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Most underground mines involve ventilation systems.  You need to push cool surface air down into those hot, deep workings to keep them cool.  The right temperature in underground mine workings is not only a matter of pleasant surroundings.  I recall reading that the accident rate jumps as the temperature increases: at about seventy degrees things are optimally safe, at eighty degrees the accident rate soars.   Ventilation systems are needed because the rocks are hot from the heat generated by radioactive processes deep in the earth’s interior.   Now professors from the University of British Columbia (UBC) are looking at tapping into the heat from closed underground mines.  They reckon this is a cheap source of energy for those dwellings and businesses that remain behind after the mine is shut down.  Now that is sustainable development for you: first a mine and then a solarium, or should we call it a heatarium or mine-arium?

To be serious, at this link is a CBC interview with Dr. Mory Ghomshei of UBC.  It is light fair, but fun as he peers into a rosy future of energy from abandoned mine shafts in cold parts of the world.   I can think of all sorts of engineering and environmental factors that are going to have to be addressed before we can cost-effectively tap into natural radiactively generated heat from old mines.   Not the least is the nasty tendency the groundwater has of rising to pre-mine levels and flooding old workings.  Then there is the  issue of keeping the headgear and shaft open for continued access to keep the heat exchange equipment functional. 

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if this is feasible except in the most isolated instances.  This cynical thought is not dissipated by Ghomshei’s statement:

“It is going to be relatively expensive, but Iunderstand the energy cost of Yellowknife exceeds $100 million per year.  So if you can spend a few tens of millions of dollars to tap into a great resource—that would be absolutely rewarding and would be paid back very shortly.  It is renewable energy because of the mine workings which is quite extensive, so the natural gradient of the heat into the mine workings would replenished the heat and the water would be replenished by the groundwater.  So it is a 100 percent renewable resources.”

That is if the water that comes out is not acidic, which in most mines in the north of Canada is probably the case.  The thing I find so disconcerting about Dr. G’s interview is that ever present falling back on the need for the federal government to pay the bill.  If his idea is such a good one, why not get a commercial enterprise going about it?  Why this constant: I have a good idea, now let us get the taxpayer to fund it.   What is wrong with free enterprise?  After all this is not research:  this would be a good old power production system.  It’s all very well, and is indeed the job of professors, to dream up the future.  But they should show some respect for the taxpayer in demanding my money (albeit yielded to the government) to put into place their dreams. 

No recommendations or endorsements implied in this posting.  But it is information that attracts my attention and it is information that may benefit a mine somewhere, so I pass it on.   Keep in mind I am a semi-retired professional engineer and produce this blog on the basis that I write what interests me, not what may be of commercial benefit.  But I am human and cannot be interested in something if it does not come to my attention; the service I write of here came via an unsolicited e-mail.  

Another reason I post this piece is that it gives me an opportunity to explore an issue that fascinates me, namely the development of language.  In this piece we see grammatical and word-meaning errors.  But keep in mind that one of the many things pushing language change is copying by the rest of us of the linguistic mistakes made by the famous and powerful. 

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 I love the “best-of-the-breed,” the “technology evangelists,” and the chance to “save cash.”  Regardless, they may be able to help you. 

I do not thinks there is anything wrong or inappropriate about the facts I cite in this article.  My Canadian friends bewail the fact that the United States is an imperial power, colonizing smaller nations and exploiting their resources.  They deny that Canada is as imperial a colonizer as any.  Consider Canadian ownership of United States mines. 

Canadian companies own four of the five largest gold mines in the United States.   In fact Canadian companies own at least 13 of the 30 largest gold mines in the United States.  Considering that 18 of the 30 largest gold mines in the United States are owned by foreign companies, one must pause to wonder if the United States is not the colonized, rather than the colonizer —the object of imperialism, rather than the actor.   

Placer Dome (now Barrick), for example, is a player in the game of owning US mines.  With more than 13,000 claims over nearly 270,000 acres, they are aggressive.  Rio Tinto comes second with over 10,000 claims over nearly 200,000 acres. 

I get these facts and refer you to many others at the Environmental Working Group website.  Clearly they do not like mines or mining, much less foreign ownership of mines that the 1872 Mining Law makes so easy and so lucrative for foreign companies.   But they do present facts and figures to make you wonder.

Personally, I wonder why US mining companies have been so slack in developing national resources.   Are they too busy with coal to worry about hardrock mines?  Are they too local to go beyond the town’s quarry?  Are they risk averse, goaded to caution by lawyers and regulators, who know their clients cannot flee across a border?  Maybe there are so many other opportunities in the US to get rich, that only desperate foreign companies, bereft of opportunity in their own lands, must perforce cross northern borders, just like workers cross southern borders?  Or is the 1872 Mining Law to blame for making it all too easy to get something for nothing? 

I suspect that the US is not alone in having most of its mining controlled by Canadians.  Consider the other obvious places: Peru, Chile, and other parts of South America. I cannot find the comparable statistics for foreign ownership of Canadian or Australian mines.  (It will of course be easier to count one day if it is all owned by Xstrata.)  Let me know your opinion. 

