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Ask Slashdot: Can Tech Help Monitor or Mitigate a Mine-Flooded Ecosystem?
An anonymous reader writes "The dam break which flooded toxic mining sediments into Quesnel Lake, British Columbia will affect the food web of a very important fisheries ecosystem for many years to come. Here is the challenge; I am asking the people here to come up with suggestions for new and inventive ways to monitor and or help mitigate this horrendous ecological disaster. A large portion of a huge world famous food and sport fishery is at stake. The challenges ahead will take thinking outside the box and might not just be effectively done by conventional means." What would you do, and what kind of budget would it take?
Ask Slashdot. Instead I'd go to forums where actual field ecologists -- the ones who actually go out and sample water, etc -- to see what they suggest.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If only there were entire fields of research that dealt with precisely this sort of monitoring.
Somtimes, tech isn't the answer. Smetimes, letting nature do her work is the answer.
We bald monkeys haven't been here that long and nature has a way of dealing with distructive forces.
Just say'in.
We misantropes have nature on our side.
There's no quick and easy solution, so let the situation settle down and let real ecologists do their jobs as appropriate.
Heck, for all we know nature just might take care of herself as the sediments settle. Sometimes clean-up attempts just make things worse.
There used to be an environmental company here in the US that held a patent on in-situ treatment of chromium-6 comtaminated groundwater. They injected a heavy molassus syrup. This provided sugar for bacteria to eat, with a wee bit of sulfer. The net result was the bacteria ate the sugar and combined the Cr-6+ with the sulfur to form a highly insoluable sulfide.
This may work on several of the metals in the soup here.
Every thing I have herd has said that the toxicity is very very low (drinking water safe) and that the sediment is the only real threat to fishery's. Go be bombastic somewhere else. This is a non disaster, disaster, nothing to see, move along.
throw the ones responsible into jail for a long ass time to make a nice example. You can't hide behind money and corporations. Take away enough of their profits to just keep them ging and keep the emplayees working.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Unfortunately, you're setting up for the classic "Oh my god, look at the data! it's horrible and we need more money!" scenario. By not having reference data from your new toys, you will be strongly motivated (financially) to make your new, higher fidelity data look as bad as possible while making inaccurate comparisons to previous data with different systems. Sure, you'll make an honest effort to calibrate it, but your natural inclination is to take the worst plausible case.
That being said, I would really like for fisheries to be monitored with a long-term echofinder so that we can get long-term high fideltidy data on fish movement, populations and size. I haven't seen much of it, but it seems that the fish finders are good enough now that it should be possible.
Yes. This is completely random.
First: Do no (more) harm
One of the lessons from the Exxon Valdez oil spill is that attempts to clean things up may make them far worse, while the ecology's toughness in the face of environmental changes is vastly underrated.
For instance: They did a major removal of oil from part of a beach. In the process they stripped the bulk of the lifeforms off, leaving essentially sand - mineral dust. In an adjacent section that was missed, the orgnisms did a fine job of consuming the oil that had spilled. (It seems sea life has to deal with seeped oil quite a bit, from natural sources. Some stuff not only handles it, but considers it a valuable resource.). After a couple years the un-cleaned beach was flourishing (though perhaps not with the same mix of populations as before). A picture of the boundary is impressive: Cut like a knife.
Granted disturbing mine tailings is a very different case. But similar rules apply: Will letting them settle to the bottom, where they can be processed over decades to geologic time, cause less harm than attempting to clean them up RIGHT NOW - which might keep them mixed into the water and produce a much larger, sustained, iinput of "toxic" minerals to the bulk of the waterway's biosphere?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Because as we all know, shit flows downhill, and then bioaccumulates upward in food chains
3D printers, space colonies, space tourism, asteroid mining!!!
There! All solved!!!
NEXT!!!!
But don't let that stop you. After all, you have a belief system to maintain.
No human being on Earth can swim and catch fish, on a reliable basis, with their bare hands and mouth, and then proceed to eat the fish with their bare hands and mouth. Such a human being would be viewed as a psychopath. Human beings aren't supposed to eat fish, therefore you don't have a problem.
Do nothing and monitor the situation for a few generations.
Make industry pay to clean up it's "mistakes". Make it pay to restore the environment to the condition it was before they started. Make it pay for all the people affected, and their children, for years to come.
