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Europe Mining

France’s Areva rebrands to Orano in dire uranium market – by Geert De Clercq (Reuters U.S. – January 23, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

PARIS (Reuters) – French uranium mining and nuclear fuel group Areva rebranded itself as Orano on Tuesday, closing the book on a years-long restructuring but still facing an uncertain future, with uranium prices at decade lows and the nuclear industry in the doldrums.

Chief Executive Philippe Knoche said a new name and logo were necessary to start another chapter in the history of the state-owned company, which was split in two and recapitalized in 2017 after years of losses wiped out its equity.

“We had to change our name – we are a new company with a different perimeter, focused on the fuel cycle,” Knoche said at a presentation of the new brand.

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Tracking Europe’s waste: ‘There’s gold in them landfills’ – by Alister Doyle (Reuters U.S. – January 17, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

OSLO (Reuters) – Some of Europe’s richest deposits of valuable materials are in the trash, ranging from gold in smartphones to cobalt in electric car batteries, according to a survey of urban mining published on Wednesday.

Scrap vehicles, batteries, computers, fridges and other electronic and electrical waste total about 18 million tonnes a year and contain materials worth billions of dollars, the report said, urging more recycling.

A smartphone, for instance, has a concentration of gold 25 to 30 times that of the richest primary gold ores, according to the study, “Prospecting Secondary Raw Materials in the Urban Mine and Mining Waste” (ProSUM). A database (urbanmineplatform.eu/) tracks and predicts flows of materials in 30 European nations, from sales to the dump.

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Sudbury mayor to check out Finnish ferrochrome smelter – by Staff (Northern Ontario Business – January 11, 2018)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

City’s bid for Ring of Fire processing plant prompts trip to Outokumpu

Since Greater Sudbury is one of the four cities in the hunt for a ferrochrome smelter, Mayor Brian Bigger is heading overseas to Finland on a fact-finding trip to see how one operates for himself.

A Jan. 10 Greater Sudbury news release called the visit to the Outokumpu mine and mill complex “an opportunity to learn from what is considered the best ferrochrome production facility in the world.” The group leaves Jan. 13 and returns on Jan. 18. The Sudbury delegation will also meet with municipal, public health and economic development officials.

Joining Bigger on the trip to Tornio, Finland is Wahnapitae First Nations Chief Ted Roque, city councillor and Sudbury and District Health Unit Board chair René Lapierre, Greater Sudbury Development Corporation executive board member Paul Kusnierczyk, Greater Sudbury Director of Economic Development Ian Wood, and the mayor’s chief of staff Melissa Zanette.

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Liberty House makes binding offer for Rio Tinto’s French aluminum smelter – by Maytaal Angel (Reuters U.S. – January 10, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Reuters) – Liberty House, the industrial arm of British steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, said on Wednesday it had made a binding offer for miner Rio Tinto’s (RIO.AX) (RIO.L) aluminum smelter in Dunkirk, France, the largest in Europe.

The group said it had chosen to invest in France in part because of a pro-business environment created by French President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

Rio Tinto said in a statement that the offer was worth $500 million ”subject to final adjustments’ and that it expects to complete the sale by the second quarter.

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It’s more important than ever to remember the miners who made us (Wales Online – January 2018)

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/

A new programme marks the 10th anniversary of the closure of Tower Colliery – the last deep mine in Wales

In the decades after King Coal lost his crown there was the sense that mining was a cliché the Welsh image-builders could do without. The tourist ideal of Cool Cymru was all chi-chi waterfront developments in Cardiff Bay and extreme sports on Snowdon.

Coal was on a par with sheep jokes and warbling male voice choirs for those whose obsession with a shiny new future erased the importance of our fascinating industrial heritage.

How they cringed when the National Lottery show was set against the pit-head wheels of Rhondda Heritage Park! How they fretted over the damaging PR of the Pot Noodle miners adverts!

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Illegal prospectors’ amber ‘Klondikes’ create moonscapes in Ukraine amid China demand (Japan Times – December 25, 2017)

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/

AFP-JIJI – KRYVYTSYA, UKRAINE – Volodymyr Korkosh steps on the accelerator and his jeep lurches forward, jumping through deep water-filled ditches. “We often come too late by just two to three minutes,” the police officer shouts in disappointment.

