Cyanide spill reveals the cost of gold
By Jim Green
The environmental and political fallout from a major cyanide spill at a Romanian gold and silver mine on January 30 continues to spread.
Aurul Gold, the Baia Mare mine operator, is half-owned by the Western Australian company Esmeralda Exploration and 45% owned by the Romanian government. The company was using a cyanide leaching method to extract gold and silver from tailings discarded by previous mining operations at the Baia Mare mine, in the Romanian town of Oradea.
The tailings dam overflowed on January 30, causing 100,000 cubic metres of cyanide-contaminated water to flow into rivers stretching several hundred kilometres through central Europe. The main rivers effected were the Somes River in Romania and the Tisza River in Hungary, with lower-level contamination reaching the Danube River in Yugoslavia.
The accident was not reported to Romanian government authorities until 24 hours after it took place, which resulted in Aurul Gold being fined about US$160.
A Romanian government official said the cyanide level was 700 times the permitted level in the Somes River near the spill site, and about 200 times the permitted level where the river entered Hungary. Heavy metals, including lead, mercury, copper and zinc, were also released. Concentrations of some or all of these metals were well above permitted levels.
Several hundred tonnes of fish are estimated to have been killed by cyanide and heavy metals in the three affected countries. As many as 80% of the fish in sections of the Tisza River have been killed.
Species which feed on anything living in the contaminated rivers are also at risk. According to the Beta news agency in Belgrade, environmentalists have found dozens of dead deer, pheasants, ducks and other animals.
Poisoned water is likely to filter into the soil and affect pasture and livestock. Contaminated water being used for irrigation poses further risks to the environment, to animals and to humans. The drinking water of about 2.5 million people has been contaminated.
Scientists fear that the cyanide and heavy metal residues could remain for decades. "If I am pessimistic, I would say that life in the River Tisza will never recover from this", said Elemer Szalma, a hydro-biologist from Szeged in southern Hungary. "If I am optimistic, I would say it will take 10 to 12 years to recover ... Even if we reintroduce fish into the river, they will die of starvation because the food chain has been completely broken."
In Becej, a town on the Tisza River about 90 kilometres north of Belgrade, police have been deployed at the market to prevent the sale of contaminated fish. In parts of Hungary, the worst affected country, some light industry has been shut down and fishing has been banned.
Eco-colonisation
Hungary has vowed to take "all possible diplomatic and legal steps" to seek compensation. The head of the Hungarian parliament's environment committee, Zoltan Illes, accused Esmeralda Exploration of engaging in "eco-colonisation".
"The profit was produced here but used elsewhere. The contamination is being left here. Nature is being destroyed here in central Europe and the health of thousands is being endangered", Illes said.
Belgrade officials have also demanded compensation from Esmeralda Exploration. "We will demand an estimation of the damage and we will demand that the culprits for this tragedy be punished", Branislav Blazic, Serbia's environment minister, said. "Had we done something like this, we probably would have been bombed".
Sections of the Danube River in Serbia are already heavily polluted by the NATO bombing of petrol refineries and other facilities last year.
'Immoral and indecent'
Esmeralda Exploration has denied responsibility for the contamination. Chairperson Brett Montgomery said in a press conference in Perth on February 10 that reports of a disaster were "grossly exaggerated" and that he did not expect his company to face compensation claims.
Flanked by a public relations consultant and a lawyer, Montgomery said he had "independent" research questioning the scale of the contamination, but that he was not prepared to release it publicly. "It's a protocol thing", he said.
Philip Evers, Aurul Gold operations manager, said: "I'm told by people in Romania and Hungary that fish always die at this time of year ... Fish can get beaten to death by the ice in the water."
This explanation did not wash with Hungarian authorities. Janos Martonyi, Hungary's foreign minister, dismissed Evers' comments as "immoral and indecent".
However, determining Aurul Gold's complicity in the widespread contamination may be complicated by a smaller cyanide spill into a northern Romanian river on February 6, allegedly from a coalmine.
According to Friends of the Earth International, the Romanian government said it had issued "repeated written warnings" about the state of equipment at the mine.
Esmeralda Exploration documented a number of problems with the mine in its last annual report. These included difficulties in breaking down the material being treated with high-pressure water and an earlier leak into a neighbouring field.
Cyanide mining
The use of cyanide in mining operations has undergone a major resurgence in the past 30 years. Rising labour costs have made open-pit mines using cyanide more competitive with labour-intensive underground mines. New discoveries of large, low-grade gold and silver deposits also have encouraged the growth of cyanide mining techniques.
The mining industry and government regulators claim that cyanide rapidly breaks down in water into harmless compounds, but cyanide also breaks down into potentially toxic compounds. Many of these compounds are generally less toxic than the original cyanide, but may persist for long periods. There is evidence that some of these compounds accumulate in plant and fish tissue.
Mine operators are usually not required to test for cyanide breakdown compounds which therefore go unregulated despite their environmental impacts. Moreover, there are many unanswered questions — glossed over by the mining industry — regarding the potential environmental and human health impacts of cyanide and cyanide compounds.
The US-based Mineral Policy Center has documented numerous cyanide spills at mining operations in recent years, including several accidents in the United States and others in Spain, Kyrgyzstan and Guyana. In several cases, the leaks have resulted in contamination of drinking water.
Even without accidents, problems arise with cyanide mining techniques, such as the deaths of birds drinking contaminated water at mine sites. For example, at the North Parkes goldmine in New South Wales, at least 2700 birds were killed in the mid-1990s. There have been significant bird kills attributed to cyanide at other mines in Australia.
Some mining techniques which involve the reduction of cyanide use, or its replacement altogether, are not implemented because they are more expensive or because of patent restrictions. While private companies grab the lion's share of the profits, the clean-up costs are largely borne by the public.
Gold boom
The Baia Mare mine is just one of many goldmines to have begun operation in the past 20 years. If gold was in short supply and was being put to good use, a degree of environmental impact might be considered acceptable. But central banks around the world hold over 35,000 tonnes of gold reserves, and 78-85% of gold production is used for jewellery.
According to a Worldwatch Institute report, the waste generated each year by goldmining operations could fill a bumper-to-bumper convoy of 240-tonne dump trucks around the equator. Goldmining produces more waste each year than iron mining, even though 200,000 times more iron is mined and is generally put to more productive use than gold.
Ross Mining plans to use a heap leaching method, similar to that used at Aurul Gold's Romanian operations, at the Timbarra goldmine in New South Wales. At Timbarra, each tonne of ore is expected to yield just 0.8 grams of gold. Each year, about 700 tonnes of cyanide will be used. In the eight-years life of the mine, 5600 tonnes of cyanide will be used.
Australia is the world's third largest producer of gold. Excluding petroleum, about half of all the funds spent on mineral exploration in Australia are for gold. Friends of the Earth International has called on governments and industry to ban new, large-scale toxic goldmines worldwide, to stop using public money to fund such operations and to make companies fully liable for their actions, particularly for clean-up after accidents.