Another large metal mine tailings dam (MMTD) has failed, this one in Brazil—discharging 13 million cubic meters of pollution into the Paropeba River with hundreds of people dead or missing. Vale Mining CEO, Fabio Schvartsman remarked that his company “followed the technicians’ advice and you see what happened. It didn’t work. We are 100 percent within all the standards and that didn’t do it.” (1)
Every large-scale hard rock mine requires a large-scale tailings depository. There are over 3,500 large MMTDs world-wide, some of the world’s largest man-made structures. Each, in theory, designed to last in perpetuity or at least millennia. Yet NONE of these are over 100 years old. Failure Rate: on average, one of these structures fails every eight months (about three every two years). These environmental disasters mostly occur at operating mine facilities and 39% of the failures in recent decades are on US soil. (2)
The risks to Chilkat salmon would grow proportionally to mine scale and ore acidity. With a few hundred new mine-related jobs, the economics and politics of the Chilkat Valley would be driven by mineral extraction and no lobbying, lawyering or reclamation bonding would change that. Voices for sustainable salmon—back of the bus, please! Finding new deposits in an operational mine is much easier, meaning extending the mine’s life and creating far more tailings than initially planned, all rubber-stamped by agency lackeys. And someday—and it won’t be “millennia”—that MMTD will fail. Chilkat salmon forever! No mine.
1) (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/26/hundreds-missing-after-vale-dam-burst-at-brazil-mine-seven-bodies-found.html)
2) https://www.nps.gov/articles/aps-v13-i2-c8.htm
Burl Sheldon