The giant solar thermal plants have the same effect...to sterilize the planet in the name of green energy. I would prefer to promote the development of solar rooftops, using solar and refrigeration technology as a hybrid, on existing rooftops. Hybrids offer the best of several energy options, and the smallest footprint; can be scaled to fit in any environment.

The giant solar thermal plants have the same effect...to sterilize the planet in the name of green energy. I would prefer to promote the development of solar rooftops, using solar and refrigeration technology as a hybrid, on existing rooftops. Hybrids offer the best of several energy options, and the smallest footprint; can be scaled to fit in any environment.

Wow..It's like a tumor on the planet...Shameful...
Once pristine land now a waste land and a poison...Shame Alberta...

Big surprise, Bush wants to do this in the US too.

http://www.savebiogems.org/yellowstone/

Bruce Power just applied to build 4 nuclear power plants for a total of 4,000 megawatts. Not only will Alberta be the dirtiest place on the planet it will be radioactive.

Thank you America, for driving the price of oil so high with your obnoxious lifestyle and warrior culture such that oilsand extraction is economically viable.

Stop buying your stupid Mac Airs, Hummers, and 787s and bring oil down to under $40/bbl again and the oilsands will shut down.

I'm sure that many environmentalists agree that nuclear power is much cleaner than the current coal power plants used to supply Alberta with electricity.

Any citation for lumping large solar thermal plants together with this mining operation? While I can appreciate the need to protect desert biospheres, there has been very little encroachment on them and solar thermal plants have a far more benign footprint than mining operations.

Working in the sustainable building industry both building green buildings and helping large semiconductor fabs (the type of facility that currently produces photovoltaic cells), your preference for solar rooftops and absorption or adsorption based cooling over thermal solar electrical generation (never mind comparing solar thermal directly to the tar sand mining?!?!?) is misguided and a disservice to the effort to attain a sustainable human footprint on the planet.

You guys are aware that power has to come from somewhere, right? Until those new printable solar panels become more mature, ubiquitous solar isn't an option. We're stuck with centralized power generation, be it fossil fuelled or nuclear. Nothing's free.

OK, before the project was going on this was not beautiful land. ITS THE TAR SANDS, freaking unsable. theyre actually putting alot of time and effort into minimizing the footprint of the plant. also, our government in continually updating the restrictns and policies that the plant has to abide but. that pic looks beautiful.

damn hippies

Coal power releases more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power. Nuclear plants are a clean alternative.

I love how everyone calls this a once pristine piece of land.

The tar sands were very polluted, which is why they are called "tar sands". In fact, the tar sand operation is actually a giant clean up operation, removing the sludge from the sand.

- Resident of Alberta

That's where I grew up, just south on the highway in Fort McMurray. I had 18 great years in Fort Mac. Too bad it took me that long to realize what atrocities were happening just north of me. I worry for my health these days because of it. What a waste of such a beautiful place.

Alberta will NOT be radioactive unless there is an accident, which the odds of a meltdown actually happening are very very small and the affected area not at large as you think. Also, since you seem to immediately discredit nuclear power as a radioactive hazard, what do you suppose is contained in the smoke from coal powered plants that generate the majority of your energy? Where do they store it's waste products? In your water, land, air and lungs. Then again, since it's only slightly radioactive (natural radioactivity) and distributed over such a large area, nobody has a problem with it(or considers the risk). In some cases such as nuclear, in my opinion, risk seems to be a matter of perception.

shopped.

Wow! It's a lot smaller than I had expected. Does such a small area truly produce so much oil?

It's dismal. And as vinbeazel said (twice), even in the name of green energy, we are making mistakes.

But I wanted to let you all know that there is hope. We are on the cusp of a new era. The rate at which we are discovering and creating technological discoveries and advancements is increasing. It may be in my lifetime that we place the planet on a road to recover.

Spread the word, and watch how you live your life. Make sacrifices, and remember to love everyone.

