| | Ok, Mining is laying waste to the planet obviously. I lied.
Good compendium of baddies of course. Well researched, even painstakingly. Greenpeace evidently doesn't have to ask for its money back.
tech.plym.ac.uk
Salmon are very sensitive to copper unless like at the Stikine, are acclimatized. Stikine salmon might no have noticed the higher levels. I have know this from Kerr studies in the mid 1970's. Of course artificial studies like this are hooey because salmon don't swim in cages and tend to avoid bad conditions. Ruination of the one river is one thing, however. 20 ppm will kill a salmon. Humans won't notice it. Tailings will not cause this. If properly impounded, clay lined and plastic sheathed, they cannot unless breached leack HM. This standard of construction has been the way since 1930. Have books on it. Exceptions were made during the war. That is the trouble 97% of the time in Canada, as at Matachewan. And people won't pump tails over mountain ranges to sequestered non draining valleys. The trouble at Brittania was the waste rock, which was not really waste and was not moated and monitored or limed. If they had piled it layer by layer with stoichometric limestone ($$) then the metals or the acid would not have reached the shore. Nowadays they would require drainage be channeled, ponded and treated for 20 years.
Tropical tailings ponds have to be better consttructed. But a few like the commies and some quebec companies in you know where did not pay attention to 100 year rains and what if. (earthquakes) In other words they had no road to repair outside breaches or moat to contain breaches. Also their cyanide in the no 1 pond was high high high. If they had a simple mills and crowe cyanide recovery unit (commies or PQ group) levels would have been perhaps 50 ppm. Add some sodium thio and later chlorine bleach to no 2 pond and problem solved. Bad enuff but bearable if it escaped slowly from a moat. In torrentials, the moat would breach too of course, but being lower and less flow, would be repairable with circumference road in a matter of hours.
Yes there are excellent examples of bad engineering, wartime shortcuts and overseas lax standards or just plain not engineering for the weather, the known siesmics or animals. Quebec Bridge is the source of iron for engineer's rings. Not the Russian cannon captured at the Crimea. Ever work for a mining company? Thundering incompetence and ass~covering reigns and rains from on high just like the government and, as always, 20-20 hindsight is eagle keen. Blame the next lower in rank. The Firing Squad is the last fall back of those who cannot train and plan.
There are perhaps 100 bad mines in Canada historically of perhaps 1200. I have seen a few eyesores with my own 2 sockets. dead people are few. Dead animals fewer. But there could be definite improvements. For pennies I could have suggested a few. A dollar a ton scared them back then. It would now too. Lime the tailings at Sherman mine? Build a tailings pond? Why? We have bribed Leo Bernier. Just pump it back in the bush. Even today the gov boys will tell you the swamp is a natural absorber. (So was the sea to a point) It really is. To a point. But after 20,000 tons per day and 20 years of acid tails from iron ore, there are limits.
Most industrial waste treatment facilities in Canada were only partly abatement. Mostly cosmetic. Pulp and paper. Bleaching of the pulp is not really that abateable. Resultant acidity kills oxygen in the rivers. SGW and CMT were long available, but..
"Pulp mills are almost always located near large bodies of water because of they require substantial quantites of water for their processes. Delignification of chemical pulps releases considerable amounts of organic material into the environment, particularly into rivers or lakes. The wastewater effluent can also be a major source of pollution, containing lignins from the trees, high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC), along with alcohols, chlorates, heavy metals, and chelating agents. Reducing the environmental impact of this effluent is accomplished by closing the loop and recycling the effluent (see black liquor) where possible, as well as employing less damaging agents in the pulping and bleaching processes"
About time.. RIP fish and forest animals of the great lakes and many other regions. 100 times the damage of the mining industry. But we have to clean up everywhere, agreed.
Even a laundry list of the most glaring egregious errors fails to show that 98% of the mines did not have these problems, standards have changed, and curing the problems is not that hard. (Hard to justify it to accountants and lawyers whose only scientific breakthrough in college was to find a way to get exam paper answers before the final.) As a U student at Kerr I actually made suggestions to the superintendant Ramsay about how to clean up Kerr's effluent so they could get permits for 20K tons per day. Sand filters and semi permeable membranes for the super fine slimes which permanently suspended in water (sub micron) and catalytic conversion for 99.97% abatement of SO2. The later was a hard design involving redesign and recirc etc. At least 10 million. the former would have cost about 3 million and would have taken 3 months with dozers etc.. It was not that Kerr was not advanced in some ways. they had developed graphite suppression systems in the mill in flotation and many other ingenious milling and engineering techniques in mining. They were progressive. They just did not have a non patent handle on these two vital areas of permitting capability. Scared the shit out of them. One dollar an effluent ton would have cost them then 1 million per year in royalties. They also thot it would not work. They knee jerked on a few less than efficacious designs they had worked on. You had to get science-jiggy with the thing and they were not total lab nerds. Of course the ore at that time would have been worth $258 M per year back then. People wanted 7 million in gold royalties. Capex was 300 million to get going. Profits would have been 40 million. Today what would be 1.314 B and 197 M profit.
/(tf – ti)<br><br>And (~D is delta, or change in, t is time, ABCD are amounts of products in moles, moles are small furry animals that inhabit lab cupboards. K is a constant that should be known or perhaps found.)<br><br>–1/a * ~D[A]/~Dt = –1/b * ~D[B]/~Dt = +1/c * ~D[C}/~Dt =+1/d *~D[D]/~Dt<br><br>If you are hot (or not, just first order)--><br><br>t^(1/2) = (ln 2)/K = 0.693/K<br><br>lbs per millisecond?<br><br>ln[X] = –kt + ln[X]sub0<br><br>1/[X] = kt + 1/[X]sub0<br><br>or k = Ae^(–Ea/RT) <br><br>Just tell the gov boys that its all second order at worst and have them plug in the criteria for you.<br><br>EC<:-}</span></td></tr></table></div></tr></td><tr><td colspan=99 class=) |
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