Bitcoin Power Plant Is Turning a 12,000-Year-Old Glacial Lake Into a Hot Tub (arstechnica.com) 214
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The fossil fuel power plant that a private equity firm revived to mine bitcoin is at it again. Not content to just pollute the atmosphere in pursuit of a volatile crypto asset with little real-world utility, this experiment in free marketeering is also dumping tens of millions of gallons of hot water into glacial Seneca Lake in upstate New York. "The lake is so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub," Abi Buddington, who lives near the Greenidge power plant, told NBC News. In the past, nearby residents weren't necessarily enamored with the idea of a pollution-spewing power plant warming their deep, cold water lake, but at least the electricity produced by the plant was powering their homes. Today, they're lucky if a small fraction does. Most of the time, the turbines are burning natural gas solely to mint profits for the private equity firm Atlas Holdings by mining bitcoin.
Atlas, the firm that bought Greenidge has been ramping up its bitcoin mining aspirations over the last year and a half, installing thousands of mining rigs that have produced over 1,100 bitcoin as of February 2021. The company has plans to install thousands more rigs, ultimately using 85 MW of the station's total 108 MW capacity. [...] The 12,000-year-old Seneca Lake is a sparkling specimen of the Finger Lakes region. It still boasts high water quality, clean enough to drink with just limited treatment. Its waters are home to a sizable lake trout population that's large enough to maintain the National Lake Trout Derby for 57 years running. The prized fish spawn in the rivers that feed the lake, and it's into one of those rivers -- the Keuka Lake Outlet, known to locals for its rainbow trout fishing -- that Greenidge dumps its heated water. Rainbow trout are highly sensitive to fluctuations in water temperature, with the fish happiest in the mid-50s. Because cold water holds more oxygen, as temps rise, fish become stressed. Above 70 F, rainbow trout stop growing and stressed individuals start dying. Experienced anglers don't bother fishing when water temps get to that point.
Greenidge has a permit to dump 135 million gallons of water per day into the Keuka Lake Outlet as hot as 108 F in the summer and 86 F in the winter. New York's Department of Environmental Conservation reports that over the last four years, the plant's daily maximum discharge temperatures have averaged 98 in summer and 70 in winter. That water eventually makes its way to Seneca Lake, where it can result in tropical surface temps and harmful algal blooms. Residents say lake temperatures are already up, though a full study won't be completed until 2023.
Atlas, the firm that bought Greenidge has been ramping up its bitcoin mining aspirations over the last year and a half, installing thousands of mining rigs that have produced over 1,100 bitcoin as of February 2021. The company has plans to install thousands more rigs, ultimately using 85 MW of the station's total 108 MW capacity. [...] The 12,000-year-old Seneca Lake is a sparkling specimen of the Finger Lakes region. It still boasts high water quality, clean enough to drink with just limited treatment. Its waters are home to a sizable lake trout population that's large enough to maintain the National Lake Trout Derby for 57 years running. The prized fish spawn in the rivers that feed the lake, and it's into one of those rivers -- the Keuka Lake Outlet, known to locals for its rainbow trout fishing -- that Greenidge dumps its heated water. Rainbow trout are highly sensitive to fluctuations in water temperature, with the fish happiest in the mid-50s. Because cold water holds more oxygen, as temps rise, fish become stressed. Above 70 F, rainbow trout stop growing and stressed individuals start dying. Experienced anglers don't bother fishing when water temps get to that point.
Greenidge has a permit to dump 135 million gallons of water per day into the Keuka Lake Outlet as hot as 108 F in the summer and 86 F in the winter. New York's Department of Environmental Conservation reports that over the last four years, the plant's daily maximum discharge temperatures have averaged 98 in summer and 70 in winter. That water eventually makes its way to Seneca Lake, where it can result in tropical surface temps and harmful algal blooms. Residents say lake temperatures are already up, though a full study won't be completed until 2023.
Don't forget the emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
late stage stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't think of a better sign of the utter stupidity of capitalism given no restraint and no rules toward betterment of society.
Re:late stage stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
> I can't think of a better sign of the utter stupidity of capitalism
What does capitalism have to do with it? Capitalism is an economic model. It is not a system of political governance.
