For the record, it's not cyanide doing damage in the illegal, informal, and/or unregulated bandit mining in the tropics, it's mercury, unplanned bulldozing/excavating and some really wild alteration of drainage doesn't help either
Cyanide is used in heap leach by modern canuck and aussie miners all over, quite responsibly, it's contained in-system fairly easily and well, is very bio-reactive anyway, broken down quickly by sunlight and the simplest of organisms, long before it gets to fish unless you have a huge spill ... and there was one years ago, Cambior at Omai, major screwup, failure of poorly engineered tailings dam, exception to the rule and proof that shareholders have to watch they don't get tangled up with incompetent twits
Resident expert on this stuff is EC of the resource ghetto - siliconinvestor.com
During the mining process open-cast heap-leach can make for horrendous looking fotos, yes, and if you take the picture just right you can make it look like a sizable portion of its area, sure ... modern mines have reclamation programmes though, and most of the old mines all over the planet that didn't are quite difficult to find now, if you don't know where they were
One other thing - diapers are not all that scarey, they can be faced with the right can-do attitude, after a couple of beers if necessary ... simply a matter of girding one's loins, that ye may gird that of thy progeny |