In the early 1960s in South Africa my parents moved to Evander, a mining town in sight of Sasol where coal was turned into petrol or gas as we term it in the Untied States.  The plant was built in response to international sanctions over apartheid.  If I recall correctly, Fluor designed and built the plant.  So it should not take Congressional hearings to establish that the technology exists.  We all know that the United States has plenty of coal–last time I wrote about the issue, I quoted a talk at the SME meeting in Denver where somebody said at least 200 years worth. 

But it may well take Congresional action to bring sanity to the mining that will be required to provide the coal.  I refer to recent reports on fights about valley fills at coal mines.  Everybody wants their car, but nobody wants topographic change to make the car possible.  Consider the civil war that will be needed to tear up the landscape of the west to get the coal required to move all those SUVs around California and keep the lights on in the Las Vegas casinos.  

I usually avoid politics naked and national.  In this instance, however, one cannot help but wonder if we have subconciously elected to continue an Iraq adventure in the hopes of securing oil so we can avoid a potentially nasty set of decisions at home regarding energy resources. 

Clearly the fight over energy is going to get hotter as we pit uranium against coal, coal against southern valleys, oil against electricity, Alberta against the federal government, and global warming against air conditioned offices.  It is perhaps too much to hope for leadership on the issue.  I suspect it will be another of those great national debates in which the lawyers get rich and we “journalists” get material to write about.  And the rest of America gets increasing cost for gas: $3.30 when last I looked at the local California gas station.  Actually we paid just about that in 1970 in South Africa.  The difference is that we drove small cars.  So little changes except the “discovery” of new opportunities by another generation of car drivers. 

PS.  I wonder how many cubic yards of material have been moved to make the roads we drive versus the cubic yards to be moved to get the coal to make driving possible.

It is hard to believe that a 23-meter high wall of an open pit coal mine in Maryland can just fail and “cover” two miners.   Is this another instance of human hubris?  I know the old adage that a slope is stable on the morning of the day it fails.  But was there no monitoring of slope conditions, no sign of faults and joints that could form a failure plane, no monitoring of groundwater that might have reduced the factor of safety?  Did the mine just work on the assumption that no failures had occurred before and thus conclude that no failure could occur in future.  We await the news of the safety of the “covered” miner, but in the meantime we must ask these questions and wonder if it will take another round of resolute legal action to deal with complacency in the coal mines. 

I shudder at the linking of this slope failure and another recent tragedy on an eastern United States campus, but cannot shrug off the thought that these instances may be example of people being just too nice (or maybe too scared) to act.  Do we have a human instinct to believe the best of people?  Do we have a human instinct to avoid the confrontation that is so often necessary, but not undertaken, and then the non-undertaking results in these kinds of tragedy?

Has society been so whipped by over-reaction to political correctness that even when human health and safety is at stake we avoid action?  I have just read of a translation error that resulted in an offensive label on a couch delivered to a black family in Canada; and now the family wants to sue everybody in sight.  We are all aware of verbal slights in the United States.   Clearly there is no room for verbal nastiness to anybody and we should move to protest whenever it occurs.  But I fear that making a stink about a label from a Chinese company that has said they are sorry, sets a tone that leads to deterring people from acting fast and proactive when they should, when there is a real issue of life and death at stake. 

I had a personal incidence of this but a month ago:  a zero tolerance attitude, in  my opinion, should have been enforced.  But instead political niceness resulted in talk and no action.  I still am scared that an outburst will occur.  The response to a situation in which I was personally involved was no different from the response of the people who should have acted in Virginia, and maybe should have acted re slope stability in Maryland. 

My point is that to lead involves action.  Failure to act is negligence.  And I submit it is even more negligent when failure to act is based on a fear of offending the overly sensitive.  I submit that if as a society we overreact to every furniture label, thereby deterring good people from acting when life and death is involved, we must not be surprised when truly bad things happen.  I hope that the outcome in Maryland renders this piece just another irrelevant rant and rave, and that what I fear personally never comes to be.   As for labels on furniture, it is interesting to see Canada becoming as lawyer happy as the United States.

Nothing about mining, just a brief report on personal doings.  I have just arrived in Cedar Rapids after a flight from Las Vegas where I spent two days .  We did the Strip in the best tradition: one thing I miss is the ability to pop a 25 cent piece into a machine.  Now the least you can feed into a machine is a dollar bill.  It seems so extravagant.  I visited my favorite store in all the world: FOA Schwartz with three floors of toys for all ages.   Truly the place for people like me who need absolutely nothing more–except more toys.  So I bought a chess set of Disney characters: on side is all the villains (and villainesses, if there is such a word) and one side is all the heros and heroines.  The fields are all ploughed here in the midwest and the seed planted, but as yet there is no sign of the new corn.  So tomorrow I will venture to the farm and return to regular grandkid doings.  Thanks for the patience as you kept visiting this blog to read items that are not directly derived from the latest news.  I will do that tomorrow as well, for it looks like the villains and heroes of mining have been as busy as ever while I fought Orange Alerts in airport. 

