earthquake was manufactured, Basel has had at least 100 seismic shocks around the 3.0 magnitude. Basel was to become the first to generate commercial power using geothermal energy. Like the geothermal incident that occurred, several destructive nuclear accidents have occurred in a variety of nuclear power plants around the world. Usually these accidents result in improper care of uranium rods which expose workers and civilians to dangerous toxic amounts of radiation.
References:
Major nuclear power plant accidents. (2008). Retrieved from http://www.atomicarchive.com/Reports/Japan/Accidents.html
Criswell, B. (2010, March 25). Gryphon's hoard. Retrieved from http://gryphonshoard.blogspot.com
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