His unit carries out daily raids on the outskirts of the village of Kryvytsya and nearby settlements in northwestern Ukraine’s Rivne region, aimed at catching locals red-handed mining amber illegally.

Once a scenic forest area, the site has been turned into a moonscape with wet marshy sand on the surface and man-made, funnel-like pits scattered for hundreds of meters around, evidence of work by hundreds of illicit prospectors.

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Stalin’s legacy lives on in city that slaves built – archive, 1994 – by James Meek (The Guardian – December 29, 2017)

https://www.theguardian.com/

At the end of the second world war, as Europe was preparing to celebrate its victory over fascism, the Soviet authorities arrested an entire school of teenage girls from western Ukraine, named them enemies of the people, took them to an Arctic concentration camp and forced them to expend their youth in slave labour.

Half a century later Galina Skopyuk is still there. She is a prisoner of circumstances now rather than a prisoner of Stalin, but beginning her 49th winter in a land where the winters are nine months long is hard. “I’m always hoping to leave. I don’t want to die here. But I don’t have any chance,” she said.

Mrs Skopyuk is one of the few living links between the present-day city of Norilsk and the dark years of its creation, starting in 1935, when Stalin willed thousands of political prisoners hither to claw a city out of the tundra in a metal-rich volcanic crater.

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Norilsk, Stalin’s Siberian Hell, Thrives in Spite Of Hideous Legacy – by Robert G. Kaiser (Washington Post – August 29, 2001)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

Is there any stranger human habitation on Earth than this?

In Norilsk, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise for three months a year, the winter temperatures remain under 30 degrees below zero, and the air is, literally, the dirtiest on the globe. Yet there is a full-blown city of 230,000 here, whose citizens are fierce local patriots with a romantic sense of their own uniqueness.

They live in a place created by zeks, political prisoners who populated Joseph Stalin’s gulag — perhaps 100,000, or even 200,000 died in its building; the exact number is lost or buried in still-sealed archives. They were inmates in an unimaginable chamber of horrors, a community of prison camps designed to create nickel and copper industries, and to kill people. It succeeded impressively on both counts.

Modern Norilsk is populated by descendants of those prisoners, among many others, and the city remembers its horrific past. This is unusual in Russia, where forgetting is easier. On the busy streets of Norilsk in August, with pretty women on parade and children chasing each other on bikes and in-line skates, that past seems so remote as to be unreachable.

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The harrowing stories of the worst mining disasters to ever hit Wales (Wales Online.com – December 26, 2017)

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/

More than 6,000 miners are believed have been killed in tragedies down the years

The stories of the most devastating mining disasters to ever hit Wales have been told. In November a poignant ceremony was held in the Rhondda to remember 150 years on from when 178 men and boys died having descended 278 yards below the ground for work at Ferndale and Blaenllechau colliery.

Sadly the disaster is one of a long list of mining disasters that took place across Wales. John Smith runs the extensive research website Welsh Coal Mines and said he, together with another member, was researching every fatal accident ever reported in south Wales.

Mr Smith said the number of miners killed in disasters amounts to “over 6,000” down the years. Using research from the website, which utilises information from newspapers and archives, as well as other sources, here are the stories of the six biggest mining disasters to ever hit Wales.

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Norilsk Journal; Comes the Thaw, the Gulag’s Bones Tell Their Dark Tale – by Steven Lee Myers (New York Times – February 24, 2004)

http://www.nytimes.com/

The bones appear each June, when the hard Arctic winter breaks at last and the melting snows wash them from the site of what some people here — but certainly not many — call this city’s Golgotha.

The bones are the remains of thousands of prisoners sent to the camps in this frozen island of the Gulag Archipelago. To this day, no one knows exactly how many labored here in penal servitude. To this day, no one knows exactly how many died. The bones are an uncomfortable reminder of a dark past that most would rather forget.

”Here it is generally thought that the history of the camps is an awful secret in the family,” said Vladislav A. Tolstov, a journalist and historian who has lived in Norilsk all his life. ”We all know about it, but we try not to think about it.”