Is it fair to brand carbon sequestration as a mining activity?  It is sort of mining in reverse:  putting something into the ground instead of taking it out.  Taken to its logical extreme, we could brand putting high-level radioactive waste into Yucca Mountain as reverse-mining, and even filling of open pits with household solid waste as reverse-mining.   Or are these activities simply a manifestation of sustainable mine development and de-development?

Regardless of the nomenclature (verbal acrobatics) involved, the idea is interesting.  I refer specifically to the article at this link.   As this figure shows, the article is about work done at Los Alamos to compile a computer code to study carbon sequestration in natural systems.  

The thing I found so bizarre about the article is the fact that the authors, staff at Los Alamos sound more like salesmen for GoldSim than disinterested researchers.  Good for GoldSim, bad for academic independence.  Good for global warming (cooling actually), and bad for…ah well, that’s the way it works in commerce and the absence of atomic bomb development. Let’s be grateful for those mercies at least. 

My two older kids did their undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.  I recall the old town, its beauty, its quaintness, and the many wooden boxes I found in the second-hand stores that line the streets. I recall average food, carelessly served by students, in old, bare-brick wall buildings.  I recall cold winters and steaming summers as we blundered through Wal-Mart to get that which was constantly needed to feed and clothe them. 

I do not recall any mines in the area that we drove through so often.  I do not recall any talk of mining.  I knew there were many excavations into the limestone and these now housed cold-storage and safe-storage companies.  My daughter, who studied civil engineering, says that in class the civil engineers talked only of tractors, pigs, and corn.  My son, studying political science, talked about those things that young men with ROTC scholarships talk about—and it is best I do not mention them here. 

Now I have found a site put up by the Lawrence Journal, LJWorkd.com that has a long spread on mining in southeast Kansas, a part of the state I never visited.   Go take a look at the site, as much for the stories it tells, as for the layout and graphics and utility of the site.  It is worth a visit, regardless of your mining affiliations and afflictions.  

The California State Water Resources Control Board by Resolution 92-49 adopted a policy that an area of contaminated groundwater where cleanup cannot be achieved may be designated a Containment Zone. To date no mine in the state has been designated a containment zone, but such a designation would bring clarity and closure to many of the vexing and contentious issue surrounding mine closure in California. This is why.

Consider a mine where you would expect it: in a zone of mineralization. The same natural conditions that lead to formation of the ore body are why pre-mining background water quality exceeds local groundwater quality standards. During mining the pit draws down the site’s water table and waste rock dumps and tailings impoundments change the inflow and recharge over large areas. The result is a change of groundwater flow patterns and constituent distribution. Application of standard regulations would indicate the need to “cleanup” the site by:

• Removing the source, i.e., the waste rock or tailings piles; and/or
• Control discharge by building covers over waste units; and/or
• Remove pollutants from the “contaminated” groundwater by pump & treat; and/or
• Get an NPDES permit and meet its limits by treating surface water if necessary.

Now assume that cost-effective & technically-practical covers are in place, that nobody would ever let you move rock or tailings from the site, that the wetlands result in NPDES compliance, and natural geology prevents off-site migration of the groundwater that is affected as much by the natural geology as by mining. Assume that you pump and treat to deal with the small part of the groundwater pollution that is from mining; nothing happens—there is no improvement of groundwater quality; and your consultant tells you that natural conditions swamp any improvement potentially wrought by pump & treat. To avoid the claws of the bring-a-suite lawyers and to eliminate the monthly meetings in Sacramento, what law do you seek to have applied?

Right now there is none that I know of—if you know please tell me. The containment zone policy was not truly designed for the mining situation I postulate. Rather it was designed and has been applied to the following case which is quaintly described on the internet:
South Bay site where a PRP built an adequate pump and treat system, operated it for years at significant expense, demonstrated decreasing mass removal that reached an asymptotic level for several years, turned off the system (with RWQCB permission) and demonstrated no change in contaminant levels (i.e. it did not increase), is required to continue monitoring, would have to turn the P&T on again if the plume threatens to migrate offsite (it’s still beneath the PRPs property), no drinking water source is threatened.

But maybe, just maybe, the Containment Zone policy—or at least the fundamentals of its approach—should be applied or be applicable to my postulated mine. There is nothing further that can be done to eliminate the source, it is not possible to stop discharges from the waste piles, groundwater pollutants will never be reduced or eliminated by pumping and treating (you cannot fight the whole of nature) and neither groundwater nor surface water leaving the site changes downgradient receiving waters. Why not call this a Containment Zone and bring closure, finality, and certainty to a site which is what it is and which never can be made significantly different. Sure it is polluted in common parlance, but then the job of laws is to make it possible for societies to function sanely and effectively for the benefit of its citizens in the face of nature’s vicissitudes. We do not live in a Platonic republic but rather in one beset by planes, bombs, hurricanes, nature’s caprice, and a desire for the material goods resulting from mining.