Then and only then will industry change and prevent this kind of crap in the future. No amount of 'monitoring' will ever fix anything.
I have plenty of "tech" to monitor anything you want.
What is the will behind it?Emmm? Eh?
It won't help for this disaster, but if you want to prevent it from happening again make sure all the CEOs and other management types who cut corners such that this failure could happen spend a healthy dose of time in prison. Ditto the environmental regulators who gave a passing grade to a high-risk situation. Maybe extract the clean-up costs from their personal assets as well - let's liquidate everything they own and garnish 75% of their income until all clean-up has been paid for or they die of old age. Because as long as the folks in charge can pocket their fat cost-cutting bonuses and then walk away unscathed from the consequences of their actions while a piece of paper (aka corporate charter) has its day in court this will just keep happening.
As far as this disaster is concerned I've got nothing non-obvious to contribute. My condolences to everyone downstream.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
specifically, use reverse osmosis and other separation methods to get all the pollution out of the huge lake... and drop it in the living rooms of the board of directors of the company that caused the spill.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
TFA doesn't say what caused the dam break, sometimes it's actually nobody's fault, ie: "shit happens". However the cause should be thoroughly investigated by forensic engineers and if it was negligence, then jail the negligent, which in the eyes of law is normally the principal engineer who signed off on the construction, "following PHB orders" is not a valid excuse in the eyes of the law.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
All of the above. Plus dissolve the company, maybe offering some of the better now un-employees jobs on the cleanup staff.
That would send a message about fuckups of this level, ensure this particular place is no longer a potential issue, and hopefully keep plenty of the workers employed until cleanup winds down so they can find work elsewhere.
My experience is in using biological indicators of water pollution in lakes at ex mining sites, specifically using macroinvertebrates. The problem is identifying each individual macroinvertebrate takes a huge amount of time, especially down to species level which is most useful, especially within lakes. If there was some way to speed up this identification with something like image recognition it would make detection and thus remediative action far more swift.
According to Wikipedia the waste pond contained about 18,000 tons of copper and a few hundred tons of other elements. Typically, sulphide ore deposits will include cadmium, lead, and arsenic, all pretty toxic.
We take copper pretty much for granted, but it's compounds are actually quite toxic. With the large amounts present I would put measurement of copper contamination pretty high on the agenda, and look to setup an independent lab to measure copper compounds in the water entering the lake, along with cadmium and arsenic. If we're lucky, the anaerobic conditions in the pond will mean that most of the heavy metals will be locked up as insoluble sulphides, but we can't take this for granted.
The fine particulates which have already entered the lake water are out of our control, and the majority will settle out over the winter when there is very little water movement. The next big influx is likely to come with the spring thaw, so remediation efforts should focus on either excavating or stabilising the deposited material downstream of the pond before winter sets in. Thereby minimising the additional contamination when the snow melts.
Just my thoughts,
Keith.
No smoking-gun emails are necessary. Everything that the corporation does is the responsibility of top management. Negligence, poor engineering, sloppy operations -- whatever the cause, management is responsible.
Call this guy http://www.fungi.com/about-paul-stamets.html
Saw him on TED, blew my socks off.
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world
Determine the boundary of the contaminated-sediment area. Pump cement in there, to make toxic concrete. Once it sets up, pull it out.
wheat, soybeans, milk or eggs and eating same with your "bare hands and mouth". You think the line is drawn at fish?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Can Tech Help Monitor or Mitigate a Mine-Flooded Ecosystem?
Yes, of course it can.
How? Oh, no idea. I'm just sure it can.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There is evidence that the company ignored warrning from the engineering company that built the projects and the pond had to be fortified or there would be issues in the future. The engineering company says they let the management and the gov know there will be issues if things didn't get fixed. No one listened so they bailed before this hit the fan and eventually it did.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
from the company and gove that ingnored the warrning from the engineering company that built the project that the current setup wasn't future proof.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
NO mine wants a tailings dam to collapse. There are regular conferences on how to design the things and specialists who design them. NO CEO wants this to happen, because the cost reparations is horrendous, and contrary to what the comments have been like here, the bosses of these companies (well the ones I've know of) want to be good corporate citizens.
Mining has risks, and incidents like this will ne analysed and fed back into the future design models, and like all things in life, will improve over time.