Environmental protection laws should have prevented this from ever getting close to happening. We don't have those EPA laws, and not "because capitalism", but because we're fucking stupid people who don't give a shit about the environment. The citizens and politicians of this country are to blame for mis-managing the environment, not an economic model.
Furthermore, no system that humans have ever devised, nor ever will devise, can possibly account for all externalities. Doesn't matter if it's an algorithm, computer system, economic model, or political governance model. Every system has externalities.
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There was a 2.5 year environmental review and permitting process. That there are people claiming that it's going to kill the trout now, when the trout derby began ten years aft
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But in the past, it produced electricity that people could use. Now it's just extracting money from Bitcoin speculators and ransomware victims.
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Furthermore, no system that humans have ever devised, nor ever will devise, can possibly account for all externalities.
We don't need to account for all externalities. Just those with severe consequences. But the great thing about global warming is that it's next generation's problem. And screw them, they will once they are born all be lazy whiners anyway.
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What's so clueless about the grandparent is that blaming "capitalism" would suggest that there's a better economic system for resolving issues such as this. It's been well-documented that "socialist" countries - including present-day China - have environmental problems on a scale that we can only imagine.
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It's an orange dot on this map - https://iopscience.iop.org/art... [iop.org]
Here's it's history up to 2011 - https://www.gem.wiki/AES_Green... [gem.wiki]
And a little something from them - https://greenidgellc.com/compa... [greenidgellc.com] - think that 2.5 year review and permitting process was cheap?
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I can't think of a better sign of the utter stupidity of capitalism
This isn't about capitalism. This is about getting ahead in a global context and one-upping other people. Bitcoin is something that is actively pursued by socialists, communists, and every other form of economic system, each equally not giving a fuck about the externalities.
Hell the only reason China cracked down on it was because they were worried it was creating competition to the government's control on the economy.
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Pretty certain "capitalism" didn't issue Greenidge the "...permit to dump 135 million gallons of water per day into the Keuka Lake Outlet as hot as 108 F in the summer and 86 F in the winter."
Here we have PROOF that government is incompetent to rule on the most basic of things, things we even mostly all AGREE they have a reason to legislate...and you want a system with MORE government control?
Brilliant.
Re:late stage stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
The making something with no real use part.
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Like tulips?
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This guy bitcoins.
Re:late stage communism (Score:2, Insightful)
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Tulips look pretty. They were traded for their physical appearance. And while I'm sure there's someone out there who would masturable to a hex representation of their bitcoin wallet it's just not the same.
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Like tulips?
At least you can eat tulips. Try eating a Bitcoin.
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I just used Google to check the current prices of Bitcoin. I could be a bit off, but the point holds.
If you can't afford to eat while holding something worth $35k, that sounds like a personal problem, and not an issue with food or Bitcoin.
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For context, I'm assuming the original comment was a reference to the bubble in the tulip market [wikipedia.org] that occurred during the Dutch Golden Age. When that bubble burst, a lot of people lost their shirts. If and when the bubble for Bitcoin completely bursts, the intrinsic value of that computation is exactly zero, so the value of that currency could also become exactly zero. By contrast, when the tulip bubble burst, at least the people stuck with the tulips could eat the tulips, because those at least have *s
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Larger population means late state capitalism both consumes and destroys the earth much faster than it can recover.
Really any population over 2 billion probably isn't sustainable and ends badly (fairly soon too).
I've had some tell me they think 1 billion is probably the sustainable limit.
Either way... we are well past that.
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On topic, water that hot isn't going to last long. It'll be a baked dirt hole in a few years.
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Really any population over 2 billion probably isn't sustainable and ends badly (fairly soon too).
And really, what's your scientific basis for that?? The earth now has 8 billion people, and looking to cease growing beyond 10+ billion. Do you really think you're contributing a useful opinion throwing numbers out of your hat? Is the sky falling, or are we doomed and should give up now?
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Larger population means late state capitalism both consumes and destroys the earth much faster than it can recover.
Really any population over 2 billion probably isn't sustainable and ends badly (fairly soon too).
I've had some tell me they think 1 billion is probably the sustainable limit.
Either way... we are well past that.
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On topic, water that hot isn't going to last long. It'll be a baked dirt hole in a few years.
