Justin,
I have no experience of the situation in the USA but have worked with both
chemical and passive systems with factory effluents in the UK. I think the
thought process would go along he following lines:
Whatever technology is used it is normally in response to an existing
legislative requirement or the possibility of future litigation. Some
decades ago, the problem may only have been addressed after the mine had
closed and would have been a 'crisis management' response requiring
immediate action. Chemical treatment offers a sure, robust method of
remediation which can cope with quite large variations of flow, metal
content, presence of different metals, suspended solids etc. Environmental
factors such as drought, freezing and the like can be built in to the
design. Dredging of residues can be reduced to a planned maintenance regime
and can be done in a spatially restricted area. Residue treatment such as
dewatering is manageable using proven techniques. In short it provides a
sure-fire silver bullet and the on-going costs can be met by future
generations of management. Thirty or forty years ago it was seen as the
method of choice for treating effluents of all levels of contamination or
volume.
Wetland technology is likely to be much more sensitive to all of these
factors, although it has the advantage of requiring less day to day
maintenance. Thirty years or so ago it was seen as a great way to clean up
large amounts of only slightly contaminated effluent.
However, I think that you have to put the questions into the context of the
times and the people involved. Mining and industrial companies usually have
plenty of engineers and chemists around who would see chemical processes as
an obvious choice - certainly several decades ago. Constructed wetlands
would have been seen as requiring external specialists such as botanists for
both implementation and maintenance. Furthermore, there is always a
reluctance to get involved with unproven technology or be a pioneer,
particularly where regulatory or liability issues are concerned - unless of
course there are compelling reasons to the contrary. Who would want to be
first when proven chemical techniques were already available in other
industries such as smelting, metal finishing and a whole host of processes
producing acid effluents?
Consider also the structure of mining companies, where funding decisions on
technology are made by off-site directors who rely on their own in-house
technical specialists. If they already have a technology working at one
site, it generally gets replicated elsewhere.
I suspect that you are already aware of these arguments. I believe the
answer to your question lies in the attitudes of industrial managements
towards risks, particularly where the consequences are crucial and costs are
less important. However, I suspect that finding documentary proof of this
will be difficult. At the risk of digression, I can only point to a lecture
I attended at one of the IMM's conferences in the 1970s. It dealt with
sinter plants, all of the same overall design, but in the space of a decade
or so these had doubled in size and then doubled again. The lecturer
bemoaned the plight of sinter plant manufacturers which did not have a
demonstration plant available of the latest size or at least the generation
before that. It was clear that the smelting industry would only purchase
from those who had and a list of SPMs who had gone out of business for this
reason alone was presented. This seemed to echo what I already knew about
management's view towards risk and new technology. Where new technologies
were implemented, these were always in response to a compelling need and
where existing technology did not provide the answer.
Regards
Richard Smith
----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Page" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 5:48 PM
Subject: History of AMD Remediation Technology
> Colleagues,
>
> I am writing to seek guidance (references, contacts, informal knowledge)
> on
> the history of remediation technologies for Acid Mine Drainage in the US
> and
> Canada.
>
> The purpose of our research is to identify historical factors that have
> influenced industry's adoption of active technologies (chemical treatment)
> over passive technologies (constructed wetlands) - or rather the reticence
> of industry to adopt passive technologies - for the remediation of AMD.
>
> Any references, contacts or information that you may have about the
> historical development of remediation technologies - including regulatory,
> economic, political, social, or other influencing factors - would be a
> great
> help.
>
> Thank you in advance,
>
> Justin
>
> PS - Our working hypothesis is that active and passive technologies are
> associated with different technological paradigms, and that there are
> particular factors that "lock in" one paradigm over the other. We
> hypothesize that industry's technological paradigm with respect to
> remediation is one of "environmental engineering," involving commitments
> to
> certainty, control and prediction. In contrast, we hypothesize that
> passive
> remediation is connected to a paradigm of "ecological engineering,"
> involving commitments to openness, flexibility and working with, rather
> than
> against, nature. We are looking for the factors that lock in the first
> over
> the second paradigm.
>
>
>
> --
> Justin Page
>
> PhD Candidate
> Department of Sociology,
> University of British Columbia
>
> Sessional Lecturer
> Department of Sociology and Anthropology
> Simon Fraser University
>
> Research Assistant
> Translational Genomics Research Group
> The W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics
> http://www.tgrg-ubc.org
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