46137
First, make the company clean up their mess, with a suitable plan signed off by some ecologists. Make sure the clean-up will 1) be better than doing nothing and 2) accomplish its objective.
Whatever money you want to spend to clean up a disaster like this would be better spent finding other potential disasters and making sure they don't happen, rather than donating your money to save a greedy corporation from their responsibility and encouraging other companies to save money by having suckers clean up their messes.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Seriously.
This happens all the time.
Get over it.
Take your penis out of your mouth and leave it alone for at least 30 minutes. Stop putting peanut butter on your penis. Stop putting honey on your penis. You are just making your situation worse.
I have the answer. press start, reload last checkpoint, and then prevent the dam breaking.
Otherwise look up to see what cheats are available.
In what form are they? In solution? That's a tough problem to solve. As particulates, it may be possible to separate much of them out.
Dam Polley Lake and divert its outflow through centrifugal separators*. That will concentrate the particulates, which can be sent to temporary holding ponds and further separation.
*I wonder if the availale head from Polley Lake can be made to drive some sort of cyclonic seperator without the use of other power input.
Have gnu, will travel.
Can Tech Help Monitor or Mitigate a Mine-Flooded Ecosystem?
Yes. The first tech to start out with is a motorboat, a Van Dorn bottle, and a sediment sampler. Then pick out a lab or two that are capable of testing for the things that might be in the water, particularly nickel, arsenic, lead, copper, TSS, phosphorus, and nitrogen. Take your water samples at several locations and depths using said motorboat with said Van Dorn bottle and sediment sampler.
Okay, okay, I was kinda being a smartass. I get it, you have 5 days to complete your detailed action plan, and in a desperate Hail Mary you're hoping somebody here will reply with, "I was just about to launch my Kickstarter project for my solar powered 3-D printed heavy-metal-cleaning-superdrone running Linux on Raspberry Pi! I'll UPS my prototype to you tomorrow!" But that's not gonna happen. I'm sure you've already hired consultants to write things like, "if levels of A are above B mcg/L then C will be done over D timespan, until levels of A drop below B, at which point E will be done." D and E may have to be investigated if you don't know what they are yet. That's about as good as you're gonna get at this point.
Don't forget that your spill probably didn't just contaminate the lake with the metals you dumped in it, but also normal things (i.e. nutrients) that tons of sediment contain that could have various biological effects such as algal blooms. In addition to supplying them with clean water, I hope your mining company also reimburses the residents of the area for the economic (both short term and long term) impact this incident is having on them. You've been reaping the benefit of the rewards, now it's time to pay the price of the risk.
Quesnel Lake is 100 square miles, and the second deepest lake in Canada. If something has to be done that involves the whole volume of the lake or all of the lake floor, it's a very big project no matter how clever the solution.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
First suggestion:
There's been a lot of interest in using Zeolites to absorb heavy metal contamination in water. One specific experiment involved dragging a bag of zeolites through ocean water, the zeolites absorbed enough Thorium to be industrially useful as an ore (if there were a demand for Thorium, which there isn't).
I've found papers that indicate that Zeolites will absorb copper and lead, two of the contaminants listed for the Mount Polley disaster; chances are likely that zeolites would absorb the other contaminants as well.
Here's two papers to get you started:
http://www.yourncdinfo.com/cli...
http://cnu.edu/arc/documents/p...
Second suggestion:
There's been some success in removing non-volatile organic pollutants from soil using steam injection. Essentially, sink a pipe into the soil, inject steam, cover the area with a tarp, and collect the steam/water as it percolates up through the soil. This method can be used to extract non-volatile organic components including tetra-ethyl-lead. (I found that last bit surprising, but this was directly confirmed to me by one of the scientists involved.)
Depending on the chemical nature of the contaminants (ie - solubility, polar/non-polar character &c) this might prove useful in decontaminating some of the mud slurry.
Here's a paper to get you started:
http://nepis.epa.gov/Adobe/PDF...
Third suggestion:
Fungi can be used to remove heavy metal contaminants in flowing water. Place a bunch of fungi mycelium in sandbags in the water stream and the fungi will filter out the contaminants as the water flows through. Come back later, remove the bags and replace with a fresh batch.
Contact Paul Stamets' group over at Fingi Perfecti and see what their experts have to say. They might even have a product you could buy for the purpose.
Here's a paper and some contact info to get you started:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.fungi.com/about-pau...
