Volcano Erupts in Iceland Near Power Plant, in 'Worst-Case Scenario' 111
A volcano in southwestern Iceland began erupting Monday, posing a risk to the nearby Svartsengi Power Plant and the town of Grindavik. "We are looking at a worst-case scenario," said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. "The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure." The New York Times reports: Thousands of earthquakes had been detected in Iceland since late October, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. In November, with homes and roads being damaged, the authorities declared a state of emergency and evacuated Grindavik, a town of more than 3,000 people near the volcano. More recently, the Meteorological Office warned of a "significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption in coming days."
Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Since the 19th century, not a decade has gone by without one, Iceland's tourist website tells interested visitors. The occurrence of eruptions remains "entirely random." The country straddles two tectonic plates, which are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma.
The current seismic activity has not affected one of Iceland's best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists worry is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last major one was in 1918. Last month, Icelandic authorities started building defense walls around the geothermal power plant to protect it from lava flows. "Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke designed to divert lava flows around the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located just over 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Grindavik," reported Reuters in mid November.
"A spokesperson for HS Orka, operator of the power plant, said it supplies power to the entire country, although a disruption would not affect power supply to Reykjavik."
Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Since the 19th century, not a decade has gone by without one, Iceland's tourist website tells interested visitors. The occurrence of eruptions remains "entirely random." The country straddles two tectonic plates, which are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma.
The current seismic activity has not affected one of Iceland's best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists worry is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last major one was in 1918. Last month, Icelandic authorities started building defense walls around the geothermal power plant to protect it from lava flows. "Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke designed to divert lava flows around the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located just over 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Grindavik," reported Reuters in mid November.
"A spokesperson for HS Orka, operator of the power plant, said it supplies power to the entire country, although a disruption would not affect power supply to Reykjavik."
If lava hits the core we are done for! (Score:3)
If lava hits the core we are done for!
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Indeed! This is getting ridiculous! When will climate change deniers finally start to believe in order to prevent events like these?
Re: If lava hits the core we are done for! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly, it's pretty crazy that we use almost no windpower here [globalwindatlas.info].
Re:If lava hits the core we are done for! (Score:5, Informative)
So, skipping straight past the trolling, there actually IS a very good correlation between melting glaciers and volcanism, in areas prone to volcanism :) Whether rock melts depends on the balance between temperature and pressure, as pressure suppresses melt. As you lift off pressure, you encourage melt. The forces involved in rebound of the crust are also uneven, and this too can create areas of low pressure and encourage volcanism. :)
Re:If lava hits the core we are done for! (Score:5, Informative)
This is not remotely new, nor remotely controversial, science [wiley.com].
You understand that glaciers can be over a kilometer thick, right? Vs. magma chambers that can be only a few kilometers underground? The change in pressure is not at all insignificant.
To quote the above paper as an example: "An increase of about 30 times the steady state value, between 10,000 and 8000 years ago, coincides with the disappearance of ice at the end of the last ice age."
Yes, there are not only not "zero" correlations with climate change, but rather, huge correlations (with regards to the specific case of glaciers disappearing from over volcanic hot spots).
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This [explainxkcd.com] should put into perspective the thicknesses we're talking about with the last glaciation.
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You have a link for that? The tiny layer of ice is paper thin compared to the miles of rock between the lava and the surface. This seems unlikely.
The layer of ice was thick enough to significantly compress the crust [wikipedia.org].
Are you a god? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I bet he is the cousin of Linus Thorvaldur Thordarson...
Re:Are you a god? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fun fact, the "last names" here (at least in the vast majority of cases) aren't surnames / family names, but rather, patronymics, and are best translated as "Son of [X]" or "Daughter of [X]", rather than "Mr. [X]son" or "Mrs. [X]dóttir"; they're not inherited, nor altered with marriage, and simply state who your father is. So for example, if you have a family of a man, a woman, and their two children, a boy and a girl, every single one of them will have a different patronymic.
Back when phone books were a thing, they were listed by first name - because again, the patronymic is more of a clarifying adjective, it doesn't denote "who your people are" or anything like that. Even when addressing the prime minister, you'd refer to her as "Katrín", not "Mrs. Jakóbsdóttir". The latter is like saying "Mrs. Daughter of Jakób"; it doesn't work.
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Ignorance is bliss.
