Visualizing the Impact of Coal with Google Earth
March 28th, 2010
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For a while I’ve been working on putting together a map of sites associated with coal, including coal ash and slurry spills, coal ash ponds, coal mine disasters, coal burning power plants and other areas where the impact of coal can be seen. Initially, I had planned on doing the world, but it’s just too much to take in one bite, so I decided to limit myself to the United States. If you happen to be from another country, it’s still worth a look. You can consider the United States a representative model of what coal’s impacts are on a country – any other country that uses coal heavily will face similar problems.
To see these sites you’ll need Google Earth, which is free and is a great program that you should have anyway. Just download and open this file: Costofcoal.kmz
This is still a working copy, so it may have a few typographical errors and needs to have more complete details added for each location and incident as well as citations. I’m posting it in order to get some feedback and any suggestions for additions. If anyone knows where I can find a comprehensive list of coal dust explosions and fatalities, that would be great, as it is one thing I’ve had a great deal of trouble finding. Of course, the map is, thus far, incomplete.
I suggest that you zoom into several of the ash ponds, major coal power plants and the surroundings. Just looking at the overview from a distance shows how many locations there are, but a closer look is required to get a better impression of the sheer scale of these facilities. It’s almost mind-boggling to realize how large many coal ash ponds, power plants, mines and other such areas are. Also, I recommend checking out some of the coal fires in Colorado, as a few actually have obvious visible footprints at ground level, such as smoke spewing from cracks in the ground. Most coal fires are not as obvious.
You may also find it helpful to turn off some of the categories (by unchecking the folder) in order to view one type of location or another and reduce screen clutter.
Any suggestions for additions or sources that provide lists of coal-related locations such as disasters or spills would be appreciated. I do plan on adding locations that show the result of “Mountain Top Removal” mining soon, and if there are any good geographic sources for that, I’d very much appreciate hearing about them!
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Announcements, Enviornment, Good Science, History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 28th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
39 04′ 16.04 N
87″ 30′ 25.01 W
Merom power plant and turtle creek resivor built to support it. this is one of the nastiest soot belching coal fired plants I have ever seen, there are times when it leaves a soot/ smoke streak as far as the hirizon can be seen.
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March 28th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
also on Merom, I believe there have been others as well
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1933&dat=19921006&id=x9wgAAAAIBAJ&sjid=VWsFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2782,3575757
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March 28th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Thanks, I’ll be sure to add it.
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March 28th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Wow. It’s a good start, but damn, providing stats for all those sites is going to be a LOT of work. It’s amazing though. Yeah, zooming in the ash dumps and ponds are enormous and so many of them. Such a huge cost when you think about it. You know, after all, they’re always going to be there. Maybe capped and covered, but that toxic ash is going to still be laying there. Also, the mountains destroyed by mountain top removal. Thousands and thousands of years of glacier action and erosion to shape them.
It’s amazing how dirty coal is. So much dirty waste coal and tailings and ash.
Keep up the good work.
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March 29th, 2010 at 12:53 am
Very cool, and a useful demonstration
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March 29th, 2010 at 12:58 am
There have been so many mountain tops removed I don’t know if you can include them all without it just taking up all of West Virginia and Kentucky.
Everyone knows coal is dirty, but possibly not the enormous impact. The thing that’s even scarier is that the impact in the US is fairly small compared to India and China where it’s mined with basically zero restrictions and they routinely lose hundreds a year to accidents.
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March 29th, 2010 at 6:01 am
Steve, if you have the opportunity, please add Goggle Earth MIME types to the server. You can find them here:
http://code.google.com/intl/sv/apis/kml/documentation/kml_tut.html#kml_server
Your server just sends them as a generic binary now and that makes my IE8 think they are zipped files.
Good effort by the way.
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March 29th, 2010 at 7:47 am
Here are some coal disasters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disasters_by_death_toll
Search for coal. Wikipedia needs a page for coal like this one for nuclear:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
Also don’t forget that the government has estimated that burning coal for electricity kills about 30,000 people in the US a year. Much more important but has less visual impact than pictures of the impact of coal.
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March 29th, 2010 at 9:47 am
You can access details on existing coal fired plants by downloading http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/capacity/existingunits2008.xls and clicking on the coal tab.
Also go to http://www.bing.com/maps/ enter the lat-long data and then select Aerial and Birds Eye. If a Birds Eye view is available, then you can zoom in and see people on the ground.
