environmental cleanup reality

[Riggerjack]

I didn't want to further detail the coal and uranium thread, so I started this one.

Environmental cleanup, what actually happens? As far as I know, the contaminated soils is removed, and new fill is brought in, and grass gets planted. That's what they did when they "cleaned up" the old Kimberly Clark plant, here in Everett.

So what happens to the contaminated soil?

I ask, because often the contaminants are natural mineral products, making me wonder how moving it somewhere else by way of heavy equipment and dump trucks is a net environmental gain.

Does anyone know anything about this? Google mainly just returns propaganda.

[Riggerjack]

I know that wetland and wetland buffer cleanup/restoration consists of planting mature versions of native plants. Which sounds reasonable, until you get the bill for paying biologists to survey and plant weeds, then document the survey, and the growth rate of such weeds.

I live in the PNW, and one of the small towns I lived in as a kid was carbonado, WA. A 100 years ago, this was coal mining country, you can still visit the old Coke ovens, and find old mine equipment. There was no cleanup done, the mines shut down when cheaper, better quality coal could come by train. We don't have or use much coal here.

So, no cleanup was done, and I lived there a year, without hearing any coal complaints.

I realize there is a difference of scale, this was underground mining, not mountain top removal, but I,ve looked at these mountain top removal mines in Google earth, and they didn't look so bad.

It makes me wonder if the missing coal mining reclamation money really has any effect.

But I'm skeptical like that.

[Toska2]

From what I've seen

Organics: burned or treated with fungi/microbes
Metals : burned or planted with plants that are super accumulators

Or used as a cap on landfills.

[7Wannabe5]

The wisest course would be to remove the contaminants to an environment that is as isolated, dry and alkaline as possible. Acid rain with free run-off combined with heavy metals in soil in or near heavily populated or farmed area would be the worst. Entire forests could be completely suffocated or populations poisoned as the metals are dissolved in the low pH water and distributed through the ecosystem.

[Dragline]

It depends on what happened there. The technical word is "reclamation". It could be as simple as you described -- coal mining isn't usually that big a deal other than moving massive piles of rock and dirt -- its just really ugly because modern mining is done with pits and not with shafts for the most part.

Gets a lot more complicated if there has been gold mining and/or heap leach operations involving acid. There may be other issues if there is what is called a "tailings pond." I did a road trip last summer with my youngest and we saw the most polluted lake in America in Butte, Montana, on the site of a huge old pit mine. They had a very lengthy explanation of the reclamation process there, beginning with filtering millions of gallons of water. It was kind of surreal.

I have some great pictures of a gold mine in Uzbekistan -- it looks like Mars or a moon scape. Let me see if I can dig one up here.

[Dragline]

Here you go -- that terrain was originally flat where the people are standing. There were mountains of waste rock elsewhere.

[jacob]

I guess I'm moderately 'qualified by association' to answer that. DW used to work as an senior scientist for a remediation company.

The answer is that it depends on the type of pollution.

For something like VOCs, you send the contaminated material through chemical process that burns them off (converts them into CO2, etc.) and returns clean/cleaner material which then goes back to where it came from. She used to operate a system that would pump out groundwater and send it through a system that looked like a big beer brewing rack that would fit on the back of a truck. This would then return the water to the ground. The lab/former naval base I worked at was actually superfund site because back in the days they figured that the best way to dispose of jetfuel was to drill a deep hole in the ground and pour it into that. That seemed like a great idea in the 1950s. Here the soil had to be excavated and treated in a similar way. Some of the propaganda might arise from the strategy of spreading treated dirt on farmland. It's easy to play "what if it isn't really safe after all" games with that, i.e. "chemists vs hippies".

Another way is to perform the chemistry directly in the ground and render the stuff inert/non-toxic in situ.

Tougher problems involve highly toxic ingredients such as cleaning up after integrated circuit manufacturers or nuclear power plants. This is a much bigger deal because those things can't be burned off. In this case, it ends up in some kind of storage facility. For chemical/big stuff, that's usually a landfill. For nuclear stuff, it's a mine or an underground cave although often that stuff ends up sitting above ground for years while people play NIMBY. Actually, for a long time, low-level radioactive stuff (like medical stuff) was put in drums and dumped in the ocean. Because the halflife was so short it was believed that the radioactive for all practical purposes would be gone once the drums rusted through. Turned out the drums rusted faster than expected, so people don't do that anymore.