To go further down that road: All assets are immediately turned over to the government and used to fund cleanup and mitigation. The government becomes the most preferred creditor.
http://tintuc.oho.vn/news/c180...
https://plus.google.com/101541...
As someone towards the beginning of the comments said, sometimes stuff happens. Maybe there was and maybe there wasn't corner cutting and/or poor engineering in this tragic situation. The take-away here for me is that we simply should not put these big mines in ecologically sensitive areas. Stuff will happen without regard to the best laid plans and intentions of mine developers. The Fraser river salmon may take a terrible hit from this pond breach. The proposed Pebble Mine is threatening the Bristol Bay area of Alaska, home to the worlds largest red salmon run, with a 700+ foot tall earthen dam upstream from major rivers, holding back a 4 mile long tailings and leach pond.
"What would you do, and what kind of budget would it take?"
I'm glad you asked! The first thing I would do would be to get all the environmentalists and the people who were responsible for the tailings pond together. Both of these groups need to understand how important it is to correct this issue together. Then I would find a lot of spoons and go out to the disaster site. Make them eat all of the spillage.
Problem solved!
Make it a game. Could you set up a virtual environment? Perhaps you can find an area where people explore the border of a habitat in the condition it "should be in" in the game. When they see an area with a problem, they can run chemical test which actually runs an actual chemicals test in the affected area. Perhaps since actual fish are affected, you can make it a virtual fishing game. Tough to say since I don't really know what all is involved in the actual clean up process.
The CEOs and anyone else in charge has already made sure that can never happen to them. They employ a variety of tricks to avoid being blamed for anything.
For example, they might hire a consultancy firm to tell them if what they are doing is safe. The job of the consultancy firm is to tell the people paying them what they want to hear, and maybe make a few easy low-cost recommendations so that the company can show how hard it is trying. Their contract explicitly states that they don't stand by any of it, and if the worst happens it definitely isn't the consultancy company's fault. The CEOs can say that they took the "best" advice available to them, because obviously they are clueless morons who know nothing about engineering so just take on what people tell them at face value. Suddenly there is no-one to blame, at least from a legal stand point. I mean, you could try, if you had millions of dollars and a couple of decades to fight it out with them, but you would probably lose.
At best you could try to pass a law that holds the company responsible, but getting those who were really to blame though greed and disregard for safety is nigh on impossible. They spend a great deal of time and money making sure of that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are a host of plants that will absorb heavy metal contamination, however the problem is that using them in this way is prevent by patents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://www.google.co.uk/patent...
and so is a dredge. So... Yes?
I work in a kitchen, where this sort of behavior would result in a forced closure and heavy fines. If I throw a few hundred pounds of chicken in an oven, I clean the surface I prepped them on. I do NOT wait until a disaster whips the stuff around and covers the whole kitchen with salmonella. While the contaminants are localized, they're easy to clean up. When disaster spreads them around, cleanup becomes nearly impossible.
In the mining context, we can't be leaving giant holes covered with contaminants just waiting for a storm! We know that a storm will come eventually. So we shouldn't fine companies for their failure after a disaster, we should send inspectors during normal operation to make sure they're meeting standards that will prevent disaster.
We need to do this because fining companies after a disaster will encourage them to minimize the financial effect of disaster, which may or may not involve behaviors that would prevent it in the first place. If the disaster rate is low enough, it could encourage them to set aside a fine-fund and make zero allowance for prevention. But if we penalize them for failure to prevent disaster in the first place, we'll be encouraging the behaviors we want to see.
Its a classic 'be careful what you wish for' problem.
Sediment sinks. You don't have to do anything. This is a self correcting problem.
There's a legend that once upon a time the captain always went down with the ship, and there were a lot of reasons why that would be a very good thing - *somebody* has to carry final responsibility, and the only one who can reasonably do so is the person with final authority. It's up to them to stay on top of everything they should be aware of, and if they fail in their duty they pay the ultimate price. Similar theme with sepukku in Japan - the person ultimately responsible for failure pays the price.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me to change the law so that modern CEOs do something similar - make them personally liable for the actions of the company on their watch, There's a good argument to be made for having a corporate veil to protect investors, but none at all for protecting the guy (or gal) calling the shots.
Of course to do change the law like that we'd have to first take back control of our government, and for now at least it seems the will to do so doesn't exist.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.