When I brought up the Stanton Energy Center, which is the closest coal power plant to me, I used the ruler tool to measure the distance to the closest subdivision and came up with less than 1.5 miles. This gives me some reservations about converting existing coal plants to nuclear because of NRC restrictions about the Exclusion Area around a nuclear power plant. http://www.nrc.gov/security/domestic/phys-protect/areas.html
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April 1st, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Excellent! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste Might be useful for you to link to in the description, if it lets you do that, given your fan base.
Thank you for doing this!
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April 1st, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Anon said:
Hey, Doc
One of the comments on the article might make for an interesting blog post:
“The article doesn’t address a REAL question that I’ve asked some high-level, knowledgeable nuclear proponents and opponents — What is the radiation release in fly ash compared with the radiation in nuclear waste, expressed on a kilowatt to kilowatt basis? Now THAT would be something interesting to find out”
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April 1st, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Anon said:
That is a good point, although I’ve never really considered the radiation or the uranium found in coal ash and exhaust to be the real reason for concern regarding health effects. Yes, coal as a fuel does expose humans and the enviornment to ionizing radiation as well as thorium and uranium, both of which are chemically toxic at high enough levels. However, there are signifficantly bigger dangers (like orders of magnitude larger). It releases much higher levels of even more toxic substances: mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium.
I think mercury is probably the single biggest problem with coal burning. However, it depends a bit on where the coal comes from.
I was surprised to read that there have been cases of berylliosis (caused by chronic exposure to high levels of beryllium) in West Virginia which were attributed to local contamination from “Coal washing” facilities. That’s pretty amazing to me, it’s also revolting that they get away with it, but it’s amazing that the concentrations could be that high!
I suppose the radiation angle might be worth going after because of the whole radiation scaremongering issue, but really, it’s not the big concern when it comes to coal.
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April 5th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Fly ash is known to cause DNA damage: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19604058
The reason that “mechanisms of the bioreactivity are still unclear and the relative contributions of the minerals and leachable metals to that toxicity are not well known” is in large part because there’s still no quantitative study of the precise genotoxicity and carcinogenicity of uranyl contamination in people.
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April 5th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
James Salsman said:
That is an unjustified assertion. You are presuming the causal connection you seek to prove by reference to this study.
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April 8th, 2010 at 11:35 am
http://explorer.altopix.com/map/ne686e/Yucca_Mountain.htm
http://www.bonestamp.com/sgt/hanford1.htm
How about the impact of nuclear?? Yucca Mountain, a beautiful desert ecosystem, was disrupted for nothing. Turns out it isn’t even a safe storage site we now find out.
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April 8th, 2010 at 11:41 am
What about the negative effects of nuclear?? Yucca Mountain was a beautiful desert ecosystem which has been disturbed to build a storage site, that now we find out is not even safe for long term storage.
http://explorer.altopix.com/map/ne686e/Yucca_Mountain.htm
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April 10th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Bruce said:
So the fact that a bunch of ignorant/lying scaremongers convinced politicians to build something completely unnecessary is somehow an inherent flaw in nuclear power.
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April 11th, 2010 at 12:28 am
Bruce said:
Bruce said:
It’s perfectly safe, do we need to go through that one again? Not like it has not been gone over time and time again.
As far as it being a pristine ecosystem… er… that’s a joke, right? I mean, you’re being sarcastic, I assume, right?
You do realize that Yucca Mountain is on the grounds of the Nevada Test site. Not really a beautiful desert ecosystem.
Those craters and the other disruption of the natural environment are the result of nuclear weapons testing, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with nuclear energy. Of course, I fully expect you to equate the two, so I will also point out that the area has also been used extensively, both before nuclear testing and since as a life fire test range for conventional weapons and large scale destructive testing.
The Nevada test site was selected primarily because it was a huge track of land that had no other use or value. They can’t even give away land like that. I suppose everything these days is considered a “complex eco-system” but as far as ecosystems go… we’re not talking about the Great Barrier Reef or the Amazon here.
It’s extremely dry and very arid. There is not a whole lot of life there (again, relatively speaking compared to other eco systems) There are some desert lizards, but not many mammals and only a small number of snakes. The plant life is basically seasonal grasses and scattered Joshuah Trees (which aren’t actually trees)
Of all the things that have been done to that area, storing nuclear waste deep underground would be the LEAST disruptive
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