Alternatively we can just ignore the problem or hand out a brochure (hint: lead paint all over the US).

Overall though, the goal is to go from "very bad" to "good enough"/"not too bad" rather than "back to the previous stage". It's pretty hard to use 20th century technology without generating some irreducible pollution. The main environmental question is thus "where do we put it".

A fun fact from the remediation industry is that remediation is very near the bottom of state priorities. If the state can't make the budget one of the first things to happen is that remediation efforts get postponed (after all, if it's been in the ground for 20 years already, we can wait another year). An even more interesting observation is that it's much easier to find employment in remediation in red states.

No idea about how coal mines are shut down. Mines, in general, however are $$$$ to shut down or fallow.

[Riggerjack]

So, as I suspected, the coal mining cleanup that may be missing, is really a landscaping project. I have faith in mother nature. Even without landscaping, it'll grow over.

I know that gravel operations have to have washing stations, with settlement ponds, and a regular run of erosion control products (mainly strawbales) to make sure the runoff is relatively dust free. I still wouldn't want to drink it, but once it enters the groundwater, no problems. I expect coal mining is exactly the same or more stringent.

I'm thinking I would object more to a coal fired power plant next door than a coal mine. But we don't use coal here. Natural gas and nuke power are considered unclean, here. And hydro is not green or renewable

[jacob]

I think landscaping project is an apt description. It fast-forwards succession from moon-scape to giant lawn or thereabouts.

You don't have to leave nature alone for very long before "nature" takes over. Consider the following drone footage from Chernobyl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra7YbBvbRYQ ... animals are thriving too.

The best form of environmental remediation seems to be to ban humans from a given area.

PS: If toxic stuff enters the ground water that's a real problem insofar that anyone is actually drinking that ground water (wells, springs). Even predicting how fast and how water it will go is hard (DW's PhD thesis was on this). This is why landfills have nonpermeable liners and why dealing with run-off is a priority. Also why there are big debates as to exactly how toxic roundup or fracking fluid actually is.
PPS: In terms of nuclear NIMBY, I wouldn't mind living next to a nuclear power plant, but there's no way I would want to live anywhere near a nuclear re/processing site like e.g. Hanford.

[Riggerjack]

Eh, Hanford is a problem because government bureaucracy plus military efficiency teamed up to completely fcuk up any kind of containment. buried below groundwater levels, in steel drums. Nobody could anticipate a problem there!

Nuke waste needs to just be cast in glass bricks, and dumped in Nevada. Make the bricks big enough to require heavy equipment to move, and monitor by satellite. Space the bricks out enough that radiation levels are similar to Denver. move bricks by train, in lead shielded cars, ensure that radiation levels next to the railway car is below that of Denver. Done.

But effective nuke waste disposal is not politically feasible, hence Yukka Mountain...

[jacob]

With the nuclear waste, it's complicated by the storage site needing to remain untouched for the next 10-100 thousand years. Not a good idea of people start building pyramids out of those bricks in year 3412 or so. There are technological issues too because the nuclear decay literally makes the waste hot. If it's not cooled in some way, the containment pods will eventually melt(!) ... same reason that material is currently stored in swimming pools. One of the guys that used to work in the group I was part of now works on computing how this process plays out in terms of heat generated and the risk of the container material undergoing nuclear reactions when it's been continuously bombarded with radiation.

There's also a possibility of using [particle] accelerator driven systems to transmute the radioactive isotopes into other isotopes that are more stable. This is a relatively new idea. It's the same idea as the VOC treatment systems.

[Riggerjack]

Right, dense containment is a problem, so a mine "solution" is difficult to actually make work. Disbursement just requires space. Heat dissipation isn't an isssue. And keeping the waste to mass ratio low enough that all you do is leave them on the surface ground. Inert, simple, glass bricks, no containment to break down, no groundwater contamination, just a simple solution.