So what are you proposing we do?
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The lottery is about to become much more serious it seems...
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If "late stage capitalism" were a real thing you might have a point. If you were talking about modern capitalism, well, it is defined by greater regulation and reduced externalities, so you'd just be wrong.
I'm not sure that your contention of reduced externalities is correct, even if you're looking at per-capita figures. I suspect you aren't considering cumulative, multiplicative, and exponential negative effects of pollution, resource depletion, decline in mental health, and social unrest. And if you're talking about overall externalities, then I'm outright calling bullshit on your claim.
As for your "late stage capitalism" snark, that's just the latest variation on the term "late capitalism", which has been
Re: late stage stupidity (Score:2)
Maybe if this plant actually produced anything you can make an argument for resources. All this is doing is making rich people richer which inflates prices for everyone else so this harms everyone but the owners. This dilutes the value of your coins as well
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It refers to what the death of capitalism looks like. Over-consumption and under-production is the gist. The gist from the OP being we are consuming too many natural resources to produce a good that effectively has no value. I am on the fence about agreeing in this circumstance but then again I agree in the principle of how capitalism ends or rather how capitalistic economies come to an end.
Re:Don't forget the emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the new Godwin's rule. Once you resort to invoking Trump, it demonstrates you've run out of any rational argument or idea.
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This, in the same day as this article:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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I dunno. Trump has some actual relevance here, since his administration rolled back over a hundred pollution regulations from the Obama administration, including one that regulated thermal pollution.
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That really doesn't help the fish that used the river that the water is being dumped into. The lake may not be getting significantly hotter overall but there is definitely a temperature increase locally both in the river and in the area where the river enters the lake.
Even if there is 1000 times as much water going in as the water released by the power plant the heat from the power plant water has to go somewhere. It isn't like the thermal energy just disappears into some alternate dimension. This being the
No sushi (Score:4, Funny)
You can catch already cooked trout from the boiling lake, save time!
Only downside is you can't get sushi anymore.
Re: No sushi (Score:2)
boiling lake
The temperatures are given in Fahrenheit. Most saunas are under 190, water doesn't boil until around 215 (depending on altitude.)
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I doubt boiling lake-water prevents pickled rice. It may prevent sashimi though.
Inevitable (Score:2, Funny)
As always, it's going to happen. [imgflip.com] Yet to be proven wrong.
Fill the lake with barramundi (Score:5, Funny)
Embodies the Ethics and Values of America (Score:4, Insightful)
wait, aren't we over-regulated ? (Score:4, Insightful)
oh, that's right. little people are over regulated.
big companies still get to do whatever the fuck they want.
greed causes limitless damage (Score:2)
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You might want to elaborate how it does that.
Boo hoo, so what (Score:5, Funny)
Any beauty represented by this lake, and its fish, can be better captured and preserved as an NFT.
How? (Score:2)
How is this still legal?!
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> How is this still legal?!
What, power generation? Or hyperbole?
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What, power generation? Or hyperbole?
Dumping 10,000,000 galons of hot water into the Seneca for no other reason that mining BTC, you dolt.
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Not a dolt.
The water isn't all that hot, and Seneca is big.
Creating BTC and freeing people from currency manipulation by oppressive governments is more useful than much energy using activity.
Totally harmless to the lake (Score:3)
While I agree that cryptocurrencies are a waste of time and energy, these clowns aren't doing anything to the lake.
Re:Totally harmless to the lake (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a very macro and limited view of an ecological system. The ecological system is incredibly complex, and a small effect can cause much larger ripple effects throughout the system. Unless you're an expert on the entirey of the system, it's impossible to know ahead of time what the result will be. That's why their study will take 2+ years and they can't just do some quick math to determine whether it's safe or not.
There's actually a term for dumping different temperature water into lakes and rivers: Thermal Pollution. One of the various aspects of the impact is stratification, or the fact that temperature is not even throughout a large body of water, and so small temperature changes effect specific regions of the body of water much more than other regions. The effects are also seasonal. Some bodies of water also experience eutrophication from thermal pollution.
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You are good at math, bad at physics. Two things you do not understand are:
1) Heat rises.