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Worth mentioning that patronymic names are not exclusive to the Nordics. It exists in many other languages as well.
German: Mendelssohn - Mendel's Sohn - Son of Mendel
Spanish: Rodriguez - Son of Rodrigo
etc.
Re:Are you a god? (Score:5, Funny)
Thorvaldur Thordarson may actually be the coolest name for a volcanologist that I've ever heard.
He could probably just flick back his long mane and glance menacingly at the volcano stopping it dead in its tracks.
Re:Are you a god? (Score:4, Funny)
Most names here are pretty "badass" sounding when translated. For example, one of my friends' name translates as "Goddess of the Sword, Daughter of Victory".
Re: (Score:1)
So probably a Freiya?
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Hjördís. Hjör = old / poetic word for a sword. Dís = goddess. :)
Hjör, via heruz, via *kérus, is related to the Indo-European root (s)ker- (to cut), which has a ton of modern descendants [wiktionary.org], from "share" to "scrotum".
Dís traces back to PIE dhéhis [wiktionary.org] (sacred being), same root as deus, theo-, and "festive" / "feast", "fair", etc.
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HjÃrdÃs, wow if she is only half as beautiful as the sound of her name, she might be a true goddess.
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Lolz, the name was copy/pasted and the browser or /. messed that up ...
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It hasn't ever handled characters outside basic ASCII well, and generally doesn't do it at all. Any modern browser, for example, should correctly render the name of the science preprint server "Ariv" because it's spelled with some ASCII ("Ar" and "iv") with a regular HTML entity "&chi ;" (without the space) in the middle (to make the name pronounce close to "archive" ; feel free to roll on the floor, helpless with mirth) But Slashcode can't handle most HTML entities outside ASCII and
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But I copy/pasted the name from Rei's text. Kind of confusing/surprising that it still got garbeled.
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But you're a European, IIRC, and a 5-digit UID so you have been around here almost as long as I have. You can't be discovering this just now.
Yes, it is bloody annoying that this user-experience error has been running fo
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Well, /.
When you are using a Windows machine, with German keyboard, and have configured the correct ISO -LATIN -BLA-BLA charset, then you can type German umlauts on
No problem.
On a Mac you can't (there is a trick how to do it, but I forgot it)
Regarding the copy/paste issue: I have no idea what is going on there.
Re: (Score:2)
I just don't expect Slashdot to get anything outside basic ASCII right. Pathetically low expectations aren't so often disappointed.
Linux, using a UK keyboard with it's default mapping on the Alt-Gr ("meta"? and "compose" keys, I can type a, e, i, o, u, y with umlauts ã,
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Yep, totally mangled. Pathetic.
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Well, it is written in PERL :-P
You need more text processing IQ to read perl than to read mangled umlauts.
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Never had a need to learn anything in it's family. So I haven't. I can craft a RegEx if I need to - just well enough to have repeatedly got tripped up by the different dialects of RegEx. There's another field where the XKCD'ian way of getting "14 standards out of 13" needs to have a few funerals to get the dialect count down to approximately 1.
OK - I'll allow two dialects, for single-byte characters and one for multiple-byte characters, as long as the multiple-byte dialect
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The regexps are not the problem it is every thing else.
You have arrays which are hashmaps. Oki.
Depending what is inside of the array you use $ or % (?) to index into it.
Completely senile.
The worst thing: the inventor is a linguist. He claimed he made the language in a way that it mimics human languages. Just Lolz ...
Re: (Score:2)
and this :
are far from mutually exclusive. The level of consistency in human languages is both generally low and wildly variable.
Which is kind-of what you'd expect, since a lot of the development of novel languages is done by unsupervised children running survived-by-not-being-eliminated software on the unstructured admixture of three or more languages (parent-1's society ; parent-2's society [or the
Re: (Score:2)
and
"quote"
text in the "comment" box, but they come out identically. (IIRC - been a while since I tried. Or is my memory playing up?)
But what if I tried < blockquote style="inline,italic,bold" >
Woah, hold up Silver : the correct tag for short, inline quotations is "q", not "quote". But that's contrary to the "Comment" box instr
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blockquote
end para
quote
quote
end para
q q end para
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Hmmm, how about
quote style="display:inline;font-style:italic;font-weight:bold"
Hmmm, the "preview" action lets the CSS additions persist to the renderer (so - not sanitised away), but they're not acted on.