If somebody wants to ignore the signs, cut thru the fence, and build a camp on the shiny glass platform, and eventually gets sick, well, you can't fix stupid, but it can be eliminated. If we want to plan for after the collapse of civilization, we could dump bricks in the central pacific, but security would be more difficult.

This isn't some crazy Idea of mine. I first heard about it in the 80's when Hanford cleanup was a bigger story. Nuke power generates heat. Use the waste heat to melt the glass, make bricks, ship by train. Really no big deal.

My brother in law works at the Naval shipyard, and dismantling nuke cores is part of the job. All we do now is barge them up river, and sit them on the surface at the "temporary" disposal site. It's been temporary for decades, and no core has ever left site. These are spent nuke reactors. if they can be surface stored, why couldn't a glass brick?

All I'm saying is do that, but not as densely, in the Nevada desert, where rivers and people are already banned, by way of Nevada desert.

[Riggerjack]

Dragline, that is indeed a great pic, but it is Uzbekistan. Is the area outside the mine look all that different? I look at that, and see a bunch of moved earth. I've done my time in deserts, and moving them around a bit didn't seem to make much difference. What life there is gets along fine on flatland, or in gullies, just fine. Ignoring cleanup, I expect what wildlife there is, will get along fine there again.

For reference Buchart Gardens, a world wide Tourist trap on Victoria island, started out as a quarry.

http://www.butchartgardens.com/

[enigmaT120]

Disburse the bricks by giving one to everybody who has a swimming pool and wants to heat it cheaply.

The problem with signs and fences and stuff for a nuke storage site is we have never had a civilization that lasted 10,000 years.

[Toska2]

I always thought that would be a cheap way to heat skyscrapers. Better form of energy too, this way nat. gas can be used for transportation.

[Sclass]

I've seen this kind of thing "go away" for HP during my years there as an employee. The circuit board factory in Palo Alto got knocked down. It was an EPA super fund site. They said nothing could be built there. It was vacant for years. Now it's a park. I never saw it excavated. Maybe they came up with some way of neutralizing the solvents in place.

HP Deer Creek site had a big solvent spill into the soil. They made a deal with the EPA. If the solvent didn't migrate into deer creek they'd leave it alone. A guy would come every month and take chemical measurements at several monitoring wells monthly. Never cleaned up. Tesla HQ is on that site now. They kept the building so I assume it was never dug out.

I had the pleasure of meeting the individual responsible for that spill. The story went like this. The idiot's job was to check the depth of the waste solvent tank and call the disposal service when it was filled. He used an aluminum pole with a steel spire on the end. Ever since he got the job he'd drop the pole into the tank and find the height never changed. He went on happily for a year not having to call the disposal service. One day somebody else asked why.

Edit- I just read the govt reports on these sites. They were dug out. The figures for the amount of removed soil seem kind of small. Traces of TCE remain at both sites.

[jacob]

In terms of using nuclear decay to heat things.
1) The top level of the pool should be safe for accidental falls. It's nice and warm.
2) Don't dive further down as the radiation increases.
3) The water evaporates off (the water acts as cooling and screening).
4) Woe unto you if you somehow run out of water!

In terms of spreading nuclear waste around in boxes or cubes locating them in desserts or residential pools or basements.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bom ... dirty_bomb

[Riggerjack]

Yes, yes, the always terrifying dirty bomb. Cuz radioactivity. It made the spider in Spiderman, and turned David banner into the Hulk. Just imagine what it would do to the cities. Fallout 4 come to life!

Or, more realistically, a drop in local real estate prices, and yet another giant jump in military spending. Honestly, a dirty bomb would be about the most humane terrorist attack ever.

More to the point, when you have radioactive material encased in rail car sized blocks, it get real hard to steal them, and easy to track them. If you could get the equipment to load one, you would still need to get it out of an isolated area, undetected. If this were the 40's yeah, this would be a good movie plot. But now we have Argos cameras and satellites. And even if you could do all that, how many would it take to make just one dirty bomb?

Or, if the glass is too energy intensive, cast in concrete works nearly as well. All that is needed is an impermeable, massive, long lasting, containment system.