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Tyee Photo Essay

Who Will Clean Up Our Mining Mess?

The coming mining boom in BC's northwest has critics wondering if current clean-up and enforcement plans are enough. Special report with photo essay.

By Christopher Pollon, 23 May 2011, TheTyee.ca

  • Acid rock drainage

    Acid rock drainage from an advanced exploration site at Brucejack Lake in northwest B.C, September 2010.

  • Brucejack Lake

    Brucejack Lake advanced mining exploration. Brucejack Lake is in the Unuk River drainage. September 2010.

  • Brucejack Lake

    Brucejack Lake advanced mining exploration. Brucejack Lake is in the Unuk River drainage, September 2010.

  • Brucejack Lake

    Brucejack Lake advanced mining exploration. Brucejack Lake is in the Unuk River drainage, September 2010.

  • Brucejack Lake

    Brucejack Lake advanced mining exploration. Brucejack Lake is in the Unuk River drainage, September 2010.

  • Brucejack Lake

    Brucejack Lake advanced mining exploration. Brucejack Lake is in the Unuk River drainage, September 2010.

  • Brucejack Lake

    Brucejack Lake advanced mining exploration. Brucejack Lake is in the Unuk River drainage, September 2010.

  • Mining operation on Johnny Mountain

    What remains of the mining operation on the top of Johnny Mountain, September 2010.

  • Mining operation on Johnny Mountain

    What remains of the mining operation on the top of Johnny Mountain, September 2010.

  • Inside the mill at Johnny Mountain

    The remains of the mill building at the top of Johnny Mountain, September 2010.

  • Mining operation on Johnny Mountain

    What remains of the mining operation on the top of Johnny Mountain, September 2010.

  • Iskut river and floodplain

    The meandering Iskut river and floodplain, just below the air strip that supplies Johnny Mountain, the Snip mine, and the currently proposed Bronson slope mine.

  • Tulsequah Chief, 600px uploaded again

    The ARD-generating Tulsequah Chief mine on the Tulsequah River, which is a tributary of the Taku. Taken July 30, 2009. The Tulsequah Chief mine is slated for clean-up. Photo: Rivers Without Borders.

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Hovering above Johnny Mountain in a helicopter, derelict buildings and rusted-out machinery are all that appear to remain of the gold mine -- but there's much more going on beneath the surface. Mining ceased here in 1993, but the 3.7 kilometres of underground workings have the potential to generate toxic drainage like a malevolent factory, leaching acid and heavy metals into the wild Iskut River below.

Not far to the northwest, the Tulsequah Chief mine has been fouling one of Alaska's most important salmon rivers for 50 years with a steady heavy metallic plume -- despite four government "orders" to clean it up and six B.C. taxpayer-funded visits to document the damage since 1989.

There are at least 1,800 closed or abandoned mines in B.C. today that have little chance of ever being cleaned up, a legacy of our Wild West mining past when no regulations existed. But do not confuse the two above mines with that legacy. Both are "brown field" mining prospects that languish in a bureaucratic netherworld somewhere between abandonment and active extraction -- owned by modern mining companies intent on redeveloping the properties or adjacent claims.

Both are mere potholes compared to what's coming. Over the next few decades in northwest B.C., cheap grid power from a new transmission line will make it economical to move mountains of rock to extract relatively tiny amounts of copper and gold from vast open pits. The rosiest prediction sees six big operational mines in the northwest by 2015.

Along with the expected profits, jobs and tax revenue will also come enormous liabilities: after millions of tonnes of mining waste have been rearranged into waste dumps and tailings impoundments -- much of it requiring acid rock drainage (ARD) treatment for generations -- the whole mess is going to have to be cleaned up and closely monitored.

"The main thing that society needs to grapple with now is, what is the long term vision for these sites?" asks Ramsey Hart, Canada program coordinator for Mining Watch Canada. "Some will require someone to be looking after them for hundreds of years if we are to maintain [adequate] protections in terms of water. Who will take responsibility?"


The way it works

A modern open pit mine is more than a source of valuable minerals -- it's also a permanent waste storage facility. Increased mechanization means that more rock can be moved and milled, creating larger and more complex waste streams than ever before.

The sheer quantity of waste -- from tailings, waste rock, liquid effluents and chemicals needed to isolate valuable minerals -- necessitates that everything must remain on the site after mining.

