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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pezz who wrote (771)	4/7/1999 1:58:00 PM
From: richard badauskas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

What do you mean "mined" with lime. Acid mine water is at the other end of the PH spectrum. The U.S. DOE has calculated there are currently 300,000 abandoned hard rock mines in the US that have caused serious acid mine drainage pollution. This acidic run-off has leached metals into 12,000 miles of streams and rivers, 180,000 lakes and reservoirs are contaminated. DOE estimates over 2.4 billion litres of contaminated surface waters need remediation. Dumping lime into these waters does not solve the problem. I work with a small Aussie technology company called Geo2 Ltd. aircommunications.net We were invited by the US DOE to test one of our technologies at Berkeley Lake in Butte Montana, which is a major superfund site. We have a technology called Green Precipitate Process that is a portable unit and was set-up at the shores of Berkeley in 1996. It pumped water from the lake into the unit that consists of a half mile long circular pipe where the water was pressure controlled and very precise reagent dosing applied. The end product was a filtrate "green" cake that contained all the metals (which is sent to a refinery for simple extraction) and farm quality water that could be further filtered or on-sold. Berkeley Lake could be profitably mined using this very economic technology. This technology can also be incorporated into a closed loop system so mines no longer need settlement tanks or dams. This type of technology stands current practice on its head, it could also turn major polluted sites into self-funded projects at no cost to the taxpayer. Mining companies are reluctant to use new technologies while metals prices are very low and there is no legislation forcing change. I can also imagine that major financial interests in the US do not want to see places like Berkeley Lake treated in such a low cost and simple way.