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?

Comments

I would

[future assassin]

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.

Re:I would

[bmo]

throw the ones responsible into jail for a long ass time to make a nice example.

While I applaud the sentiment behind this, the "ones responsible" will be some poor schmuck low on the totem pole sacrificed to the god Mammon. Probably a janitor somewhere that would be blamed for throwing away an "important memo" on "please don't do that" which didn't exist anyway.

In an ideal world, emails would be pulled, phone records retrieved, evidence recorded, and those up top would be held responsible for this. And in a really ideal world, none of this would happen. But this isn't an ideal world and fines are "just the cost of doing business."

Look at what Duke Energy got away with. Look at what they all get away with.

>letting the corporation survive

No. That won't fix anything. It has come to the point that corporate death penalties actually have to start happening to light a fire under the asses of employees that would see their livelihoods taken away by higher-ups in the corporation through mismanagement, along with boards seeing their corporate governance (and cash that goes with it) taken away, and stock holders wiped out. Only then will there be any motivation for good corporate governance.

--
BMO

Start with a prescription from Hipocrates:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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?

Re:Start with a prescription from Hipocrates:

[ColdWetDog]

The flaw with this analysis is the timeline. Yes, the short term impact on the cleaned beaches was pretty horrendous, but it remains to be seen how this plays out over time as the ecology recovers. It could well be that the cleaned areas actually had a closer return to pre-spill ecologies than the ignored beaches.

What we have done is to create an interesting, long term experiment.

'Always look on the bright side of life ....'

Re:Start with a prescription from Hipocrates:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The flaw with this analysis is the timeline. Yes, the short term impact on the cleaned beaches was pretty horrendous, but it remains to be seen how this plays out over time as the ecology recovers

Hear, hear. The "cleaned" beaches may come back closer to the original - after they've been repopulated by pioneer speecies and gone through the whole beach-equivalent of the succession to climax forest. The uncleaned beaches may get where they're going more quickly, but that may be somewhere other than where they started. And so on.

Maybe, once the toxins have been cleaned up by lifeforms in one case, the soil rebuilt and recolonized by successive populations of organisms in the other, they'll come back to what they once were. (Assuming the area hasn't been reshaped by then.) Maybe they'll come back as something else - like the "flip-flop" island of recent history: Lobsters ate the snails and kept their population down. A hurricane wiped out the lobsters. Attempts to recolonize by importing lobsters failed. Turned out the snail population boomed once the lobsters were gone and it got to where a newly introduced lobster would, within minutes, pick up enough snail riders to weight it down and eat IT, so now the ecology was stable in a different mode. So in either case the beach ecology may converge to a different equilibrium.

But there are sections of the Pacific Northwest where a natural phenomenon did something similar: Two glacers met along the front of the ice cap during the last ice age. When things finally melted they melted last, forming a dam holding back an ocean. When it finally melted through, the ocean poured through in that one spot. It scoured an area comparable to an eastern state down to bedrock, washing everything from topsoil to gravel to rocks to boulders off toward the Pacific. The area STILL is nearly as lifeless as the moon.

So my bet is the unwashed beach will reach a robust and stable exology in historic time. But I wouldn't be surprised if, even with lots of sea life washed up by wave action, the washed beach takes geologic time to make a similar recovery.

Re:Very low Toxicity

[mark-t]

All the tests so far mean is that the any of the toxicity that is in the sludge that got dumped from the tailings pond isn't leeching into the water itself, because the pH balance is good enough. The silt itself, however, is still actually *IN* the water, and its presence may pose a longer-term threat to human life and wildlife in the region if it can't be cleaned up.

Re:What would I *not* do?

[ArcadeMan]

I just bought Bitcoin-plated TOSLINK cables and the sound quality is fantastic!

Re:Humans aren't supposed to eat fish

[ledow]

Despite the fact that it's a commonly-held belief in the scientific community that, at least in part, we walk because we were shore-based waders, that our brain development was linked heavily with consumption of fish and fish oils, and that there are still entire communities that with the help of a simple tool (a net, or even just a series of wooden stakes in the rivers/oceans), they can capture enough food to sustain themselves indefinitely?

Wanna take down a cow single-handed? Good luck. Seen what a carrot looks like before the modern age of fertilizers and heavy cross-breeding? Want to see the effort involved in turning wheat into something you can actually eat?

Don't talk bollocks.

Well, I've got a suggestion for next time at least

[Immerman]

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.

Re:What would I *not* do?

[ShanghaiBill]

Gold is used throughout industry. Attempting to use Bitcoins in place of it would be a really neat trick.

Only 10% of gold production goes to industry. The rest goes to either jewelry or investment. Much of the jewelry is sold in India, where it is used by families as a store of value. If India had a better banking system, the demand for gold might fall by quite a bit.

Re:Very low Toxicity

[ColdWetDog]

Remember "So long and thanks for all the fish"?

What happens if it's just 'so long'? Did you ever stop to thing about that?

Re:What would I *not* do?

[jayrtfm]

Based on seeing the angst of my Indian friend when he was shopping for gold gifts for his family, there's a lot more cultural meaning than mere stored value.

Re:No Reference Data

[ColdWetDog]

Sonar fish counting works well for spawning fish in rivers. Salmon are typically counted this way because they all come up from the sea to spawn. Populations that live their entire lives in rivers or lakes would be much harder to count using this technique. Unfortunately, the only really accurate way to count the number of fish in a lake or pond is to dynamite it and count them as they float to the surface, subtract the number that stay floating and hope everybody else just has a headache.

The plans of mice and men

[TapeCutter]

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.

Re:The plans of mice and men

[russotto]

TFA doesn't say what caused the dam break, sometimes it's actually nobody's fault, ie: "shit happens".

Given that the previous engineering firm bailed out a few years ago with a letter that stank of CYA, I'm going to guess it's not that this time.

There is evidence

[future assassin]

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.

The ones

[future assassin]

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.

Knee Jerk

[labnet]

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.

Take preventative measures instead

[penguinoid]

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.

Re:What would I *not* do?

[sillybilly]

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Yes, there are tech items that can help

[NoKaOi]

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.

Here's Two suggestions

[Okian Warrior]

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...