In Canada today, mining companies are responsible for all aspects of mine closure and reclamation. Companies must submit mine closure plans prior to receiving approval to commence mining; in B.C., approval of such a plan and a financial guarantee is required before a mine can be issued a permit.

Al Hoffman, B.C.'s chief inspector of mines, says we've come a long way since the '60s, when B.C. became one of the first provinces in Canada to enact mine reclamation legislation, including the requirement that companies post up-front financial securities to guarantee mine clean-up costs. "There were no reclamation securities before 1969, and certainly since that time, B.C.'s mining industry has had a stellar record," he told The Tyee.

Calculating the details of that financial guarantee today is the subject of considerable exchange and negotiation during the development of a project. "We look at two things: company and environmental risk," says Diane Howe, B.C.'s deputy chief inspector of mines and senior reclamation specialist.

When determining the form of that guarantee, Howe says they look at the financial strength of the company, its diversification, its credit rating, whatever liability it has elsewhere, and what its permformance has been in the past. Mine capacity, mine cash flow, value of commodities and even property values are also weighed.

The degree of environmental risk is determined by looking at the need for physical reclamation, such as the resloping and revegetation of a mine site; the removal of all buildings, roads, power ways and pipelines. The last piece is long-term closure, including the operational costs of ongoing water treatments, and any monitoring and maintenance at the site.

Beyond ongoing payments into a security, Hofmann says a company is bound by the conditions of its mine permit. "We can request an increase in securities at any time," he says. "If they don't fulfill those conditions, we have the authority to order them to do so, we can write orders and if they don't there are legal penalties."


A regulatory and fiscal black hole?



A report produced this week by the University of Victoria's Environmental Law Centre Clinic seriously questions the ability of government to prevent future environmental and taxpayer liabilities from mining. "Both industry and government often contend that mining activities will not harm the environment because strict standards will be followed both during and after operations," concludes author Maya Stano, a law student and former private sector mining engineer. "Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that compliance is not being adequately enforced to ensure that these commitments are indeed upheld."

The capacity of government to monitor the commitments made by B.C. mining companies during the environmental assessment process is virtually nil, says Stano. The monitoring that does happen is now generally limited to proponent-hired monitors and in place only for a limited period at the construction and early operational stages of the project. "This leaves environmental protection at the operations and closure stages extremely vulnerable."

In 2003, the province eliminated all regional mine reclamation inspectors, leaving just one position in Victoria. By 2004, mine visits by inspectors fell to 400 from 2,000 visits in 2001; by 2008, just over 1,000 visits had been made, still only half the inspections done in 2001.

The latest information on such mine visits is not publically available because the chief inspector of mines, who is required to file annual reports online, is currently out of compliance with his own reporting requirements for 2009 and 2010. "It's coming," said chief inspector Hoffman when pressed for the missing online reports by The Tyee. "To be honest, it's partially from lack of staff."


Too much discretion with securities?

Stano says B.C.'s chief inspector of mines has too much discretion when negotiating mine securities with mining companies. If she could make only one recommendation based on her research, it is that some of this power be curtailed.

Today in B.C., it is not a legal requirement that a mining company post a bond; it remains subject to the discretion of the chief inspector of mines. This unelected bureaucrat makes the ultimate decision of what constitutes an acceptable form of financial security, too, which can range widely from low risk (e.g. cash in the bank) to high risk (e.g. the value of equipment on a mining site). This latter practice, was described by the B.C. auditor general in 2002 as "questionable" given that such assets depreciate over time, and in a worst-case scenario, ultimately compete with paying salaries, paying income tax, and the claims of other creditors.

Such is the case with Johnny Mountain mine -- according to a spring 2011 company regulatory filing, "mining equipment" worth just over $190,000 has been pledged in part to cover reclamation costs of Johnny Mountain. For the proposed Red Chris mine in northwest B.C., the company's latest reclamation funding plan also assumes that funds received from the "salvage of the mine equipment, process plant, and other infrastructure" will be applied to reclamation funding.

The chief inspector also has the power to make a company's calculation of reclamation costs confidential -- including for properties requiring perpetual ARD treatment and monitoring. While a miner must submit an "estimate of the total expected costs of outstanding reclamation obligations over the planned life of the mine, including the costs of long term monitoring and maintenance," no one outside of government or industry can scrutinize whether such estimates are reasonable or adequate to cover future costs.