But this one proves that Slashcode eventually ignores the CSS I apply. Including things within general HTML/ CSS rendering rules. So, trying to learn CSS that would apply to Slashcode is a WOMBAT. I think I reached that concl
Re: (Score:1)
Oh, I take it back. "blockquote" has an implicit "style="color:medium-grey";" which "quote" doesn't have.
Did not notice, until you pointed it out.
I'm completely against using colour for anything like "pointing out" in a GUI.
The first Macs where black and white only, then depending on Graphic cards, with colours of grey scale (grey scale is awesome). Everything that was different from something else: had a different shape.
The human eye and mind reacts on shapes, not on colours.
It's a geothermal plant! (Score:5, Informative)
Will get plenty of geothermal if the lava hits it!
Re: (Score:2)
It seems this geothermal power plant has worse emissions per MWh than an equivalent coal-fired unit.
Re:It's a geothermal plant! (Score:4, Funny)
nah lava on top.heats the cold sink, we want that end colder than the hot sink end
An ideal heat engine is reversable!
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Sure, but then the power comes out at the reversed side of the system e.g. at the bottom of the hole. Not sure their plant was designed for that like a typical reversible heat-pump would be and it might a little harder to just turn the setup around.
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An ideal heat engine is reversable!
As in throw this puppy in reverse and let’s get outta’ here!
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Actually wondering how badly the piping will get damaged by the earthquakes that come along with eruption.
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Yeah, it costs a bit more at the design stage, but you get that back the first time you don't have to rebuild it in the middle of recovery from a major earthquake.
Oil companies may be evil, but they're not stupid.
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Oil companies? This is geothermal. And oil companies avoid drilling next to active volcanoes if they can help it for this exact reason. Having to redrill everything sucks.
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And they're not terribly upset by the idea of drilling in volcanic districts. The high heat flow makes for relatively shallow depths of maturation of the kerogen - the first step in the chain to a productive reservoir - if you've got a reasonably high sediment percentage of organic matter. The Indonesian chain for example has a thriving drilling industry (with lots of "interesting times" from the high sedime
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>in the (not very likely) event of a well being trashed by an eruption
Bingo. The problem here is that geothermal in Iceland is put fairly close to places where it has a good chance of getting trashed, because it's generally worth it. You get far more efficiency when it's actually working, because the closer you are to an active lava flow, the hotter your hot end of the circuit is and the hotter it remains at greater flow rates. Remember, what geothermal power is looking for is maximum difference between
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If the geothermal power system were being designed for maximal thermodynamic efficiency, then yes, you'd go for a maximal heat source temperature (and minimal heat sink temperature). But they're not - they're designed for maximum economic efficiency, which means aiming for a hot enough heat source to provide the desired energy, but without going too high into realms where your corrosion of (downhole) pipewor
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Interesting and informative. Thanks for typing that out!
Its expected, not ironic (Score:3)
Irony: it's a geothermal power plant.
Not really, seems sort of expected to a degree. :-) It is leveraging magma nearing the surface. In short, it is intentionally built in an area where lava may appear. Getting hit like this a normal cost of business, the "business" or "industry" in this case relying on infrequency to remain profitable.
Yellowstone (Score:2)
I remember hearing we were starting to investigate putting in plants around Yellowstone, but then they detected increased seismic activity and decided not to poke at it...
Re:Yellowstone (Score:5, Interesting)
He said we're well overdue for another eruption, and it'll be big when it happens.
One of the previous eruptions was big enough that the Romans and Chinese both wrote about the spectacular sunsets at the time.
I need to update my home insurance.
Re: (Score:2)
Yellowstone - the solution to global warming (Score:3)
Yeah we're overdue for Yellowstone to erupt but it'll be like an asteroid strike in terms of preparation in the sense that what little that could be done to mitigate it is fairly pointless, and the error bars are fairly big so it may be another 20 generations.
On the positive side it could solve global warming as it introduces a mini ice age. :-)
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I'm hoping to be dead when it does erupt, and not just for tax purposes.
