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REPP-CREST
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Summary of Energy's Impact on the Land
Land Use
Excerpt from the Environmental Imperative: An Update by Adam Serchuk
While power plants themselves take up relatively little space, provisioning the plants can require extensive land use. Table 6 estimates the land required by some energy technologies. Not only the quantity but the nature of energy-related land use can vary widely. For example, some forms of biomass cultivation can promote more biodiversity of birds than row crops do, although not as much as forests.1 Similarly, while a 25-MW wind farm may occupy between 475 and 1,150 hectares, depending on the arrangement of the turbines, the machines themselves only require 5-10% of that area, leaving the remainder for customary agricultural or range use.2
Wind turbines can coexist with traditional land uses such as farming and ranching.
Coal mining imposes some of the most severe energy related environmental costs on American land. Historically, mining operations harvested the timber over coal beds to furnish burgeoning railroads with ties, and the mines themselves with props. Timber cutting left remaining land cover vulnerable to forest fires and subsequent pest infestations, and facilitated flooding and erosion, thereby clogging steams.3
Since 1930, coal mining has disturbed about 2.4 million hectares of American land, the vast majority of which once held forests.4 In addition to old, abandoned mines, coal mines supplying electric power plants currently disturb about 680,000 hectares.5 The Surface Mining and Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) requires mine owners to post bonds for land rehabilitation, although land is rarely if ever restored to original conditions. Partly as a result of SMCRA's requirements, mining firms increasingly resort to "mountaintop removal," explicitly exempted from the 1977 law. This technique employs heavy equipment to lop several hundred feet off the peak of a mountain, and cache the resultant debris in hollows and valleys. In West Virginia, surface mines produced only 10% of the state's coal in the 1960s; the figure now stands at about one third, and each site can occupy 10,000 hectares.6 As a result of the Clean Air Act, which in recent years has helped drive many utilities toward lowsulfur Western coal, the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana hosts comparable mining activity on, in some cases, an even larger scale.7
In addition to conventional mining-related land disruptions, uranium mining presents special hazards. These include the release of radon gas and airborne radioactive dust from uranium mines and mills, as well as radioactive seepage from waste rock piles and contaminated groundwater pumped out of mines.8 The United States now imports about three-quarters of its uranium, mostly from Canada. The remainder comes from processing waste rock and "in situ leaching" rather than conventional mines; these techniques use ammonium carbonate or sulfuric acid to remove the uranium from mine walls. (While leaching avoids accumulation of radioactive and potentially toxic tailings, the leaching liquid represents a hazard, especially to groundwater, if not contained.) But tailings from historic mining operations, unregulated until 1980, represent the huge bulk of low level radioactive waste in the United States. The principal radioactive components of mill tailings, thorium230 and radium226, have half lives of about 75,000 and 1,600 years, respectively. Toxic metals contained in the tailings, such as molybdenum and manganese, pose a threat to groundwater as well. Nearly one third of uranium milling waste is found on Navajo lands.9
Bibliography:
1.Virginia Tolbert and Lynn Wright, "Environmental Enhancement of U. S. Biomass Crop Technologies: Research Results to Date," Biomass and Bioenergy, 1998, pp. 93-100.
2.EPRI and DOE, Renewable Energy Technology Characterizations, EPRI TR-109496
(December 1997), pp. 6-31. The land required by wind power may be less than commonly thought. Based on an authoritative wind atlas (D. L. Elliott et al., An Assessment of the Available Windy Land Area and Wind Energy Potential in the Contiguous United States, Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, PNL-7789/ UC-261 (August 1991)), another REPP study estimates that the 12 Midwestern states could meet 10% of their electricity needs with 27,700 wind turbines on 3,363 square kilometers of land, or just 0.35% of available and appropriate windy land in the region; Jamie Chapman et al., Expanding Wind Power: Can Americans Afford It? (Washington, DC: REPP, 1998), table 1.
3.Geoffrey Buckley, "The Environmental Transformation of an Appalachian Valley,
1850-1906," Geographical Review, April 1998, pp. 175-98.
4. Jeff Skousen, Paul Ziemkiewicz, and Christina Venable, "Evaluation of Tree Growth
on Surface Mined Lands in Southern West Virginia," viewed 18 February 2000 at www.wvu.edu/~ agexten/ landrec/evaltree. htm.
5. The U. S. Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining first collated voluntary reports by states and tribes of land disturbed by coal mining in 1998. OSM, 1998 Annual Report, at www.osmre.gov/anrep98.htm. According to the most recent EIA data, those reporting entities accounted for only 60% of total U. S. coal production.
Disturbed area for non-reporting states calculated roughly from their 1997 coal production as a fraction of U. S. total production. Result multiplied by 85%, the portion of U. S. coal production that supplies power plants. Data from www.eia. doe.gov/cneaf/coal/statepro/ tables, www.eia. doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/html/t3p01p1.html and www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/html/ t37p01p1. html, all viewed 22 March 2000.
6. For background, see www.osmre.gov/ mtindex.htm.
7. William Long, "Coal's Hot Competition Forges a Breed of Giants," New York Times, 21 February 2000, p. BU4; "Coal Miner's Slaughter," Sierra, November/December 1998, pp. 16-17; Peter Galuszca, "Strip Mining on Steroids," Business Week, 17 November 1997, p. 70.
8. Robert Brooks and Anita Seth, "The Uranium Burden," Energy and Security 4, viewed 8 March 2000 at www.ieer.org/ensec/no-4/umining.html. See also E. G. Luebeck,
"Biologically Based Analysis of the Data for the Colorado Uranium Miners Cohort: Age, Dose and Dose-Related Effects," Radiation Research 152, pp. 339-51, viewed 8 March at www.radres.org/toc99.htm.
9. See, for example, Peter Diehl, Uranium Mining in Europe (Amsterdam: WSIE AMSTERDAM, 1995), viewed 22 February 2000 at www.antenna.nl/wise/439-440/cont.html; Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Uranium: Its Uses and Hazards, viewed 19 November 1999 at www.ieer.org/fctsheet/uranium.html.
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