Diane Howe says this confidentiality protects the competitive position of companies who will often be tendering out the future work to close the mine. "The companies don’t want contractors having the advantage of being able to see some of this info."

This means that the kind of independent, third-party scrutiny of mine closure costs that have been attempted in both Alaska (see last table at end of this page) and Alberta are not possible here -- and potentially put taxpayers at risk.

This transparency is vital given the uncertainty and huge margin for error that exists when trying to predict how environmental conditions at a big closed mine site will change over time, particularly involving site chemistry and ARD. "If a proposed mine site predicts no acid rock drainage (ARD) after any mitigation measures, then it has about a 50 per cent probability of being correct about that," writes K.A. Morin in a 2010 study examining the accuracy of pre-mining environmental risk predictions. "If a minesite already has ARD, there is about a 90 per cent probability it was predicted to have low ARD potential before it started."

WHAT IS ACID ROCK DRAINAGE?

Modern open-pit mines disturb massive volumes of rock; nearly three tonnes of rock must be excavated to produce a typical gold wedding band. This discarded rock and tailings can contain acid-generating sulphides, which start a natural chemical reaction when exposed to air and water. In a process analogous to the decomposition of a leaf fallen from a tree, the sulphide-bearing rock degrades with this exposure, releasing acid and metals into surface and groundwater. Acid rock drainage can begin decades after a mine has closed, and once it starts, a perpetual chain reaction can result; of the at least 60 mines in British Columbia with serious environmental liabilities today, 40 of those have significant uncertainties around drainage chemistry.

The boom starts here

B.C.'s much-hyped mining boom will be centred on the northwest corner of the province, one of three regions noted for high ARD potential. The most advanced proposed mine in this region is Red Chris, about 80 kilometres south of Dease Lake -- a medium-sized open-pit copper/gold mine relative to nearby projects like Galore Creek, Schaft Creek and Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell. (See map.)

The current plan at Red Chris is to mill 30,000 tons of rock a day for about 28 years -- which would produce at least 275 million tons of waste rock and tailings by the time it's over.

After the mine closes in 2043, the company expects a large rock waste dump and the exposed walls of the open pit to become acid generating. "It may be decades following mine decommissioning before acid generation becomes a concern and treatment is required," states a 2005 government Assessment Report for the mine. "Treatment will likely be required in perpetuity."

How does the government negotiate the terms of closure in such a scenario? "You have to realize we've got 15 to 20 years for this company (Imperial Metals) to figure out how they can maybe possibly mitigate for that acid rock drainage," says Howe. "So we won't ask for the company at day one for that long-term post closure treatment (detail)."

She adds that companies are required to report annually on their evolving liabilities at a site. "There is very detailed reporting required for changes to the mine plan, and we are constantly reviewing securities at mine sites."

In its latest feasibility plan, the company proposes to build a "state-of-the art" water treatment plant that "will operate over the long term to contain, collect, treat and discharge water from the site." The tailings from the site will be contained by three earth-fill dams constructed in the valley to the southeast of the mine site.

"You can imagine that given the time lag, there is no way to provide anything but an estimate of the reclamation process at this time," Imperial Metals vice president of corporate development Gord Keevil told The Tyee. "We will continue to do research to mitigate any issues, and feel hopeful that the potential water treatment plant and ongoing treatment will not be necessary."


Two mines, ongoing responsibilities

The owners of the Johnny Mountain site got into the government's bad books in 2007, when they went behind the back of regulators and burned and buried much of the detritus on the mountain top, which then had to be spot excavated at company expense and tested for toxins. "Johnny Mountain is the case of a company that's struggling to keep themselves afloat," Howe told The Tyee. "We're very close to confiscating whatever we need to do the work up there."

Tulsequah Chief Mine, Tulsequah River, 300 px

The ARD-generating Tulsequah Chief mine on the Tulsequah River, which is a tributary of the Taku. Taken July 30, 2009. See larger version in photo essay at top of this story. Photo: Rivers Without Borders.

The Tulsequah Chief mine received high profile attention in the summer of 2009, when Sarah Palin implored Gordon Campbell to clean up the site -- which continues to jeopardize Alaska's great Taku River commercial salmon fishery.