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I would say "saying that we're 'overdue' for this natural disaster or that" is usually a tired trope, as most natural disasters don't occur on a schedule, and it being a long time since the last one doesn't actually mean anything. That said, some volcanic systems do go through cyclic eruption periods. Reykjanes (the southwest peninsula) as a whole for example goes through long periods of inactivity (before 2020 there hadn't been a single eruption there for 851 years), before one rift after the next starts
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So the system doesn't fulfil the criteria for following a Poisson distribution [wikipedia.org], because the events are not independent. The Laki fissure system (1783-4 eruptions) is somewhat off the S coast, but near the E-W mid-point of Iceland, not in the extreme SW as the Rejykanes peninsula is. At some point, someone is going to raise the prospect of this eruption leading on to triggering a repeat of Laki 1783-4 ... which isn't an unreasonable fear
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Waste of time. They'll call "act of god" (you know - the vicious mysogynist racist of the Bible/Koran, or other slavering supernatural being of your choice. Or force majeure, or one of their get-out clauses. You're better off moving away.
Hmmm, so that rather rules out the Naples Supervolcano. Hasn't gone off big-style since about the start of grain processing, about 40 kyr BP. Centra
Re:Yellowstone (Score:5, Interesting)
Last I checked there were only two places in the world where geothermal wells had unintentionally bored into magma chambers: Hawaii and Iceland.
In Hawaii, they immediately capped the well and set out to avoid coming anywhere near the magma chamber again.
In Iceland (near Krafla), they decided, "Hey, let's start dumping a bunch of water down this!", turned it into a production well, it became the most powerful producing well in Iceland, and they set out to drill more of them ;)
Really, though, it's not as dangerous as it sounds. A well isn't a "hole", it's full of heavy "drilling mud", designed to be as heavy or heavier than the surrounding terrain. You might help let gas out, but that's not a bad thing. And cooling the magma is definitely a good thing if your goal is to prevent eruption - you don't have to cool it that much to make it uneruptable.
People commonly mistakenly think of magma as a liquid, but it's more kind of like honey, where there's a bunch of fine crystals suspended in a melt, and at any point it's a question of what percentage of it is melted and how viscous it is as a whole, rather than "is it melted or not melted?". As it cools, that not-melted fraction rises and the viscosity rises, and you don't have to push it too far before it's not going anywhere.
Don't forget your training... (Score:3)
If the lava's coming toward you, just duck and cover!
Don't forget your training... Historians grateful (Score:2)
If the lava's coming toward you, just duck and cover!
Worked for Pompeii. Future generations will appreciate your contribution to history. :-) Oh wait, is only getting hit by volcanic ash an option in the region or is it only lava?
Pyroclastic flow != lava (Score:2)
Worked for Pompeii.
Pompeii was taken out by pyroclastic flow which is a lot faster (~80 km/h) and far more dangerous than lava which flows at ~10km/h or less. Duck and cover is about all you can do for pyroclastic flow, with lava you can outrun or even outwalk it as long as the terrain is relatively flat and there is somewhere safe you can move to.
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AND you know the direction from your location to that place of (relative) safety, AND can walk in the correct direction, consistently.
Which is where the person with a paper map and a compass is likely to survive a lot better than the person relying on the batteries in a GPS and a network connection to get mapping data (and the essential advertising).
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For the uncultured, here is the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Ya, I'll take earthquakes, thanks (Score:2)
One of the perks about living in CA is that we only have earthquakes.
I know, I know, "only". But if you're far enough away from tall buildings and common episcenters, they're hardly more than an inconvenience. I'll take that over literal hell fire ( or Fingers of God like they get elsewhere ).
Re:Ya, I'll take earthquakes, thanks (Score:5, Funny)
I spent most of my life in Southern California and I can tell you that they do indeed have four seasons: fire, flood, earthquake and riot.
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In terms of active volcanism, I wouldn't put California very high up. 10k years is old to you, here it's ancient, people would think of that as extinct. On the Reykjanes peninsula we've now had four eruptions since 2020.
If you were looking for other disasters to add to California beyond floods, I'd also add droughts, heatwaves, and Charlie Sheen.
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Oh, and wildfires. And Harvey Weinstein.
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You could have just said "And progressives" and saved yourself some verbiage.
Re: Ya, I'll take earthquakes, thanks (Score:2)
Last time Konocti went off it was fairly explosive. You can see some of the resulting rocks in the next county...
Re: Ya, I'll take earthquakes, thanks (Score:2)
"One of the perks about living in CA is that we only have earthquakes."