2) Hot water contains significantly less dissolved oxygen and more dissolved solids.
They are creating a permanent layer on top of the lake that keeps oxygen down. This degrades the amount of life in the lake. Not a huge amount, but enough to be noticed. There are significantly less fish and those that do live there are smaller as well.
Is this a horror story? No. But if you lived by the lake, you would be pissed to
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It's weird, it wasn't an issue 15 years ago, but is now an issue because bitcoin mining.
The answer is: It was never an issue, not then, and not now, within the limits they've been provided. They are in compliance and the lake is perfectly capable of absorbing this temperature change.
I hate bitcoin, but this article isn't the way to eliminate it.
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As the article stated, they're putting the hot water into the outflow channel of the lake, so not only would the heat input be irrelevant, it's not even going into the lake.
Bitcoin is green? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'd imagine the warmth increases algal growth... ;)
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Indeed at that stage, you will have other things to fear...
Oh yeah, I'm so fucking afraid of reduction of pollution
SCARE ME DADDY
One Warm Lake (Score:2)
This article is, of course, complete nonsense to anyone who knows what Lake Seneca is.
But let's pretend like they're not lying to scaremonger free market currencies:
Since the US dollar is now fiat and backed by foreign wars over oil and gas pipelines, what can we better afford as a species: one warm lake, or perpetual war to back the fiat Dollar? Assuming we had to make the choice.
Included in these calculations is the verifiable fact that the US military is the number one polluter in the world.
Sorry, but th
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> we have only selfish politicians
"Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish ignorant citizens, you're gonna get selfish ignorant politicians."
- George Carlin
Kiss those trout goodbye (Score:4, Interesting)
Trout are fish that require cold, oxygenated water for survival. Lake trout are stressed at water temperatures above 55F and will not spawn; they die at 70F.
There actually is a straightforward solution to this problem: cool the water before discharging it. Since they're literally in the business of minting money, they should be able to afford that; they had no problem with the 65 million dollars it took to convert to natural gas.
When a farmer says he can't afford to produce affordable food for the market without some kind of potentially harmful agricultural runoff, that's a serious concern to weigh. The harm to the public of the pollution has to be weighed against the benefit of affordable food. But I see no reason why the public should put up with any environmental destruction from bitcoin mining operations.
Bitcoin mining is the cost of security (Score:2)
One point I have not seen so far is a rebuttal of the notion that Bitcoin mining is purely wasteful. The resources spent to mine Bitcoin does, in fact, buy something very valuable: it buys security. An ideal world would not need security, and everything spent on security is, on a theoretical level, wasteful. All cryptography (just make it a rule not to snoop), every lock (don't open doors when not allowed), every weapon (just agree not to fight), every fence (don't walk that way), and so on. Enough peop
Re:Did someone (Score:5, Insightful)
forget to tell us the environmental impact of how they have been mining salt under the lake for years and years..
" Another bad thing happened once, so this bad thing should be OK too"
Re:Did someone (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really man.
Those guys did a bad thing so why cant we do a bad thing, isn't an argument, its moral cowardice.
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So if you were abused as a child, it is perfectly fine for me to punch you in the face?
The point is to show how much power is wasted in bitcoin mining. Being able to heat up a glacial lake takes a lot of energy, Which also means that is a lot of energy wasted to get to that point. All to generate a unique number that represents money.
Bitcoin had good intentions at first, being a handy way to securely and privately exchange money. However it has a problem of an exponentially growing calculation causing m
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fuck it. someone had to say it..
I know, someone always has to bring up whataboutisms, despite the countless times it is pointed out a stupid form of non-argument. Though normally it's high UI trolls, not lower UI regulars.
You should know better.
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hot water would stay near the top though, algae blooms are a concern. report should clarify matters
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Yeah, In my country, a 3GW nuclear power plant, when it was operational, heated up the lake it used for cooling by about 2C. So, a 0.1GW gas power plant would not manage even that.
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Yes, lakes can be different sizes. Too bad Lake Seneca is biggger.