But after 50 years, Environment Canada says Chieftain Metals, a company run by Terence Chandler -- the former CEO of Redfern Corp., the very same company that went bankrupt trying to open the mine in 2009 -- is finally going to clean it up. "Chieftain Metals is in the process of setting up their base camp and waste water treatment plant at the Tulsequah Chief mine site," said an Environment Canada spokesperson on May 11. "Waste water is not yet being treated." [Tyee]

Christopher Pollon is a widely published freelance journalist and Tyee contributing editor. His website is here.

36 Comments:

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  • Fiat lux

    1 year ago

    When will society come to

    When will society come to grips with the sordid fact that the sale of resources is not and income, and that the GDP and "growth" figures by miseducated economists and bought politicians are nothing more than childish fraud ?

    Ed Deak.

  • alive

    1 year ago

    Pigs all of them!

    Who paid for the clean-up of the site where Expo86 sat and the Concord Pacific built their towers? --- Taxpayers, that's who!
    Who made the mess, private enterprise!

    Our Governments left a glorious mess at the old DEW line projects when they pulled out; what was not worth the transport was dumped into the drink-- thank you very much!

  • DPL

    1 year ago

    The big threat is always the

    The big threat is always the same. If you don't like us here, we will take jobs somewhere else. Canadian companies use it all the time and tend to go to places where the locals don't have the power to stop them. Our province is getting cut up for the benefit of some stockholders who don't care as long as the bucks are coming in.Our present BC Government goes right along.

  • Fiat lux

    1 year ago

    The beauty of the present

    The beauty of the present economic calculations and accounting system is that they have no debits, or liabilities.

    Everything goes on, nothing comes off.

    A fantastic system and our governments are hooked to it.

    As long as the imaginary money is circulating , even when thousands of people are starving in the streets, millions are dying of starvation all over the world, the pollution, climate change, depletion and incredible garbage are destroying the Earth, it is all calculated as GDP and "growth".

    And people are falling for this crime wave, as long as they can play with their texting and other electronic garbage.

    Ed Deak.

  • rantnic

    1 year ago

    GDP

    Garbage Dependent Profiteers - those who create nothing, grow nothing, build nothing, serve nobody and take profits from everyone. They make money and call it wealth creation. But in reality, do they really create anything? Perhaps the answer to that question is yes, because they have created and perpetuate an economic system that makes them wealthy at the expense of others. An economic system that has nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of our real economy.

  • EnviroMom

    1 year ago

    Toothless Watchdog

    The lack of enforcement, the enabling relationship between the the chief inspector of mines and the mining companies, the total lack of an actual inspection capacity, all this makes BC's mining reclamation standards a mockery. This must be made an election issue.

  • pwlg

    1 year ago

    alive

    Who paid for the industrial toxic waste in southeast False Creek? Taxpayers of Vancouver!

    Great article. There is nothing more startling than to come across an open pit mine and its operations. Unfortunately most of the public never sees the devastation.

    One of the largest ever trout caught in BC was in a lake now used as a waste water catchment "pond".

  • willy

    1 year ago

    Cleanup

    The mess in falsecreek happened before the where any regulations and the Dew line is being cleaned up.

    Ed Deak you are a great one for economic matters but have you ever looked into the cap and trade and carbon credit scams? The huge money and politics behind the climate change scam

    Here is a start http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/18/ipcc-official-%e2%80%9cclimate-policy-is-redistributing-the-worlds-wealth%e2%80%9d/

  • Cool Hand

    1 year ago

    Water Treatment Plants

    Water treatment plants should be a prerequisite to the issuance of a mining permit and commencement of mining operations.

    State of the art water treatment plants should be situated on-site where the hydraulic flows are channelled to the wtp.

    The Brittannia Mine is a case in point. For 70 years acidic, metal-contaminated water flowed untreated into Howe Sound.

    Now with a state of the art water treatment facility, the wtp treats ~4 billion litres of water and removes over 255,000 kilograms of heavy metal contaminants annually.

    Furthermore, a micro-turbine, utilizing the outflowing treated water, powers the treatment plant. Another win-win.

    http://www.epcor.ca/en-ca/about-epcor/operations/operations-bcp-pnw/britannia-mine/Pages/default.aspx

    That's an environmentally sound first step IMHO.

  • david hadaway

    1 year ago

    and abroad

    People who visit Canada and happen to see a clear cut or mining operation leave astonished at our brutality toward our own land.

