
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.