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To: lorne who wrote (69011)	5/10/2001 3:08:46 PM
From: IngotWeTrust	Respond to of 116857

Thanks, Lorne! RE: arsenic and [g]old lace...most of those arsenide/gold deposits are a pariah in the mining industry even at this date as best I understand. Thanks for the updates...I read them all, with hope. And those jerks who are saying we aren't cleaning up as we go and being responsible for reclamation just are hollering up a box canyon...Darn near every miner I know is very aware and very willing to reclaim as we go. gold_tutor

To: lorne who wrote (69011)	5/10/2001 3:39:18 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116857

"According to the federal Toxic Release Inventory released this April, mining is the nation's largest toxic polluter. " Lies damned lies and statistics. Mining, because it is a primary industry, does source the metals but does not USE them all per se! And for one thing the largest polluter of arsenic is NOT the mining industry it's the insecticide industry and farmers! 90% of all arsenide waste from mines is in the form of arsenopyrite which is a locked-up form of the metal and relatively harmless. I can handle arsenopyrite by the bucket load all day with bare hands and will not poison myself. Despite the bad record of some companies in handling their cyanide wastes in other countries, cyanide, if handled properly and in most types of mine tailings, is a non-problem. It degrades naturally in water by sunlight. It can also be handled by new techniques in carbon bed active recovery for ultra safety. Copper can also be recovered from streams of water down to PPB's by new techniques that don't cost and can do this directly on high volume non-electrolytes i.e. pure water. The hardest pollutant to handle is a slime of non toxic sand. (High Blaine index) But there are means to deal with this too. Mines have ALWAYS been responsible for their waste and environmental pollution by law since the 20's and also always responsible for the cleanup of their properties. To say they will NOT be by some relaxation of the Clinton rules is ludicrously misleading rhetoric. Mines are simply not the largest polluters of the environment, And anyway by what yardstick are they talking? Area of pollution? No! Mining's area of pollution is very small. Toxicity or concentration of pollutants? Again no! Amount of pollutants in toto? NO! It is simple physics and chemistry. The primary producer of the product cannot reasonably be the greatest polluter! It is the end user who lives longest with the product and lets the product degrade, corrode and run off, who is the greatest polluter, and over the wides area. So we have manufacturing, power generation, cities and farms as the worst culprits. Farming is the widest spread, greatest volume, most inherently dangerous, most toxic polluter in existence. Next comes cities, power and finally manufacturing. Mining is perhaps in there after transportation and all the other necessary evils of man. There is no necessity these days for mine tailings, or smelter gases to pollute even by 1/10 of a percent of their total load of substances. Modern catalytic and carbon bed techniques make it economic or payback to recover the metals down to parts per million in water and to small fractions of a percent in air. Mining pollution is caveman-bogeyman argument by non thinking politicians and vote grabbers who perhaps have other agendas. I will admit US power and some mines pollute more than they need to. I will also tell you that they don't need to at all. They could toe the line and reduce emissions to almost zero. Their refusal to is a ploy to avoid paying patent royalties on reductive techniques that we know about that have been around since the late 1950's! Arsenopyrite deposits of gold, silver and nickel are very common. They have been handled safely with no discernible harm to humans in Cobalt, Geraldton, Red Lake, Pickle Lake, Sudbury and other areas for upwards of 100 years. Where it gets sticky is in the smelting of concentrates or roasting. Here even Asarco, whose name incorporates the As element symbol of Arsenic is loathe to treat such ores by roasting. But they can be handled safely if you have the plant to do it. There are modern methods of dealing with these problems such as the Falconbridge process or the Sherritt process and others. Straight cyanidation or autoclaveing, which can be done sometimes, leaves the tailings as relatively harmless and no aerial toxics wastes are created. EC<:-}