    Now similar things are being done elsewhere by Canadian corporations, to such a degree that there are parts of the world where a Canadian passport has gone from being something that would open doors to being an embarrassment.

  • Fiat lux

    1 year ago

    willy....My main interest is

    willy....My main interest is not so much economics, but the tricks and gimmicks used by a long line of religions and ideologies to enslave and mass murder millions in thousands of years of history, with the distorted application of the most beautiful sounding theories.

    The biggest crime wave in history is going on right now with the theory of neoclassical market economics, that has little to do with the claimed purpose of real economics, but with the legalization of criminal activities, in the name of "economics".

    The above story is a good example of how theories can be misused and misapplied to legalize destruction.

    And all for a very simple reason no politician or part would dare to touch with a flagpole:

    "Wealth is the temporary control of resources/energy"

    "Wealth can not be created, only taken from others, the environment and future generations"

    Especially, when the accounting system used to "create wealth" has no debit/liability columns.

    What a fantastic racket, yet people go and vote for its continuation.

    Ed Deak.

  • RickW

    1 year ago

    Vote Green in the Upcoming Provincial Election

    What else can the ordinary citizen do (other than bury her/his head in the effluent and hope it all goes away)?

  • Skywalker

    1 year ago

    Voting Green?

    You jest right? That would guarantee another four years of the same.

  • RickW

    1 year ago

    Skywalker

    so what else? No matter who one votes for it "would guarantee another four years of the same".

  • For a better world

    1 year ago

    Your are partially correct, Cool Hand

    Water treatment plants should be one of the prerequisites before issuing a mining permit and commencing any mining operations.

    And I agree "State of the art water treatment plants should be situated on-site where the hydraulic flows are channelled to the wtp."

    Although the Britannia Mine Beach spewed toxic wates into Howe Sound more than 70 years, we the taxpayers funded the reclamation costs. Neither Anaconda nor any of the predecessor mining companies paid one iota for the environmental degradation caused by this operation. The only reason any action was taken to rectify the problem was to soften any the negative image during the Olympics.

    I also suspect as part the Province's "smoke and mirror" environmental program was the closure of the Woodfibre pulpmill. Maybe the lucrative subdivision of forest lands in the Sooke area was part of a generous compensation package.

  • Sask Resident

    1 year ago

    No Process

    All governments have policies to make companies to rehabilitate mine sites then to walk away, but few have a process to do it and the expertise to know if plans are appropriate. Then other agencies put things in the way, like EC not allowing tailings below water in naturally deep lakes, the safest way to store ARD tailings. I just hope BC doesn't go the way of the disasters in NS and Ontario, with hills of acid generating tailings.

  • Sask Resident

    1 year ago

    DPL

    Who works at and gets paid by all these BC mines? Do they pay taxes and would they be considered taxpayers? Or do you only consider government employees who get paid with other people's taxes as taxpayers?

    A BS's biggest polluter remains the city of Vancouver.

  • Kreditanstalt

    1 year ago

    OTOH...

    Beg to differ: real wealth is generated by farming, fishing, agriculture, mining and manufacturing. Not by selling stuff to one another. Not by baristas or real estate agents. Real wealth is not paper money - is in fact destroyed by governments! - but is the only route to higher standards of living.

    The mining process, from initial exploration to defining resources to permitting to actual production is extremely lengthy
    and risky. 90+% of mining ventures never pan out, never going into production. As an investor in junior and producing miners I have LOST money roughly half the time and I'm beating the odds.

    Taking risks should be rewarded and, while I heartily agree that dealing with all real environmental danger should be the responsibility of the companies, we must also acknowledge that excessive government interference in private business impoverishes us all in the long run.

  • Fish-counter

    1 year ago

    If they follow the model of the BC fisheries industry...

    ...the cleanup will be done by volunteers.

  • zalm

    1 year ago

    The costs of cleanup

    Brittania Beach is a useful example - there are hard figures on that project that can be extrapolated to tell us what it will cost to clean up BC.

    That nice treatment plant Kuhl Hound speaks about cost $20 million to build, and will cost about $4-5 million to operate each year for the next 20 years. It will have to continue to operate for another 300-700 years before the acid drainage is sufficient slow to be of little risk to Howe Sound again. Total cost in 2008 dollars: $1.2 - 3.5 billion.

