National challenge of leaking mines dwarfs Colorado spill

[TexasTowelie]

Source: AP

SILVERTON, Colorado (AP) — It will take many years and many millions of dollars simply to manage and not even remove the toxic wastewater from an abandoned mine that unleashed a 100-mile-long torrent of heavy metals into Western rivers and has likely reached Lake Powell, experts said.

Plugging Colorado's Gold King Mine could simply lead to an eventual explosion of poisonous water elsewhere, so the safest solution, they said Thursday, would be to install a treatment plant that would indefinitely clean the water from Gold King and three other nearby mines. It would cost millions of dollars, and do nothing to contain the thousands of other toxic streams that are a permanent legacy of mining across the nation.

Federal authorities first suggested a treatment plant for Gold King more than a decade ago, but local officials and owners of a nearby mine were reluctant to embrace a federally-sponsored cleanup.

"They have been not pursuing the obvious solution," said Rob Robinson, a retired abandoned mines cleanup coordinator for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. "My hope is this has embarrassed the hell out of them and they're going to finally take it seriously."

Read more: http://kdhnews.com/news/nation/national-challenge-of-leaking-mines-dwarfs-colorado-spill/article_fc9b27a3-97f9-507e-a071-b1ffe67c73f4.html

[jtuck004]

1. Nice. Take your profits, run away, leave it to the working people who are left with no

jobs to clean up your mess.

[newfie11]

2. This is the canary in the coal mine scenario

Colorado is loaded with old abandoned gold and silver mines.

[The Jungle 1]

3. Fracking is the mine of our time.

Nothing is being set up to deal with these fracked gas mines in 100 years when the steal casings and concrete plugs fail. When this happens the ground water will be put at great risk.
Again the miners will take the profit and run away leaving us with a mess.

I live in Pa and we still pay millions every year to clean up after the coal barons. You would think our government would want control everything about this new mining yet they are giving the frackers a free pass.

[annabanana]

7. Centralia is STILL burning, right?

[The Jungle 1]

16. Yup

[mike_c]

14. some of the most devasted streams and rivers I've ever worked in...

...were polluted by old coal mines in Pennsyltucky.

[The Jungle 1]

17. Very true

I wish someone smarter than me would add up the amount of money this state has spent on repairing the damage the coal barons inflicted.

[Strelnikov_]

19. Agree n/t

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, TexasTowelie.

[TexasTowelie]

11. You're welcome.

It is certainly a story of national interest.

[Uncle Joe]

13. I agree, water is life,

if we lose that, we lose everything.

[fasttense]

5. Just another blundering failure of capitalism

The rich capitalist, some long dead but their stolen wealth still supporting their dynastic families, mine all value out of a piece of land with no thought about the huge piles of toxic waste they leave behind. They leave the polluted and destroyed land along with poisonous waste for the underpaid worker, the ones who have to live there, to clean up with their tax dollars.

This is why capitalism is such a destructive and broken economic system. A few very rich people get even richer while leaving behind their crap for others to clean up. Glaring fault #1 of capitalism: the Capitalist doesn't even clean up after himself. A good economic system would at least get people to clean up after themselves.

[mike_c]

15. unfortunately, no reasonable amount of money can fix the damage...

...caused by hard rock mining exposure of sulfur bearing minerals at the face of opened rock seams. Once they're exposed to atmosphere and water, acid drainage (including heavy metals) is pretty much inevitable. It is essentially impossible to reseal the exposed rock faces. The only real solutions are to either stop mining-- which means no more resource extraction in a world in which resources are increasingly scarce-- or perpetual monitoring, pumping, and treatment. Ultimately, the cost of resource extraction is permanent vigilance and perpetual mitigation. These are the social costs of hard rock mining.

Garrett Hardin was right, as usual. The benefits of resource extraction accrue to the few, while the costs are borne by everyone.

[fasttense]

18. I find that hard to believe

That nothing can be done to deal with the waste at the time it is created. I've heard the same lament said about those huge corporate pig farms. There is nothing they can do to deal with the very huge amounts of waste created. Yet mining and pig farming has been going on since the time of Jesus and we are not swimming in crap.

