2.6Kg Gold Nugget found by amateur in Oz

This person was an Amateur Australian gold digger.

Hardly what I'd call commercial

or in 1st world where you are unlikely to be found out.

He wasn;t doing it commercailly.

As yyou said in the 3rd world it might well be the most popular but losts of things are more popular in such countries, it doesn;t mean it's the best way to go about things maybe that's why they are classed as 3rd world couintries

I wasnt talking about him, that was a general comment.

Its not illegal in the 1st world when done properly.

I wasnt talking about him.

That comment was about the expensive.

We werent discussing the best way, we were discussing whether its illegal to do it that way commercially and whether the fact that mercury is expensive is a problem.

Nope.

Not forgetting the Canadian Tar Sands where an area larger than some countries has been stripped of its 'topsoil' to extract the sandy, oily sludge to be heated up and oil extracted leaving total desolation.

Honey pie anyone who has flown over it knows it was total desolation before they started The great Canadian bugger all

It was pristine forest, with all the biodiversity that goes with it. It was also sometimes native land too, who were bribed (conned) to giving up their rights.

Meanwhile down in the US of A they extracted coal by literally blowing the top of mountains to get at it more easily.

The same destruction of forests happened with farming.

At least the land not bespoiled in the process. Most of Southern UK was forest and now it is mostly agricultural and much fewer trees.

The American way of business is generally to just abandon redundant factories/mines/whatever plus all the contamination that they have caused.

They do tend to be quite good at uglification.

Oh my god, a treehugger. I have a housing estate going up in my local town, 10 acres of pristine meadow and woodland, now going to be a sprawling monoculture of social scroungers sand snowflake hipsters with Audis.

It was also sometimes native land too, who were

Its called a deed of sale., If I owned a million acres of great canadian bugger all Id sell it for the price of a half decent life and an education.

Tell me, are you really as dumb as you appear to be, or is ait a superb act? And have you ever left the county in which you were born?

A very efficient commercial process.

A lot more since the indistrial rebvolution.

Not so much any more.

The main problem with the project (what little I know about it), is the settling ponds. They contain hydrocarbons. Even the original waterway, before tarsands began, had hydrocarbons in it. The water was not "clean", like in some other projects.

Nevertheless, there are square miles of settling ponds, and no obvious way to dispose of them in an acceptable way.

If there was a nuclear power plant nearby, there would be a clean source of power for post-processing the water. But I don't think any power sources nearby, are all that clean.

All I can tell you, is settling ponds have been growing at a significant rate since the project started. And I haven't heard a credible project to dispose of them. If the water was a reasonable thing to dispose of in its current state, they would have done that already.

the water was never perfect in the Athabaska. There would be tar balls in it, as an example. And that's before we started digging.

"As a pond is filled, a predictable settling pattern occurs during the initial three to five years. The sand quickly sinks to the bottom, then a middle layer forms, known as mature fine tailings (MFT), which is comprised of about 70 per cent water and 30 per cent fine clay. The top three or so metres of the pond is water, which is re-used at the mine site or in in situ processes to minimize the amount of fresh water taken from the Athabasca River. At Suncor’s oil sands operations, for example, water from tailings ponds now provides up to 90 per cent of water required for ongoing operations. "

This means the tailing ponds aren't as deep, as a certain mining project that broke its levy and ruined the river next to it. But still, the number of square miles of tailing ponds is troubling, and implies they'll never be dealt with... except by the government.

And all of that water surface, has to be protected by sound devices, to scare away aquatic bird life. You can't be hosing off ducks all day long, because hosing them off isn't good enough to begin with. It is one hell of a large surface to police.

Can you imagine how much material it would take, to make liners for ponds like that ? If you used reverse osmosis, it would be the same problem, cubic miles of "plastic". Distillation would separate the water, but you'd still have a cubic mile of solids to deal with. The landscape is flat. There are no big holes that need filling :-) Or I'm sure they would have tried that.

When the proposal came along to build some SMRs, they should have considered fitting some SMRs in the region. But that project is so unrealistic, the plan is funded... but there's no visible progress. Anything they could do, to shrink the square mileage, would be an improvement. And your rate of water reclamation, has to be greater than the rainfall rate (since the ponds are not covered).

Paul

This would be one of those rare cases where a wind turbine would do the job. No wind today? Well, we'll wait, and do some more processing when it is windy.

Andy