    Taxpayer dollars.

    Multiply that by 1,800 closed or abandoned sites (the Ministry of Natural Resources recorded 3,300 mines in BC, so I'm not sure where the other 1,500 went - yes I know some are still operating, but not that many) and then reduce that number by 50% to allow for the number that protentially won't generate enough acid rock drainage to worry about - that's 900 mines, most of them the smae size or smaller than Brittania.

    So let's take the low end of the scale. 900 mines times $1.2 billion over the shorter life of the reclamation project is $1.1 trillion!

    Let's say we're wrong, and all the mines need treatment at the long end of the scale. That's $6.3 trillion! - in 2008 undiscounted dollars.

    Anyone in the mining industry want to buy an annuity to cover that cost?

    Didn't think so. Too busy justifying their work as "honest God-fearing toil" continually at risk of being robbed by "them revenooers". I guess we'll just cut education and welfare again to afford it.

  • Fish-counter

    1 year ago

    Zalm: like I said, it will be done by volunteers

    Your figures are probably about right. what you don't say is that we just won't bother. Most, if not all of the mines, will be abandoned.

    One other notable is the copper mine on Mount Washington. The Tsolum River folks, led by local hero Jack Minard, have cleaned up the system and started to salmon recovery process. http://www.tsolumriver.org//

    This was started and has been carried through by volunteers. They had to prod government to act. The good news is that they succeeded. Jack Minard and the other people who worked on the Tsolum river deserve medals.

    The Raven Coal Mine in Baynes Sound, that is the start of a whole other story.

  • freebear

    1 year ago

    Who Will Clean Up Our Mining Mess?

    Peoples' grandchildren, thats who!

  • Terry1950

    1 year ago

    Even bigger messes to come

    You take this event, add it to the dismal efforts put in by Alberta to deal with a recent oil spill in Northern Alberta and then ask yourself: "Do you really want Enbridge building a pipeline from Alberta through BC (crossing a major earthquake fault) so they can fill up tankers to sail through the straights?".

    My answer would be a resounding NO. Enbridge has a terrible history for mess ups and this WILL, not could, be a terrible threat to the whole west coast.

    For more see http://michiganmessenger.com/40223/inspection-records-for-enbridge-pipeline-spotty-at-best

  • snert

    1 year ago

    Zalm

    Quote:
    Let's say we're wrong, and all the mines need treatment at the long end of the scale. That's $6.3 trillion! - in 2008 undiscounted dollars.

    Nice to see that you've checked out all the options, including those that may not have been developed yet and come up with a financial Armageddon. It might be more productive to put that incredible mind of yours to work figuring out ways to mitigate any pollution as opposed to preventing mining all together.

  • zalm

    1 year ago

    The usual misunderstanding

    ...from the usual suspects.

    "It might be more productive to put that incredible mind of yours to work figuring out ways to mitigate any pollution as opposed to preventing mining all together."

    My RRSP happens to have a little Kinross in it and my TFSA some Kootenay. God only knows what my pension fund has in it, but I'm sure Pender Paul can tell us both. I'm not sure you're quite on the ball there, snert.

    Weren't you just going to tell me that perhaps I can just buy some AMR pollution credits or something that I can trade on some exchange somewhere to make more money so someone can pollute more and I can get rich....

    NOT.

    On a planet possessing a crust coated more than 60% by a highly reactive substance called water, handling the problem of sulphides is not going to be easy no matter what you do. It's not as if you can put the tailings in a sealed barrel to keep the water and oxygen away from it, dump it in a salt mine, and let it handle itself over the next few hundred years.

    That said, bioremediation with sulfur-reducing bacteria is still in its infancy, but shows some promise. Just the kind of thing BC could be a leader in - if only its ruling party would look up from grubbing for moolah from its corporate base to seed a few dollars and resources to a research group or two and point the bat over the fence, saying "We shall conquer acid mine drainage by the end of the decade!".... er...sorry, got a bit carried away by my Kennedy impersonation, there.

    Listen, if the Fiberals haven't come up with a solution, and the NDP haven't come up with a solution, who am I? I'm just some schmoe who's always harping on about waste and inefficiency and designing accounting systems that pay attention to the true cost of any product or process, and when all else fails, use less or none at all unless you can figure out how to pay the whole-cost-accounting price.

    But that seems to be something akin to communism for some of our readers....