Some of which are caused by our geothermal plant at The Geysers! Not the plant so much as the pumping sewage into the ground to keep the plant working...
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>One of the perks about living in CA is that we only have earthquakes.
Um... and massive wild fires, and flooding and mudslides. Add in some locust plagues and you'd be in the running for a chapter of the Bible.
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Large dyke (Score:1)
"Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke"
Are lesbians immune from lava?
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It's time for the US to step up here by sending in Rashida Tlaib to plug the fissure. Or would that make the gods even angrier?
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Yes, in fact!
[TheMoreYouKnow.gif]
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"Worst case scenario"? (Score:1)
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That's sort of like saying "Well, it would be best if you didn't get skin cancer, and if you did it would be better if it was melanoma, but at least the melanoma is somewhere that's not unsightly! Look on the bright side!"
I watched the eruption last night from Reykjanesbraut, and it was pretty spectacular. But let's not kid ourselves, this is a disaster, and it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of luck to keep everything safe, and in the meantime, will massively disrupt the lives of people and busine
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** if it wasn't melanoma
Ha ha! (Score:1)
How stupid, building power plants near volcanoes!
That would be like building cities where it rarely rains, and then complaining about not having enough water! Oh, wait ...
c'mon (Score:2)
"We are looking at a worst-case scenario," said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. "The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure."
For a vulcanologist, using the term "worst case scenario" for a piddly little volcanic toot (albeit near a power plant) is several orders of magnitude off from shit he should be extremely well aware of.
VEI (Volcanic explosivity index) is a measure of volcanic eruption severity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There hasn't been
Not a Worst-Case Scenario (Score:1)
Last night, it looked bad. But it's no longer a "worst-case scenario".
The fissure is further NE of the town of Grindavik and the power plant that anticipated. And the fissure stopped growing south before it reached the slope down to the coast. So, lava is primarily pooling around the fissure. The active part of the fissure has also decreased and retreated north to where the original/main vent is located. While the fissure was active over a 4km span in the hours after the initial eruption, the main activity
A solution (Score:2)
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Of all the school buses, yours was the shortest.
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WTF are you babbling about? Iceland is practically all volcanoes. Just living there they have to deal with that as a fact. No one there is pretending there is not a big downside to that.
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Five year separation to blame the Jews?
Bad luck rather than bad planning? (Score:2)
thought they were talking about a nuclear power plant, but poor real estate choice for any other kind of plant is just mistake; if it gets destroyed choose more wisely next time.
Choose an area where megma is not nearing the surface? The only selection geothermal can make is with respect to frequency, and this situation may be the result of bad luck with respect to timing.
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Choose an area not near a volcano known to cause lava to flow ON the surface!
What is wrong with people here, they get all snowflaky any time a bad "greenie" decision is pointed out.
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Which they did, by choosing an area that didn't have any record of surface volcanic activity for 800-odd years. Which is almost as long as you can possibly get in Iceland, the island having only been inhabited for 1150-some years.
If you actually look at a map of the Svartsengi, you'll see that it's on the flank of a hill. So only about 1/4 of it's horizon is occupied by places that could potentially flow lava down hill towards it.
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Choose an area not near a volcano known to cause lava to flow ON the surface!
Its about the frequency of such lava flows. For example if its once every couple hundred years the risk is acceptable.
Its like building a house on the big island of Hawaii. Cheap land is probably near lava flows. If you build a very modest house and keep a bag packed, no problem. If you get 50 to 100 years out of it its a win. That how some of the affected neighborhoods on the big island rebuild, with awareness guiding their level of investment. Similar with small farms. Certain types of lava can break d
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The poor real estate choice of... building a geothermal power plant in a geologically active location?
Did you really think through what you wrote?
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"OMG, look at those morons, building this WIND TURBINE in this windy location!"
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The poor real estate choice of building where lava flows, dipshit.
Do you think through before you write. No, you're a greentard snowflake looking for things to whine about, even if it means over stupid civil engineering decisions.
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You mean "IN ICELAND"? The entire country is made of volcanoes.
There hadn't been a single eruption in that entire peninsula in 851 years. The most recent eruption "in the general area of Grindavík" was 2500 years ago. How long has it been since, say, a major hurricane hit a major Gulf- or Atlantic coast city? Less than 2500 years, you think?
And this isn't the sort of place where there's some specific place (like "Mount Saint Helens" or