Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [283]
The gold mine on Lihir Island dumps its tailings into the ocean via a deep pipe (a method viewed by environmentalists as highly damaging), and the owners claim that this is not harmful. Whatever the effects of that one mine on marine life around Lihir Island, the world would have a major problem if many other mines similarly dumped their tailings into the ocean. The Ok Tedi copper mine on the mainland of New Guinea did construct a tailings dam, but experts who reviewed its design before construction warned that the dam would fail soon. It did fail within a few months, so that 200,000 tons of mine tailings and wastes are now discharged each day into the Ok Tedi River and have destroyed its fishery. From the Ok Tedi the water flows directly into New Guinea’s largest river with its most valuable fishery, the Fly River, where suspended sediment concentrations have now increased five-fold, resulting in flooding, deposition of mine wastes on the river’s floodplain, and killing of floodplain vegetation over an area of 200 square miles so far. In addition, a barge carrying barrels of cyanide for the mine up the Fly River sank, and the barrels have gradually been corroding and releasing their cyanide into the river. In 2001 BHP, the world’s fourth largest mining company, which operated the Ok Tedi mine, sought to close it, explaining, “Ok Tedi is not compatible with our environmental values, and the company should never have been involved.” However, because the mine accounts for 20% of Papua New Guinea’s total exports, the government arranged for the mine to be kept open while permitting BHP to withdraw. Finally, the Grasberg-Ertsberg copper and gold mine of Indonesian New Guinea, a huge open-pit operation that is Indonesia’s most valuable mine, dumps its tailings directly into the Mimika River, whence they reach the shallow Arafura Sea between New Guinea and Australia. Along with the Ok Tedi mine and another gold mine in New Guinea, the Grasberg-Ertsberg mine is one of only three large mines in the world that is currently being operated by an international company and that disposes of its wastes into a river.
The prevalent policy of mining companies towards environmental damage is to clean up and restore the mined area only after the mine has shut down, rather than follow the coal mining industry’s practice of reclaiming the area as mining proceeds; the hardrock mining industry opposes that strategy. Companies assume that what is called “walkaway” restoration will be adequate: i.e., that cleanup and restoration will incur minimal costs, will go on for only 2 to 12 years after mine closure (whereupon the company can walk away from the site with no further obligations), and will involve nothing more than resloping of disturbed areas to prevent erosion, applying a growth medium like salvaged topsoil to stimulate revegetation, and treating water flowing out of the mine site for a few years. In reality, this inexpensive walkaway strategy has never sufficed for any major modern mine and regularly leaves water quality standards violated. It is instead necessary to cover and revegetate all areas that could be sources of acid drainage, and to capture and treat polluted groundwater and surface water flowing out of the site for as long as the water remains polluted, which often means forever. The actual direct and indirect costs of cleanup and restoration have typically proved to be 1.5 to 2 times mining industry walkaway estimates for mines without acid drainage, and 10 times those estimates for mines with acid drainage. The biggest uncertainty in those costs is whether the mine will produce acid drainage, a problem recognized only recently at copper mines though appreciated earlier at other mines, and almost never predicted accurately in advance.
Hardrock mining companies