  • zalm

    1 year ago

    fish-counter

    Are you telling me the Tsolum is being rehabilitated simply by covering up the tailings with something that won't let the water drain through, and then the land is re-terraced and planted over top? Sounds too simple!

  • Cool Hand

    1 year ago

    Sha-Zalm

    Quote:
    That nice treatment plant Kuhl Hound speaks about cost $20 million to build, and will cost about $4-5 million to operate each year for the next 20 years.

    Well, not exactly. The capital cost of the plant was $15 million for the largest point source of polluting ARD in BC.

    That capital cost was incorporated into the PPP arrangement whereby the guvmint only coughs up $1.36 million/annum inclusive of capital, operating, and maintenance costs.

    http://www.partnershipsbc.ca/files/documents/Britanniacasestudy_000.pdf

    So the total real cost to guvmint is $27.2 million over the time frame of 20 years v. your ~$120 million figure.

    I won't even touch the rest of your mathematical derivative extrapolations and I doubt Nick Leeson would either. ;)

    Nevertheless, it's also important to note that if the Britannia Mine was situate in the semi-arid Similkameen Valley or Boundary country, for example, the ARD would be virtually non-existant.

    Case in point: The Similco copper mine west of Princeton, which has literally millions upon million of tonnes of mine waste rock/tailings adjacent to Hwy 3. No ARD seeps into the adjacent Similakameen River AFAIK. Ya probably are also aware that it is in the process being re-opened.

    Another example - further east in Greenwood (Boundary country) massive slag piles remain from mining operations over 50 years ago and no ARD exists in that drainage basin AFAIK either.

    The big problem exists west of the Coastal (Cascade) Mountain range in the proverbial "rain forest" where the monsoons provide the basis for major ARD.

    And that's why I postulated that new mining operations should include waste water treatment plants from the outset. And those would be much smaller and cheaper than the Britannia example.

    Quote:
    Fish-counter - The Raven Coal Mine in Baynes Sound, that is the start of a whole other story.

    That's a proposed underground thermal coal
    operation in a region where major underground coal operations have been the norm since the days of the Dunsmuirs. Not much leaching to occur therefrom (similar to the Quinsam coal operation up-island).

    Much of the anti-Raven mine rhetoric that I have read is not based upon science, logic, reality or common sense. But for those still perturbed - again just have a waste-water treatment plant from operations outset.

    And in the spirit of the legendary Bob Dylan, on his 70th b-day, some of his poetic justice/enviro musings still remain relevant today:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk3mAX5xdxo

  • Fish-counter

    1 year ago

    Zalm: the fish seem to like it

    Apparently, when some of the copper is eliminated, the rest precipitates out by natural processes. Capping the mine is not the whole solution, but it worked enough to allow salmon back. Don't believe me, but read their web page and their research lit.

    Cool Hand: You seem to like coal mining. Have you ever been down one? You wouldn't use the Dunsmuir name so readily if you knew their legacy. Aside from the waste water issue, the sheer lunacy of trucking all the coal over to Port Alberni is ridiculous. Dunsmuir knew enough to ship the coal out, or to use the railway. There is already a track in place, but it would need repairs. All those trucks over The Hump? That is just plain dumb.

  • Frank

    1 year ago

    Kreditanstalt

    "As an investor"

    Investors are no different than the real estate agents and baristas you put down in your post. Workers create wealth, investors don't anymore than real estate agents do.

    "while I heartily agree that dealing with all real environmental danger should be the responsibility of the companies"

    How about the responsibility of the companies and the shareholders? Just in case the company goes bankrupt and leaves the taxpayer holding the bag as usual?

    "we must also acknowledge that excessive government interference in private business impoverishes us all in the long run."

    What impoverishes us is exploitation of the natural environment and workers by people that get rich off other people's labour and public resources.

  • Frank

    1 year ago

    Sask Resident

    Who put the wealth in the ground? Your companies? How come you guys are all pro-government when they let you act with the same level of responsibility as a group of drunken frat boys but when the bills come due you're suddenly anti-government?

    Perhaps if corporations in particular and the Right in general understood words like responsibility this article wouldn't have had to have been written.

