On Thu, 22 Mar 2012 04:04:50 +0000 (UTC), Przemek Klosowski
wrote:

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:52:19 -0400, Wild_Bill wrote:

A friend photographed his aerial view flying over a long ago closed
copper mining operation in NM.. the vast scale of those mines can't be
appreciated by looking at pictures in textbooks.

Check Norilsk in Siberia/Russia. It's similar latitude to Alaskan North
Slope, but it's an industrial city with population of 100,000 and a mile-
wide, half-mile deep hole in the ground, whereas people commute to the
Slope oilfields by flying in and out. Norilsk also apparently holds the
record for most polluted city in the world. Russians are tough people.

OhMyCrom! 4 million tons?

Environment

Landscape near Norilsk

Much of the surrounding areas are naturally treeless tundra.


Pollution

The nickel ore is smelted on site at Norilsk. The smelting is directly
responsible for severe pollution, generally acid rain and smog. By
some estimates, 1 percent of the entire global emissions of sulfur
dioxide comes from this one city. Heavy metal pollution near Norilsk
is so severe that mining the surface soil is now economically
feasible, as a result of acquiring high concentrations of platinum and
palladium through pollution.[11]

The Blacksmith Institute[8] included Norilsk in its 2007 list of the
ten most polluted places on Earth. The list cites air pollution by
particulates (including radioisotopes strontium-90, and caesium-137
and metals nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, and selenium) and by gases
(such as nitrogen and carbon oxides, sulfur dioxide, phenols, and
hydrogen sulfide). The Institute estimates four million tons of
cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium, and zinc are
released into the air every year.[citation needed]

According to an April 2007 BBC News report,[12] the company accepted
responsibility for what had happened to the forests, and insisted they
were taking action to cut the pollution. For the period up to
2015–2020 the company expects to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by
approximately two-thirds, but admits it is hard to guarantee this pace
of reduction because they are still developing the technology. CNN has
claimed that there is not a single living tree within 48 km (30 mi) of
the nickel smelter Nadezhda ("The Hope").[13]

--
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
-- Jimi Hendrix