Liefferink muddies mine waste debate

Jan de Lange | Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:58

[miningmx.com] -- IT'S a strange irony that one of the country’s foremost environmental activists - Mariette Liefferink and her Federation for a Sustainable Environment - should make every effort to sabotage one of the mining industry’s most important cleanup projects, and manage to do so.

If truth be told, the mining industry has a history extending over more than a hundred years of breaking up, excavating and leaching some of the most poisonous substances known to man, and then abandoning such operations. In South Africa miners have built up a reputation of being the economic version of scorched-earth terrorists.

It is therefore entirely understandable that civil organisations and government authorities put every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' of an environmental impact study and rehabilitation plan for a mining project under the microscope before approving it.

The Mine Waste Solutions (MWS) and First Uranium Kareerand mega-tailings dam is probably one of the most sensitive mining projects ever tackled in South Africa's gold fields.

The cleaning of 15 enormous tailings dams around Stilfontein and Khuma – the township which was established, in the apartheid tradition, 3km to the south-east of the town, away from the N12 freeway – is probably the community’s last chance to transform a typical mining town into a productive rural community.

The alternative is to let it collapse, like many other mining communities which have become ghost towns.

The 15 tailings dams lie on a broad stretch of dolomite running from the north-east through the town up to and under the Vaal River.

Apart from the sinkholes that are caused by certain types of dolomite, water and dissolved materials such as uranium, salts and sulphides flow through this porous rock. In the Stilfontein environment, they are slowly but surely killing off the Vaal River.

MWS extracts gold and uranium from the ore. Initially this will involve extracting 57% of the gold in the tailings and 33% of the uranium. When the uranium plant is fully operational, a pressure leach circuit will also remove all sulphides from the tailings.

Everything possible is being done to ensure that the tailings dumped in the Kareerand tailings do not land in the Vaal River 2km away.

It will take 15 years to break up the 350 million-odd tonnes of half-fossilised mine tailings using water cannons, convey them in an expensive piping system to the R3.2bn gold and uranium plant, process them and, using ecologically acceptable techniques, dump them in the new mega tailings dam.

It would be very near-sighted of anyone to overlook the macro-ecological benefits. For conservation experts, the disturbing aspect is that the new mega tailings dam is 2km from the Vaal River.

This is apparently why Liefferink and the Federation for a Sustainable Environment are prepared to do anything in their power to prevent the project going ahead. It's also difficult for the residents and farmers in the environment to accept it.

The site where the tailings dam is being built has however been selected with scientific precision and as prescribed by the Department of Water Affairs. It was selected from seven possible sites because the ground under the tailings dam has a massive clay layer that is between six and eight metres thick. Clay is naturally far more impenetrable than dolomite.

One of Liefferink’s specific objections is that clay does not occur everywhere below the new mega basin, but MWS has supplemented the weak places with a type of industrial clay, bentonite.

Chaos

Liefferink wants the tailings dam to have a plastic lining, but the dam is entirely too large for that. There are also sure to be seismic movements that could tear the plastic which, over the lifetime of the dam, would weather and disintegrate.

As prescribed, slightly more than a year ago MWS established an environmental forum that is managed by an independent outsider, Umsizi. Municipalities, business organisations, farmers and other landowners, residents' associations from Khuma and Stilfontein attended it, as did … Liefferink.

I'm not here to protect jobs. I'm here to protect the environment for posterity

She caused chaos. She said that their presence and participation in the forum implied that they consented to unbounded pollution and devastation by MWS. Others at the meeting pointed out that thousands of jobs would be lost if the building of the mega tailings dam was halted.

“I'm not here to protect jobs. I'm here to protect the environment for posterity,” she said, according to eyewitnesses.

It's an old tactic of environmental organisations to sabotage such consultation structures. It makes it possible later to accuse the mining company of not having consulted the community which is required by both environmental and mining legislation.

But the ecological sensitivity of MWS's Kareerand project is a soft target for environmentalists. Stilfontein is a dirty place. In order to clean it up, people's hands will have to get dirty.

More than 74km of piping pumps the tailings under high pressure, but not everything always goes according to plan.

That's why the environmental forum is essential, even should people want to oppose the mega dam. If complaints should arise regarding MWS’s activities, this is the best way to ensure they receive attention. Legislation makes it impossible for the company to ignore such complaints.

The harassing of the company and ganging-up of four avaricious landowners is threatening to swing the pendulum against the project. This would be a tremendous blow for Stilfontein and Klerksdorp but, even worse, it would do more damage to the country's image as an investment destination than the whole white-hot nationalisation debate.

Environmentalists are essential to the mining industry, but then they should play a constructive role. They should improve the industry, not try to destroy it.