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.
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. 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 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. But tailings from historic mining operations, unregulated until 1980, represent the huge bulk of low level radioactive waste in the United States.