The Giant Mine Project

mrG — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 12:24:14 -0500

There's news south of the border of some trace amount of some lethal chemical discovered in an office, and tragic as that might sound, my car radio told me last night about another cache of poison, only this one was not a product of bio-terrorism, this one was joyously deployed by the power of irresponsible corporate greed and literally in the pursuit of gold:

It's taken four years to decide what to do with the 237,000 tonnes of highly toxic (arsenic trioxide) dust, a by-product of 60 years of gold mining.

Let's imagine that: That's enough chemotherapy doses to fill over 7 eleven-story office towers, and it's been swept under the bedrock carpets, and only now do we have a plan. And, after 60 years accumulation and 4 years deliberation, here's our plan: There's no safe way to transport it even if we did get it all above ground, so we're going to build a massive and highly technical freezing system and then keep the cache on ice ... forever.

Forever is an awfully long time.

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The Giant Mine Project