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By Rob Perks Posted July 6, 2010 in Health and the Environment, Saving Wildlife and Wild Places, Solving Global Warming NRDC recently released a report — Reclamation FAIL — that debunked the coal industry's propaganda that mountaintop removal mining is beneficial because (1) Appalachia needs more flat land and (2) flattened mine sites are routinely converted for economic development. Such claims are nothing more than a big, flat lie. Specifically, NRDC’s analysis used aerial imagery to show that nearly 90% of mountaintop removal sites have not been converted to economic uses. Of the 500 mountaintop removal sites we examined, we excluded 90 from our survey due to active, ongoing mining activity. That left 410 supposedly reclaimed mine sites, for which we found that: * Overall, economic activity occurs on just 6% to 11% of all reclaimed mountaintop removal sites on sites we surveyed * 366 (89.3%) had no form of verifiable post-mining economic reclamation excluding forestry and pasture * 26 (6.3% of total) yield some form of verifiable post-mining economic development In terms of actual economic development on post-mined lands, one of those 26 “beneficial” projects is a federal prison on what used to be Belcher Mountain in McDowell County, West Virginia. You can actually take a look at the site using GoogleEarth by clicking here. (more) New art Image: “Appalachian Coal Disaster” available at the following URL http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=326061&l=d1ba865db2&id=10000048934… CoalWar.com added by: Willowguy