Energy
Coal-fired power plant – surface mining
(A) After inheriting some land, an archeologist who explore this ground and their sibling, a paleontologist who searches for the remains of ancient animal life. First, they hired a crew, attached strings to short vertical poles in order to setup a grid evenly distributed in rows and columns. The crew is assigned to uncover several feet of dirt. Another sibling is is a photographer and yet another one a drawer. Together, they documents the content of the underground in two ways: photographically and graphically to analyze later and find artifacts that interest them. A cross-section of the earth from the surface down if first drawn. There is a depiction of layers as they found them: a swamp, grass and soil, bushes, trees with roots, dirt, stones, rocks, and then show the underground layers.
(B) Drilling core samples down from the surface and cutting the walls of a river exposed a layer of coal. Data collected with a GPS (Global Positioning System) confirmed the existence of a layer of coal, from single inches to several feet deep. Heavy machines are needed in order to extract coal. To develop a surface mining plant, they had to build roads, so heavy machinery could arrive and dig out the scoops of dirt and then coal, each of the size of a house. For this they asked three second cousins to do it.
(C) Now they had to face the environmental aspects of a surface mining. Machines removed the soil, the overburden between the soil and the coal, and extracted coal, which had been then taken away. Now they were facing a big surface with no soil, trees, animals and plants to feed them, forest, field, nor pasture. They felt like being under public criticism because of the destructive effects of their group actions, which may affect the climate, fauna and flora. There were no plants and so wildlife cannot revive on their wasted land. Moreover, despite of an income coming from the surface mining, the land remains quite ugly and useless. It is projected that mountaintop removal mining will cause a projected loss of 1.4 million acres of land http://sites.google.com/site/stripmininghandbook/chapter-1-introduction
They asked their third cousin, a lawyer, to research their possible threats and risks.
(D) They wanted to make more money out of this endeavor, so they started new set of group Skype meetings. For all those reasons they developed their own group scenario for reshaping this space, which would be useful, environmentally healthy, and still generating profit. They discussed recycling the land for a factory of bricks, cement, build a prison, a landfill, production, of some goods, recycling station, or disposal area of computers, or, since many trees have already been cut, installing a furniture factory, and a paper making or a printing company made sense as well. They could build an airport, a military base, or a culture-, sport-, or entertainment endeavors, such as a giant cinema, theaters, spaces for various kinds of performances, sports arena shaped like a coliseum, or arrange for events such as the Burning Man Festival http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman. They considered constructing Olympic games (summer or winter) stadiums and facilities, or even an innovative museum of copies and fund an artist-residence center. Each of them agreed to create a list of needs and a cost estimation of their endeavor, remembering, that many of them require water and electricity supply, meeting sanitary needs of users, housing for workers and visitors, among other needs. They came up with a multilayered structure of a project of reclaiming such an area. They had to measure the level of pollution in the area first, they were told.