And, if it is true nothing can be done to deal with the waste at the time it is created, then it should NOT be allowed. If a capitalist cannot make a profit while dealing with the waste he creates, then he should NOT be doing it. It's a bad plan.

It is a bad business model to leave behind your mess for others to clean up, and a sign of a flawed economic system if it is allowed.

[mike_c]

20. it's not just a question of waste....

Water percolates through tailing piles of course, but even if the tailings are lined and capped (which was NEVER done on old mines) the exposed rock faces within the mines themselves create acid drainage. It's their exposure to atmosphere that acidifies the water. Back filling old mines with rubble or any other porous material does nothing to mitigate this.

It is a bad business model to leave behind your mess for others to clean up, and a sign of a flawed economic system if it is allowed.

I certainly won't argue with that. But again, I think Hardin was right. Someone will ALWAYS cheat to enrich themselves, while leaving the social and monetary clean up costs to everyone else.

[greatlaurel]

6. Good article with facts about the tens of thousands of leaking mines not being treated.

Coal mines are not even being included in the statistics given in the article. The streams and rivers of Appalachia are extremely degraded by the acid mine drainage from abandoned coal mines. The news media has a good opportunity to educate the public about the amount of pollution generated by abandoned mines. Once the mines are dug and the rock is exposed to water there will be acids form that leach heavy metals from the rock and dissolve the metals in the water causing the kind of contamination from the Gold King mine.

This mine and the others near it were and still are leaking continuously poisoning the waters of Cement Creek and the Animus Rivers. The sudden release of a massive slug of contamination to hit the water system all at once causing the much higher contamination to move further into the watershed. The fact remains that the contaminated and highly toxic waters from these mines continue to leak into the watershed everyday, untreated. The spectacular color of the massive spill leads to dramatic photos. However, once the color returns to normal the silent poisoning of the entire watershed will continue unabated, as almost no one in business or politics wants to spend the billions of dollars to clean up the contamination from these mines. It would require the responsible parties to actually pay for the actual cost of their business practices by making them clean up the mess rather than putting the cost of their business onto the public in poisoned watersheds across the United States.

Thanks for the post.

[TexasTowelie]

12. You're welcome.

It's odd that some of the best stories get posted at the wee hours of the morning. This is almost like a "Friday Night news dump" so that people don't pay attention to it.

[ancianita]

8. Why didn't cleanup laws get made when "mineral estates" were established as real estate title?

Apparently, lawmakers really were that ignorant about the life endangering effects of these activities on others. Or they were kicked back profits so that such cleanup wouldn't be enforced. Or people in general accepted messes because there was always more land elsewhere to move to if they didn't like what nearby mining cost them in life quality.

Still, it seems that moral corruption has been the normal state of the extraction sector since forever, apparently.

[ancianita]

9. And then there's all this evildoing in Mali and elsewhere...under cover of believer wars.

http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=150836

or

http://archive.onearth.org/blog/as-companies-gather-for-shareholder-meetings-opposition-to-bristol-bay-mine-mounts

These extraction sector are destroying everywhere they go.

[L0oniX]

10. It's just business. They mine and profit and we pay for the clean up. Capitalism.

[Zorra]

21. kickety kickety kick, the mines will make us sick

No more mines!

"A Terrible Mine Is Good To Waste!"

[GliderGuider]

22. Here's a risk-assessment question for the room.

This site estimates that there are half a million abandoned mines in the USA, mostly coal and hardrock mines. Extrapolating that figure to a global scale, there may be eight times that many, or four million abandoned mines around the world. Most of them are in jurisdictions that have very poor environmental regulations.

Many collapsitarians are extremely worried about the risks posed by the 400+ nuclear reactors around the world because they need to be actively managed to stay ~safe (whatever that word means for a nuke), and such management may not be possible in a world with widespread civil decay and unrest.

So there are on the order of 10,000 times as many abandoned mines as there are operating nuclear reactors.

So here's my question. How would you compare the ecological risk posed by 10,000 abandoned coal and gold mines to the risk posed by one nuclear reactor?

Keep in mind that abandoned mines leach environmental toxins even when society is fully functional...