It may look small in that photo, but development has only started. The area of oilsands is acutally bigger than Florida. Can you imagine an open pit mine the size of Florida? Fortunately, they are trying to reclaim the land as they go along.

Also, the area is not currently a wasteland of sludge, it is boreal forest. The sludge is under the top layer of forest, duh. It's like coal mining, except there is oilsand instead of coal in the seams.

It takes the energy equivalent of 1bbl of oil to extract 2bbl of oilsands oil, and a lot of water.

This is truly a dismal situation.

"....this was not beautiful land."

I've been to Fort McMurray and I thought that the forests were quite beautiful before the strip mining began. It is not beautiful now.

Besides the obvious scarring of the land there is the toxic waste leaching into the water and increasing cancer rates in native communities.

And the huge CO2 emission required just to extract oil from the tar sands.

The tar sands are a huge embarrassment for those of us from Alberta with a conscience and we need to start scaling them back.

thank you, thank you for posting this picture. It's time people saw the disgusting devastation the Tar Sands development is having on our Boreal forest. While it is true, bitumen has been leaking into rivers up there, naturally, from the tar deposits, strip-mining the area is NOT in any way a massive effort to clean things up.

The unfortunate thing about the picture posted is that we have no sense of scale, or whether this phenomenon of destruction continues on outside the boundaries of the photo. For instance, you cannot see the world's largest pile of elemental sulfur in this photo - because it's too small. And the precariously-perched tailings ponds on the banks of the Athabasca River look tiny, despite their enormous proportions.

This area, and the surrounding also destroyed areas have been disrupted to the point that we have endangered the future of Woodland Caribou in our province, and we run the risk - daily - of dumping millions of galons of toxic sludge-water into the Athabasca River, then MacKenzie River and then the Arctic Ocean. Not to mention, of course, that the open-pit mines have to run propane cannons all the time, creating loud booming noises not unlike a war-scene, to prevent birds from landing in the oil-slicked muck that collects in the bitumen sands and thus dying.

What has allowed this to continue, in addition to the very poorly managed oil revenues, is that the north is sparsely populated. If the tar sands had been discovered west of Calgary, this rapid development would not have taken place. We need more people to see this picture. Because, while it is not just an environmental issue, where healthcare fears and employment and housing crunches get talked about, the scale of environmental destruction does not.

Horrible to live by. Stinks at night and in the early morning and I lived in La Loche, to the west of the Tar Sands.
Unfortunately in Northwestern Saskatatchewan Oilsands Quest is patiently waiting for an opportunity to develop the tar sands.
At Cree Lake, the English River First Nation signed an agreement to develop the minerals on their traditional territories.
In Fond Du Lac, northern Saskatchewan, Uranium and rare earth minerals are considered to be exploited.
What a shame! What ever happened to stewardship and traditional rights and territories; about saving the land for future generations! I am First Nations and I am disgusted by almost every project that I have visited - How can you say that you are going to put the land back the way it was when you suck and extract the life out of it?
How can you say that you practice a traditional lifestyle when you allow the land, that has sustained your people for centuries, to be raped and pillaged just for jobs?
These projects are not sustainable, nor have they shown that they are the best thing for the environment. I am sick and disgusted with how government, people, and society negates the earth that sustains us.
Ekosi, Merci Cho

Horrifying
does anyone have a scale for the image though, its obviously BIG but how big is the question

scale: the blue tailings pond in the middle of the upper third of the image is about 3 miles long, or 5km, north to south.

You could try visiting http://www1.travelalberta.com/external/ext_MapsWindow.cfm
there or the regular www.travelalberta.com website, it usually opens a Google Maps pop-up.

From there, using the Hybrid map (satellite and map together), you can zoom in just north of Ft. McMurray and see for yourself. (north-eastern Alberta), and I would suggest looking further north, past Ft. MacKay for yet another collection of open pit mines and tailings ponds.

This is only going to get larger given our current political regime, AND it's already visible from the moon.

Wow.

like magic.

query for "Google Earth & Alberta TarSands" &

tahDAH!

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