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Mining Environmental Accidents, Pollution, Tailing Dams and Abandoned Mines

BOOKS: The horrors behind the mining industry that powers your life – by Russ Mitchell (Los Angeles Times – February 13, 2023)

https://www.latimes.com/

You, the smartphone addict. The modern nomad, lugging your fancy laptop. The electric car driver, smug in your certainty that you’re making the world a better place. Look over here, under this rock; look at what you’d rather not see.

That’s what Siddharth Kara invites you to do in his damning new book, “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.” Maybe you already know our booming battery-based economy depends on cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You’ve heard things are bad there. But I’d guess that, like me — smartphone addict, laptop lugger, owner of an electric car — you had no idea just how bad.

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B.C. fines Teck Coal $16 million for contaminating Kootenay waterways – by Winston Szeto (CBC News British Columbia – February 8, 2023)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/

The company failed to treat effluent for selenium and nitrate, Ministry of Environment says

A Canadian mining company has been fined more than $16 million for polluting waterways in B.C.’s East Kootenay.

The B.C. Ministry of Environment has imposed three administrative penalties on Teck Coal Limited, a subsidiary of Teck Resources, citing the company’s failure to have water treatment facilities ready by a required date to limit emissions of nitrate and selenium from its Fording River operations in the Elk Valley.

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‘We need to restore the land’: as coal mines close, here’s a community blueprint to sustain the Hunter Valley – by Kimberley Crofts and Liam Phelan (The Conversation – February 7, 2023)

https://theconversation.com/

The decline of the coal industry means 17 mines in the New South Wales Hunter Valley will close over the next two decades. More than 130,000 hectares of mining land — nearly two-thirds of the valley floor between Broke and Muswellbrook — will become available for new uses.

Restoring and reusing this land could contribute billions of dollars to the Hunter economy, create thousands of full-time jobs and make the region a world leader in industries such as renewable energy and regenerative agriculture that improves soil and water quality and increases biodiversity and resilience. But to unlock these future opportunities, we must first clean up the legacy of the past.

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ANALYSIS-Can mining clean up its act to meet soaring demand for green metals? – by Jack Graham (Thomson Reuters Foundation – January 27, 2023)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON, Jan 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – In January 2019, a tailings dam from an iron ore mine burst near the southeast Brazilian town of Brumadinho, unleashing a deadly avalanche of muddy waste that killed an estimated 270 people.

The anniversary of the disaster – Jan. 25 – is a painful day for Angelica Amanda Andrade, whose sister Natalia died aged 32. “My life changed completely four years ago,” said Andrade, 28, a teacher who is campaigning for safer mining practices on behalf of her community.

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Abandoned mines among most expensive territorial contaminated sites – by Emily Blake (Canadian Press/Toronto Star – January 22, 2023)

https://www.thestar.com/

Environmental advocates say costly cleanups of former non-renewable resource projects in the North show the need for better planning.

YELLOWKNIFE – Environmental advocates say costly cleanups of former non-renewable resource projects in the North show the need for better planning.

Three of Canada’s top five most expensive federal contaminated sites are abandoned mines in the North: Giant Mine in the Northwest Territories at an estimated $4.38 billion and the Faro and United Keno Hill mines in Yukon at $1 billion and $125 million, respectively.

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Toxic Towns: Don’t hold your breath – by Malone Mullin (CBC News Interactives – November 28, 2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/

In Baie Verte, N.L., a mine that once brought prosperity now symbolizes pain, suffering and death. Nobody knows how to get rid of it.

This is Part I of a three-part series on contaminated sites in Newfoundland and Labrador.

In Émile Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal, a French mining town, filled with families dependent on coal, is plotting a strike. It’s not an idyllic existence, living in 19th-century Montsou. Workers and their families sleep in shacks, eat mostly bread and rarely embrace leisure.

Eventually, they’re consumed by the massive beast whose tendrils reach deep underground. The mine, named Le Voreux, holds such sway over the townspeople’s lives that it transforms into a character in itself; figuratively speaking, by the end of the book, it eats its servants alive.

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Canada’s top five federal contaminated sites to cost taxpayers $4.38-billion to clean up – by Emily Blake (Globe and Mail/Canadian Press – November 28, 2022)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

With a cost estimate of $4.38-billion, remediation of the Giant Mine, one of the most contaminated sites in Canada, is also expected to be the most expensive federal environmental cleanup in the country’s history.

The figure, recently approved by the Treasury Board of Canada, spans costs from 2005 until 2038, when active remediation at the former Yellowknife gold mine is anticipated to end. That includes $710-million the federal government said has already been spent, but does not include costs for long-term care and maintenance.

