Pretty Polluted

June 10, 2004 11:37 AM

Visualizing power plant impact.A nice use of flash to show the impact of electricity generation around the USA. You can zoom in on individual states and then individual power plants. Or you can view the national impact of several regulatory regimes.
posted by alms (6 comments total)

It seems to miss a few of the nuclear plants illustrated here.

I wish those stupid boomers would wake up and stop marginalizing nuclear power.
posted by trharlan at 11:47 AM on June 10, 2004

poor poor West Virginia . . .

trharlan, interesting. What do we do with the waste?
posted by hackly_fracture at 12:16 PM on June 10, 2004

The scale of the power production equipment to me has always been defined by those stats showing pollution in millions of tons of carbon dioxide.

That really does seem like a very large volume of any gas, doesn't it?
posted by dglynn at 12:42 PM on June 10, 2004

Funny it said Ca. has is one of the cleanest states but feels the effects from other states. Looking at the map, how do those winds cross over the Great Divide, The Rocky Mountains? My state, Texas is the highest yet the colors on the map show a different tale other than it has the largest area mapped.

Not sure what to figure out from this map. The northern states have the worst colors. The majority of the problem exits where the civil war took place.
posted by thomcatspike at 12:47 PM on June 10, 2004

What do we do with the waste?

Snotty answer: if we treat it as we do similarly harmful waste that's not tainted with neutrons, we leave it in big piles wherever.

Really: you reprocess most of it. What's left -- the really nasty stuff -- you put someplace people aren't likely to go accidentally, or encase and drop into subduction trenches to get sucked into the mantle if you're confident you won't want the stuff sometime in the next few hundred years. As long as it's net better than coal, switching is smart.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:52 PM on June 10, 2004

where's the leadership on conservation? for christ's sake...
posted by specialk420 at 8:32 PM on June 10, 2004