Seneca lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] :
Surface area 66.9 sq mi (173 km2)
Average depth 291 ft (89 m)
Lake Druksiai (used for cooling of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant with two RBMK-1500 reactors, 3GWe capacity in total)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Surface area 44.79 km2 (17.29 sq mi)
Average depth 7.6 m (25 ft)
If a 0.1GW gas power plant can heat up a lake that has ~4x the surface area and ~12x the depth so it becomes a
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We don't want facts. We want to know someone you can find that says lake Druksiai is "like a hot tub".
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So, tell me what happened to the Aral Sea? Perhaps it wouldn't have disappeared if the public wasn't so complacent about economic activity mandated by government fiat.
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Your points may well be correct but that doesn't make crypto currency mining a good thing (it its current form at least).
now let me find that phrase ....err...ah yes...
Two wrongs don't make a right
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Thank you. I was surprised and disappointed in the article as well. Ars is normally much more analytical and level-headed about these kinds of things. But this article is using loaded language from the very start.
And don't get me wrong, fuck Bitcoin. But hyperbole and exaggerating the facts for an e
Re:Seneca lake (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice how the arstechnica article is carefully worded so as to be literally accurate while misleading. It says that rainbow trout are harmed by hot water (true) and that the plant produces hot water (true). It doesn't actually say that the water is dangerous to the trout; it leaves it to the reader to falsely conclude that, when in fact, there isn't enough hot water to be a danger.
Also notice the quote from someone claiming that "the lake" is like a hot tub. That's true in the sense that they quoted a person who did in fact say those words, but the quoted statement itself isn't true unless "the lake" means "the tiny portion of the lake next to the plant, that I tried".
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Rainbow trout ARE sensitive to temperature. As water temperatures rise, even seemingly a little, they may not die outright, but they will fail to thrive, and spawning is reduced, and this is well understood.
Sadly, Trout Unlimited, for one organization, seems uninterested in Eastern trout populations. FFA or some others should be pressuring New York State to change this, reduce the impact, or revoke the permit. Or, in some time, they will have no meaningful trout population in the Seneca area to protect, whi
Someone did well in math... (Score:5, Informative)
...but failed in geology.
Regarding that someone on Ars doing the math [arstechnica.com], he doesn't appear to know of a thing called lake stratification [state.il.us].
Those calculations wrongly assumed that the plant's waste water would transfer its heat to the entire volume of water in the lake. Seneca Lake is a very narrow, very deep lake, and I suspect has a very distinct epilimnion [wikipedia.org], or thin thermal layer of surface water. In the summer, lake surface water is heated by the sun and stays much warmer than the other thermal water layers below. Because hot liquids rise and cold liquids fall, this layer layer of warm surface water mostly circulates within itself and not with the lower thermal layers. (In the fall and spring, when surface temperatures change, -then- you get convection.) Pour hot waste water onto the surface, and it -will- warm the surface significantly more than the math supposed.
Running out of time, so I'm going to ballpark here, but given the relatively high ratio of total water to surface area of this lake, I'd ballpark only 5% of its total water volume is its epilimnion. So, multiply his result by 20, and you'll understand why that lake feels quite a bit warmer.
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There is less hot water going into the lake now than there was in 2005. Considerably less than in 1985 when they took nearly half the plant offline. The trout derby was 21 years old in 1985, the plant was 32.
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Besides one person's great rebuttal, pointing out reality is more than a mathematical thought experiment, the cryptomining operation is attached to an electric grid, not an electric plant. That crypto operation could in theory consume way more electricity. while dumping much more heat than a single power plant.
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kriston bathered"
Interesting to note about Cayuga Lake in your comment... does it still catch fire and smell like benzene?
ITIYM the "Cuyahoga River [wikipedia.org]" - which is in Ohio, not New York.
And, no, the river no longer catches fire or smells like benzene (or any other petrochemical, for that matter). That's because even Ohioans - who aren't exactly noted for their brilliance, the Wright brothers and Charles Kettering notwithstanding - are capable of learning from experience, if you drop a brick wall on them, so, with the help of the EPA's Superfund helping hand, all that crap was cleaned up, and the pollution sources
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Another non-sequitur
What happens if the truth is that the polar bears adapt to climate change but humans can't? Climate change is a fact, co2 capturing heat is a fact as plain and simple as a greenhouse getting warm in the sun - it really is that straight forward.