  • morechatter

    1 year ago

    Poor countries are into mining destroying the environment

    What is Canada's excuse? And it is not like it is making the poor countries better off for it while the environment pays the biggest price.
    http://www.newint.org/easier-english/mining/miningfacts.html
    Global marketing, the Chinese will do the Labor along with 3rd world countries because the people work real cheap and nobody cares about rules and many are educated while using the mining resources in Canada destroying its waters to keep it all afloat.

  • richard j

    1 year ago

    More then Acid Run off

    Some good points have been made about the success's in cutting back acid mine runoff. Some very important calculations have not been made though Just how much money was spent in researching the problems at Britannia sure there are costs in the real construction/operation of the project But what were the costs that lead up to identifing the problem the engineering in fixing the problem and court and investigation costs.
    And what was the damage done over the YEARS of pollution Just how many salmon smolts were killed not to mention shrimp and crab. What are the health costs to the people ? Just looking at the cost of the small plant is false !
    With the Tsolum for a small mine with under 100 employees operating for less then 30 Years We lost 4 species of salmon the river was pasteurized We lost the genetics for this run that were established over thousands of Years What are the true costs here? CONGRATULATIONS to the volunteers whom fought to have a clean up effort ! But after googling the web I found Millions of dollars of tax payers dollars went into the investigation o0f what was causing this problem and attempting to engineer a solution Creating a Fish hatchery to attempt to preserve the precious genetics of the salmon and trout stocks
    This is just acid mine drainage What about the " HEAP LEACH " methoids of refining using Arsenic and Cyanide
    We NEED MINING !!! But until we can solve the world wide problems associated with the after affects of these operations CARE must be taken not to assist the bad actors whom create the problems! And not assist the companies that go about the right methods of production

  • zalm

    1 year ago

    Calc hound

    I recognize math is hard, but I think perhaps you are not in possession of all the facts. The document you provided shows the discounted net present value, not the actual cost of the project. The DNPV in this case is a "sales job" not the gospel.

    I'm sure it was only your error, and not malicious, so I offer as correction the real document (or at least as much as we're allowed to see, because Partnerships BC contracts are exempt from FOI regulations, and they and their clients regard all contracts as proprietary and secret information. Unfortunately for them, they do have to shell out some information in order to look good to the government and the public and the sell the next private partnership contract to the gullibles in the Ledge and the ink-stained wretches at their keyboards. It's this information that provides the real costs of this "partnership".

    The actual cost is discounted to net present value at a rate of 8.12%, which indicates that the true dollar value of the contract that was let in 2005 was $130 million. Do the math yourself.

    The final report of the group that put the proposal together is here:
    www.partnershipsbc.ca/.../Britannia_Value_for_Money_Report_March_05_FINAL.pdf

    Incidentally, you'll note that the original estimate by Klohn Crippen in 2003 was for a $100 million plant if built and operated by the government. The private partnership obviously missed that target by the proverbial country mile, but I guess investors have to get something for sucking at the public teat....

    As to which areas suffer ARD, you need to go back to the books on that one too. Two of among the many large ARD generators are the Sullivan in Kimberley (at which two employees died a few years ago in a wastewater reclamation hut operated by Teck) and the Gibraltar in the Cariboo. The Hedley Nickel Plate mine (near Greenwood - probably the one you're referring to) is also a significant generator, but treatment has focussed more on reclaiming gold from old tailings piles than significant reclamation of water resources.

    Frankly, if I were you, I'd go back to my "derivative extrapolations" and go over them again a little more carefully. Or else sell me your house at its "discounted net present value" - I figure that ought be - oh, I dunno - about $4,500. I'll even pick up the HST!

  • zalm

    1 year ago

    Oh...

    I wish I had time to take on kreditanstalt's misapprehension about "real wealth". But Galbraith says it in The Affluent Society far better than I could - gotta go find that page.

    "Real wealth" is a misnomer used by the wealthy to justify increasing its wealth by any means. Sufficiency for all demands no increase in wealth - merely that wealth not be "sticky" in certain hands, but instead circulate around and around... kind of like old Social Credit.

    Nothing wrong with greed, keditanstalt - as long as it doesn't come at someone else's expense. And here, it does.

  • Fish-counter

    1 year ago

    Interesting comment from a high school student...

    His ambition was to get a prospector's ticket so he could stomp all across the country, claiming he was prospecting for minerals. Apparently, one can trespass at will as long as you are looking for gold or oil. OK, so we need mines. But do we need the pollution?

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