Television

Fictional mines, commodities and disasters whose setting began in television, grouped by setting. Each record is researched and structured like its real counterpart and sourced to canon; see the Fictional section for what that means. The full lists across every medium are Mines, Commodities and Disasters.

Mines (13)

Doctor Who

• Llanfairfach Colliery
  A pit closed as 'a dying industry' and immediately used as a hole to pour the replacement industry's waste into — with the men who worked it the first to find out what that costs.
• The Trisilicate Mines of Peladon
  A pit dispute in which the owner's answer to a strike is to shoot a hostage an hour, written for broadcast between the British miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974.

DuckTales

• Scrooge McDuck's Klondike Mine
  The Yukon claim where Scrooge McDuck made his first real fortune, the Goose Egg Nugget — not, as this record's discovery stub had it, where he earned his famous first dime, which he'd already had for two decades by then.

Fullmetal Alchemist

• Youswell Coal Mine
  A mine whose worst hazard wasn't underground at all, but the man who owned the deed to it.

Poldark

• Wheal Grace
  Named for Ross Poldark's mother and reopened as a last, desperate gamble that cost his cousin Francis his life before it finally saved the family from ruin.
• Wheal Leisure
  Ross Poldark bet what remained of his inheritance on finding copper beneath a mine his own father had already worked out and abandoned.

Star Trek

• Gallitep
  A mine whose only surviving physical trace, decades on, was a disease with no other cause — and the moral weight that came with being able to identify who'd once been there.
• Janus VI
  A mining disaster that turned out to have no villain at all — just two species who'd never thought to ask what the other one was doing underground.
• Pentarus V
  The mine that gives the episode its reason for existing is never once shown on screen — the whole hour instead follows Picard and Wesley crash-landed on an unrelated desert moon
• Rura Penthe
  A prison that doesn't need walls, because the planet itself is the cage.
• The Dilithium Mines of Remus
  A mine that exists in its story purely as a place people are sent: never shown working, never measured, and used by both sides of a civil war as the thing they will do to each other when they win.
• Tyrus VIIA
  A mining engineer's maintenance robots turn out to be alive, and Picard shuts down a whole mining project rather than order one to its destruction

The Expanse

• First Landing
  A mining claim fought over by its own founders and a corporation that had never set foot there, until an ancient alien defence system made the argument moot for both.

Commodities (2)

Star Trek

• Dilithium
  Whether it's a scarce resource worth fighting over or something you can simply synthesize has changed as the franchise itself has aged
• Latinum
  It is currency specifically because a replicator cannot make it — the one thing in a post-scarcity economy that still has to be dug up

Disasters (1)

Star Trek

• The Gallitep Mining Accident (Before 2357 (exact date not given))
  A disaster with no depicted body count of its own, whose real legacy was turning a medical diagnosis into a kind of criminal record — and, in the end, a death sentence for an innocent man anyway.