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When I have a little money, I buy bitcoin; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes -- Erasmus 2.0
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That's really mean. The environmental waste though, all that pollution for nothing, mind boggling. The funny thing though that power station is the Church of the religion of Capitalism they who worship virtual currency, their GOD, it is worth what they believe it is worth, it is worth more than the planet it is on. Capitalism as a religion, it's really rather funny and amusing, until they started wasting all that energy and generating all that pollution to generate NOTHING, an empty religious belief. Yeah,
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No, the amusing thing is that the power plant would still be producing most of its power since it was in place before crypto, thus the situation of the lake would remain unchanged, the residents are just salty that the power in question is primarily going to crypto instead of going to them or being sold elsewhere on the grid. Well, I say the residents as if this is a generally held opinion, but what I mean are the 3 people that NBC could actually get to bitch about the issue for its article. At most the ave
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The people who owned the facility before Greenidge LLC were not able to operate it profitably as a power facility on the wholesale bulk power market. They went out of business and the site was acquired by the bitcoin mining company. I did the P&C engineering for the reconnection of this plant in 2018-2020. I tried to get Grist and others interested in this story before it got re-licensed, but I guess it wasn't interesting until it was operational.
It was four coal units originally (I don't know about the
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On the other hand, we'll finally get the right wingers on board who still think it's a commie plot to kill the allmighty dollar.
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Unless governments adopt crypto currency, crypto currency has no chance at displacing something they do not control.
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There's no need for displacement. It's about trust at an individual level.
If I'm willing to accept X crypto coin for services or products then I do so with other's holding X.
I no longer think of crypto coins in USD converted values, but more the utility I can get out of them explicitly (without conversion). If I need something in another currency, such as USD, I can convert (paying gas other fees).
I haven't seen a need to convert anything to USD, in fact it's been just the opposite. And everything I hold
Re:But if an Ivy does it.... (Score:5, Informative)
Cornell has had this incredible system for a long time which has been seen as pro-environment. Did you miss the key point on the page you linked?
Returning Water
Water is returned to the lake gradually, dispersed through small holes at the outfall. Clearer than the shallow water it enters, and cooler in all but the coldest months, the returned water has no discernible impact.
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There probably is.
However, the power plant is not new, so, it presumably meets those requirements. Just because it is not primarily used to power miners does not make it produce more heat than previously.
Re:Isn't there regulation against this? (Score:4, Informative)
There probably is.
It's right there in the summary FFS: "Greenidge has a permit to dump 135 million gallons of water per day into the Keuka Lake Outlet as hot as 108 F in the summer and 86 F in the winter."
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There you go. It's regulated, so we're safe.
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There you go. It's regulated, so we're safe.
No. This is just evidence that we aren't just stupid, we also elect stupid people to represent our stupidity. :-)
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Atlas converted it to natural gas and it only runs at half the capacity of the original 1953 plant, which would suggest that it is producing less waste heat than it did in 1953-85.
And jud
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Nope, doesn't even mention global warming, just the warming of a specific lake, for the specific purpose of mining crypto.
There's no wild stretches to link these topics together - your biting satire is not relevant.
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Tourism is maybe the worst example you could cite. First, tourism is one of the very few ways that you can actually export sevices. You know, services. The best kind of industry you could possibly have because you're almost entirely selling manpower with only a fairly small amount of the value added depending on a more limited resource like raw materials of produce. Services are an awesome industry because the only way to really run out of supply is when you run out of manpower. In other words, when you hav
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Still, if facing the choice of wasting the resources on tourism or on bitcoins, tourism at least provides jobs.
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Bitcoin has everything to do with it.
Most of the time, the turbines are burning natural gas solely to mint profits for the private equity firm Atlas Holdings by mining bitcoin.
The company has plans to install thousands more rigs, ultimately using 85 MW of the station's total 108 MW capacity.
So up to 78% of the power plants output is going towards bitcoin mining. That means that up to 78% of the heated water discharge of the power plant is from bitcoin mining. That means the plant could cut the discharge of heated water by up to 78% just by not mining bitcoins.
I think that bitcoins have a lot to do with it after all. The problem may have been due to other issues in the past but currently it looks like ~75% of the problem is due to bitcoin mining.