The Romanian Accident is an example of the laxness of communist and eastern European environmental standards of safety and does not impugn the North American mine standards or practices with regard to cyanide. In Romania, they had 100,000 tons of high concentration liquor, almost 7.8 grams per litre cyanide. God knows what they were doing with it. (171 lbs per ton!) Mine leach liquors averages in plant are perhaps 1/80th of that! That is 17 million pounds of cyanide. No wonder it poisoned the river. Even so the average river, 200 feet wide, and 30 feet deep, 100 miles long, contains 187 million tons of water. That would dilute the concentration 1872 times. That is 41 mg per ton. Standards for drinking water are 0.2 mg per ton.
So we can see that that the issue here was an unsafe level held back by and unsafe reservoir of poisonous liquor. It's levels, and practices that were commonly known to be dangerous in produce at any cost communist puppet states that are at issue. As at Bhopal India or Chernobyl, if the handling or practices degrade to the negligent or dangerous level, milk becomes a hazardous product.
Every day in industry are handled the worst poisons known to man. They are a necessary part of every industrial process. Phosgene gas, nickel carbonyl, cyanate gas, uranium hexafluoride. We make nickel, uranium fuel, insectide, and 1001 products of mankind. Many plastics are made from liquids and gases that would kill you in a microsecond. the effluent in Brownsville Texas from making circuit boards has been under review from the government for a decade. It's deadly. Go see Erin Brockovitch. Gold mines are not the Kings of Pollution. Day in day out we do these things safely. Hell farmers put chemicals on your rice krispies wearing rubber monkey suits that if one tear occurs in the suite while applying it, they are told that their life expectancy is limited.
You panicking because you just found out they use hazardous chemicals in industry? Where you been boy?
The worst polluters on the planet are farmers. Number two are roads and highways. A close number three are cities and their power plants. Devastation on an unprecedented level. Shut down every mine in existence today and their pollution batement would not even be noticed on a global scale.
The trouble with Sierra club bogeyman science about pollution is that it is knee jerk reactionary about the sources of pollution.
The Sierra devotee, multiplied by 1,000,000 gets his energy from a high sulphur coal plant and burns light night and day reading glossy print made from toxic ink made on sulphuric acid river-destroying paper, about some gold miner in Hellengone Alaska that has a dirty no-good sluice box. We can see in a picture of this cretinous miner, a fish jumping near by, and on the pan are some more. Behind him the last bald eagle flies, and a bear fishes salmon. Clearly, nature is receding at an alarming rate.
"Damn" says the Sierra D. Duck mind police. "We gonna get that evil river destroyer." He hops in his SUV and burns 5 gallons tearing down 50 miles of salted tarmac to the club meeting. Tossing out bottles and candy wrapper in a red fury he belches carbon dioxide all the way to the woods hideaway of his fellow nature lovers. There his at Redwood beam building he harangues the members while the gas furnace blazes and everybody read the 100 page Wall Street Journal, made from 140 year old CDN spruce. He pauses after a beer, and flushes the toilet into the sea nearby. "Mining is ruining the nation he cries!"
Multiply him by 1,000,000 complainers and his daily energy use, paper use, effluent and all the cyanided metals he uses, and the miner will never catch up. 4500 miles away the miner sighs. He wanted to pollute. His daddy told him. " Lay waste to the country. Devastate. Let no one living thing survive. We are miners son."
He hangs his head. "But dad, I can't catch up to the Sierra club, they are doing so much better a job at killing the planet! Look at the money they got. Why they pollute more than we do without half trying!"
"I know son, I know. We lost the race. But hey!, you can throw this beer can in the river, And can the Sierra guy crap on a stump?"
"Why no!" says the son, brightly. "We will catch him yet." But in his heart he knows he has lost. He staggers a bit. He sits and sobs. Scornfully the eagle sneers at him. "I can still lay eggs. I can fly free. You can't kill me with that sluice box, boy" he seems to say. The miner shakes his fist vainly at the proud bird. It is the passing of an era.
Nature has won. It has passed the crown of destroyer to the ignorant. Those who merely strove mightily to claim bragging rights of devastation have had to concede defeat.
EC<:-} |