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Eastern Russian port of Nakhodka chokes on coal – by Katya Golubkova and Oksana Kobzeva (Reuters U.S. – December 21, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

NAKHODKA, Russia (Reuters) – The far eastern Russian port of Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan is swathed in coal dust. It blankets the streets, clogs the air and is blamed by some for a rise in respiratory diseases among the city’s 150,000 residents.

Yet despite pledges this year by Russia President Vladimir Putin to tackle coal pollution in ports such as Nakhodka and Murmansk thousands of kilometers away near Finland, port workers and local officials don’t expect any change soon.

Once mainly an entry point for cars from Japan and an export route for Russian wood and fish, Nakhodka has switched in recent years to shipping almost nothing but coal from the vast mines in the Siberian region of Kemerovo, also known as Kuzbass.

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Mining listings bring Indian gold and Irish zinc to London – by Barbara Lewis (Reuters U.S. – December 20, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Reuters) – Two exploration companies with assets spanning gold in India to zinc in Ireland will list their shares on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) on Thursday, bringing to 11 the number of mining listings this year as commodities prices recover.

Shares in Panthera resources, whose prime asset is a gold project in Rajasthan and Erris Resources, which has gold in Sweden and zinc in Ireland, will start trading at 0800 GMT.

Commodity prices have stabilized after a steep downturn in 2015 and early 2016 and the number of share listings is up dramatically from just two in 2016. Junior miners who are exploring and developing assets, however, say it is still hard to raise capital.

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British coal still burning abroad despite push for global ban – by Susanna Twidale and Barbara Lewis (Reuters U.S. – December 18, 207)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain led calls for an end to coal-fired power generation at United Nations climate talks in Bonn last month but at the same time British companies are active in coal projects around the world, often with government help.

In Britain, the use of coal in electricity generation has declined sharply since the introduction of a carbon tax in 2013, although the country remains a center of coal-mining expertise.

Many in the mining industry see no contradiction. They say coal remains the best option in some countries and it would be hypocritical for the developed world to deny emerging economies the power they need.

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Mining’s Bohemian boomtown: The tiny mining town of Joachimsthal was an inspiration for many famous scientists – by Cecilia Keating (CIM Magazine – December 04, 2017)

http://magazine.cim.org/en/

Despite its low profile today, Jáchymov, a small spa town in the mountains of Bohemia in northwest Czech Republic, has an illustrious history. For more than four centuries, its mines were central to scientific discoveries made, and research done, by Georgius Agricola, Marie Curie and J. Robert Oppenheimer, including the discoveries of several minerals and elements.

Rich silver deposits were discovered in the town in 1512 and over the ensuing decades thousands arrived to exploit them, with the town’s population jumping to 18,200 in 1534, up from 5,000 in 1520. It was christened Joachimsthal (meaning “St. Joachim’s Valley”) in 1520 by its rich owners, the Counts of Schlick.

The Schlicks quickly became one of Europe’s richest families, and started minting coins out of the area’s silver called thaler – the origin of the word dollar. Coins were shipped to Leipzig, an important trading hub, and were accepted across Europe.

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In Germany, miners and others prepare for a soft exit from hard coal – by Valerie Hamilton (U.S.A. Today – December 13, 2017)

https://www.usatoday.com/

For most people, the top of the mine shaft at the Prosper-Haniel coal mine in Bottrop, Germany, just looks like a big black hole. But Andre Niemann looked into that hole and saw the future.

Part 1: No regrets from this soon-to-be-ex-miner

Niemann leads the hydraulic engineering and water resources department at the University of Duisberg-Essen, in the heart of German coal country, western Germany’s Ruhr Valley. For more than 150 years, Germany mined millions of tons of anthracite, or hard coal, from coal mines here that at their peak employed half a million miners. But that’s history now — Germany’s government decided a decade ago to end subsidies that made German hard coal competitive with imports.

Now, the last of these mines are set to close at the end of 2018, ending an industry, a tradition and a culture. “Prosper-Haniel is really special,” Niemann says. “It’s the last mine in this region, and everyone is looking, ‘OK, what’s happening now?’”

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