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Can you put a price on the impact of Yellowknife’s Giant Mine? – by Sidney Cohen (CBC News North – November 16, 2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/

Quantifying, in dollar terms, the effect of the mine on the economy, environment and people is complicated

Last week, the federal government revealed that cleaning up Yellowknife’s Giant Mine is now projected to cost $4.38 billion instead of $1 billion. This is, by one measure, greater than the mine’s total estimated revenues during its operation.

Quantifying, in dollar terms, the impact of the mine on the local economy, the environment, and the people who live on and use the area’s land and water is complicated, if not impossible.

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There are 280 billion tons of mining waste. This startup is putting it to good use – by Adele Peters (Fast Company – November 7, 2022)

https://www.fastcompany.com/

Phoenix Tailings uses new technology to get key minerals out of mining waste.

Digging up and extracting the minerals needed to make electric car batteries or wind turbines comes at an environmental cost, using huge amounts of energy and dangerous chemicals and creating toxic pollution. But one Boston-area startup is getting some key materials in a different way: Instead of mining them from the ground, it uses new technology to extract them from mining waste.

“For us, it’s about figuring out how can we extract the most from the waste that has already been mined,” says Anthony Balladon, cofounder and VP of partnerships at the startup, Phoenix Tailings. “It has already been dug out of the ground. How can we make the most of what we’ve already done, rather than dig up new holes somewhere else?”

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Aluminum-based material can scrub CO2 from coal-fired power plants’ exhaust – by Staff (Mining.com – November 6, 2022)

https://www.mining.com/

An international team of researchers is proposing the idea of using aluminum formate – a metal-organic framework (MOF) – to remove carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants’ exhaust before the greenhouse gas reaches the atmosphere.

In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the research group explains that MOFs have exhibited great potential for filtering and separating organic materials—often the various hydrocarbons in fossil fuels—from one another.

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How big coal companies avoid cleaning up their messes – by Josh Saul, Zach Mider and Dave Mistich (Cap Radio.org – October 29, 2022)

https://www.capradio.org/

Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor.

Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago.

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Climate changed: Mining industry digs into alternative methods as risks rise – by Ian Bickis (Canadian Press/Thompson Citizen – October 20, 2022)

https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/

In the North, some mines risk leaking acid if the permafrost melts, while across Canada heavier rainfall will add strain to tailings dams and a lack of it could throw operations.

While no strangers to extreme weather, the growing risks from climate change are forcing the mining industry to take a hard look at their methods, and how to prepare for the worst. Many of the most prudent actions to minimize risk are, however, also more costly, meaning that while some have taken them on, not everyone has followed suit.

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Doubts downstream: Residents of Libby, Mont., have heard selenium from Canadian coal mines isn’t a threat. But trust in industry is hard to come by after hundreds here died from minerals contaminated with asbestos. – by Joel Dryden and Rob Easton (CBC News – October 19, 2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/

Walking the streets of Libby, Mont., on a hazy September day, it’s not uncommon to hear the cough of a local resident. The picturesque, blue-collar town about an hour southwest of the Canada-U.S. Border in Montana’s north was once bustling with jobs thanks to nearby vermiculite mines. The work helped line locals’ wallets with steady pay. And lined their lungs with toxic asbestos dust.

Years of remediation have helped make the town of about 2,700 safe again following what government officials called the worst case of industrial poisoning of a community in American history. But residents are still struggling to rebuild after hundreds died, and approximately 2,400 have been diagnosed with asbestos-related diseases.

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Dirty metals for clean cars: Indonesian nickel could be key to EV battery industry – by Erwida Maulia (Nikkei Asia – October 19, 2022)

https://asia.nikkei.com/

Rich nickel reserves attract Chinese investment but environmental hurdles remain

JAKARTA/MOROWALI, Indonesia — A group of fishermen and their wives looked forlorn on the porch of their stilt houses, perched on the sandy coast of Indonesia’s remote Bahodopi district.

Their homes, along with the few dozen others that make up the fishing hamlet, stood against a backdrop of towering cranes and billowing white smoke from the chimneys of Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), a sprawling nickel processing complex in Central Sulawesi province that hosts an array of Chinese companies and their partners, led by stainless steel giant Tsingshan Holding Group.

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Congolese NGOs decry mining in main refuge of ‘Africa’s unicorn’ – by Erikas Mwisi Kambale (Reuters – October 19, 2022)

https://www.reuters.com/

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo Oct 18 (Reuters) – Illegal gold-mining is destroying tracts of pristine rainforest in Congo’s Okapi Wildlife Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site meant to be a haven for the endangered mammal nicknamed Africa’s unicorn, environmental organisations warned on Tuesday.

Industrial activities are supposed to be banned in the 13,000 square kilometers of the reserve in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo. Aerial photo evidence shows mining has persisted, the civil society groups said at a joint news conference to mark the international day of the okapi.

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