Many countries have almost no wilderness left; everything is either urban or agriculture or mountains with no convenient place for an earthquake.

Seismic disturbances are generally a concern for dense urban areas. It seems unlikely that agricultural areas would care that much.

Is there any conceivable burden urbanites don't imagine the people and land outside urban areas can tolerate?

We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.

> Is there any conceivable burden urbanites don't imagine the people and land outside urban areas can tolerate?

The burden of wealth.

Huh? Read my comment. I did not suggest there are no building in non-urban areas. Just fewer, and thus it would be less expensive to make them earthquake proof.

Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time. Earthquakes stronger than whatever a bit of geothermal energy production would produce.

Because Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time, japan has quake-safety standards. They were written in blood, and don’t exist in places which don’t routinely have earthquakes, because quake safety is constraining and expensive.

Retrofitting an entire country for quake safety because you’ve decided to create artificial earthquakes is inane.

Who suggested an entire country? We are talking about small-ish areas.

You have literally no idea how wide the geological destabilisation would reach.

Given the example quoted, not all that far. One article talked about Strasbourg having some minor wobbles, not the entire region. They would have surely seized on the sensationalism of reporting a wider impact.

Of course, there's no clear border. Wobbles will be biggest at the epicentre and get smaller further out.

In any case, you just do the actuarial math, and figure out how much it would cost to wobble-prove buildings in the area in question, and stick that into your cost benefit analysis. It's not like other forms of energy generation are completely without downsides either.

> We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.

What percentage of rural areas are situated in close proximity to large dams and bridges?

Your statement is unclear, are you saying it doesn’t matter if dams and bridges get destroyed, or that it doesn’t matter if rural habitations get destroyed as long as they’re not destroyed near infrastructure?

It’s perfectly clear if you read it without trying to be deliberately obtuse.

In Germany you will be hard-pressed to find a place more than 10km/6mi from the nearest village with more than 500 inhabitants. Those people don't like earthquakes or cracked buildings either. Same thing in England.

Pay to earthquake proof their building and give them a bit of extra money on top. It's not that hard. Have a sort of auction to see who in the vicinity it willing to accept the geothermal plant for the cheapest.

Keep in mind that Germany has plenty of open pit lignite mines. Like eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Schleenhain_coal_mine

The disruption from geothermal is minuscule by comparison.

Agriculture relies on stable water supply…

"It seems unlikely that agricultural areas would care that much."

Why would you think that? Because the peasants are all too stupid to notice an earthquake that damage their houses?

Sure, fewer people would be affected, than in a dense city, but the problem solution of: out of sight, out of mind, is fascinating.

You know that you can earthquake proof buildings?

Offer to do that plus a bit of extra money on top, and you'll find plenty of rural takers. Pick the cheapest bidder.

There surely are various solutions and it is also a solution to shift side effects to areas where fewer people are affected (and more easily compensated) - but the tone of that statement above was "who cares for rural areas" at least I read it like this, because why else would rural people not care about it?

Which statement are you referring to?

I do agree with the commenter who said that we don't need to earthquake proof agricultural land itself. Especially not against minor wobbles. Fields just lie there.

(Just to avoid confusion: any buildings close to agricultural land need to be considered, of course. I am talking purely about the fields.)

> Why would you think that? Because the peasants are all too stupid to notice an earthquake that damage their houses?

Yes, exactly. I also don’t expect dense residential buildings prone to earthquakes to be prevalent in low density sparsely populated agricultural areas.

There is nothing “fascinating” except that stating facts about rural areas immediately brings out the worst kinds of trolls out of the woodwork.

It seems like this is a real problem: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-sol...

That said, it also seems like this proposed technique is very different and probably wouldn't have the same issues.

> Assuming this is a real problem, wouldn't you just put your geothermal power plant well outside of any city?

The US’ fracking experiments show ”well outside of any city” is nowhere near enough.

Why? How much damage has been done?

In every state where fracking got authorised, earthquakes above 3.0 have increased by an order of magnitude (or even appeared where they were considered essentially inexistent).

Hundreds if not thousands of buildings have been damaged across OK and TX because they’d been built with no quake resistance as they’d been built in zones considered inactive, insurers have jacked up their rates and the USGS had to revise their risk maps.

The risk to populations is also non-negligible, because aside from a lack of quake-proof constructions the populations are not trained for or aware of quake safety for the same reason that the areas are historically stable.

I don’t think that’s happened yet in the US (as no fracking quake has exceeded 5.0 yet), but in 2019 fracking started killing people in china: the Sichuan basin, historically a geologically very stable region, got hit with 4 quakes between 4.9 and 6.0, at least 15 died and hundreds were injured.

Thanks!

Seems all pretty manageable on the humongous scale of 'this could be our main source of energy'.

Eg burning coal or oil kills a lot more people directly and indirectly.

> Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive.

So, expending twice on a bad idea ? Seriously, what do you think will happen ?

And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ? Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?

> So, expending twice on a bad idea ? Seriously, what do you think will happen ?

What do you mean? A few really minor earthquakes are all that was reported by the comment I was replying to. So I'd assume more really minor earthquakes.

> And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ?

The usual way of paying an insurance company?

> Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?

Depends on the jurisdiction. But sure, you can make the plant operator responsible for that and responsible for having gigantic insurance coverage.

(Just look at whatever liability people who operate dams have today. A breakage of a major dam would also devastate entire regions. So whatever arrangements are good enough for that use case are probably good enough here.)

I don't think the "entire region"s involved would be big enough to make insurance difficult to implement.

The goal of the plant was to provide heat for Strasbourg, so it has to be near the city.

Yes. Originally I typed a longer version of my comment that had a section on heat vs electricity.

Basically, the idea I proposed would only work for generating electricity, not for using the heat directly.