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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (10603)	5/19/2010 3:20:04 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24225

"No possibility of a spill with oil sands" LMAO. The Paris based, French monthly journal,"Le Monde Diplomatique", in it's April edition took a long, hard, and deep, look into the immense toxic cesspool which are the Alberta tar-sands today. According to the in-depth report ( entitled in French: "Sous les sables bitumineux de l'Alberta") , around the Athabasca lake region, the cancer rate is becoming "alarming"; or 30% above the Albertain provincial average. The culprit is suspected to be the 230 Km2 toxic reservoirs where the effluence from the oil industry's operations is collected. The massive scale extraction of the "black oil," underway for years now, seeks to suck out the remaining 170 billion barrels of beneath the Boreal forest, of which huge swaths are by now cut and destroyed to get to the oil ( as the earth is transformed into toxic sludge) underneath. Massive quantities of fresh-water are used to "steam out" the viscous petrol from the tar-like sands. The process gives off vast amount of C02 gas as well. globalresearch.ca = Required reading on this subject is Andrew Nikiforuk's new book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, recently published to wide acclaim in Canada and set for US release in March. In this context, one chapter in particular called "The Ponds" is of direct and chilling relevance. ...there is no denying that the world's biggest energy project has spawned one of the world's most fantastic concentrations of toxic waste, producing enough sludge every day (400 million gallons) to fill 720 Olympic pools.... The ponds are truly a wonder of geotechnical engineering. Made from earth stripped off the top of open-pit mines, they rise an average of 270 feet above the forest floor like strange, flat-topped pyramids. By now, the ponds hold more than four decades worth of contaminated water, sand and bitumen..... The ponds are a byproduct of bad design and industry's profligate water abuse. Of the twelve barrels of water needed to make one barrel of bitumen, approximately three barrels become mudlike tailings.... Perhaps the biggest enviromental risk is an accidental breach. Earthquakes and extreme weather events can make a rubble of even the best-engineered dykes and could cause a domino-like failure of other nearby ponds.... Engineers and ecologists agree that the tailings ponds pose a substantial risk to Canada's largest river basin.... For now leaks from the ponds remain a constant challenge....most tar sands tailings ponds seep so badly that they've created toxic wetlands near their bases. The ponds became world famous earlier this year when 500 migrating ducks landed on one of them. As Nikiforuk recounts, "Many of the migrating visitors were buffleheads, keen divers that slipped under the water and never resurfaced." It wasn't long before the Prime Minister was apologizing. But of course, nothing much has changed. The tailings ponds continue to grow at a daily pace that is mind-boggling solveclimate.com Alberta Tar Sands to Poison U.S. Great Lakes Region, Too by Stacy Feldman - Oct 17th, 2008 in bitumen canada John McCain oil sands President Barack Obama Tar Sands An environmental catastrophe is underway in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada -- home to the most energy-intensive and dirtiest industrial enterprise on Earth. And it’s about to infect the Great Lakes Basin and the US Midwest, too. That's according to an excellent new report out of the University of Toronto, How the Oil Sands Got to the Great Lakes (pdf). solveclimate.com