The Dangerous Business of Mining | Hacker News Reader

The Dangerous Business of Mining

delanceyplace.com

27 pointsrobbybaron19 comments

I toured the Empire Mine (CA) some 30 years ago. I vaguely recall it worked something like this:

The ore was crushed by a giant stamp mill. The resulting slurry was mixed with cyanide, which dissolved the gold. The gold was separated from the cyanide by mixing with liquid mercury, forming an amalgam. The amalgam was put in a retort to evaporate off the mercury... by folks wearing asbestos suits.

I'm happy to work in software, thank you.

Cyanide and other such harmful chemicals were used. Let's not mention hydraulic mining. That said, the history, the left over relics, and such are interesting to explore. Empire Mine in Nevada City/Placerville is worth visiting. Sixteen-to-one up in Alleghany (an interesting drive) is still active and on my list to visit.

One of my favorite tidbits from the general Sierra / Plumas / Nevada County area is the Engel Copper Mine. There was a narrow gauge rail road that brought the copper ore down to Keddie which was then loaded onto the Western Pacific. Wikipedia says it was hauled out to Utah to be smelted down, locally people say it was brought down what is now SR-70 / the canyon (where the Camp Fire that decimated Paradise started) to Sacramento/The Bay Area for processing.

Much of the mercury came from the New Almaden mine located in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains west of San Jose. The mining polluted the Guadalupe river with high levels of mercury. The river, which flows into San Francisco Bay, polluted much of the bay with methylmercury. To this day, many decades after mining stopped, the river and the bay are still contaminated with mercury to a degree where consuming fish and seafood from the bay can still be unhealthy.

Adobe, Google, Facebook, etc. are all right there on the shoreline. You might work in software, but (metaphorically at least), you're a lot close to those mines than you might think :)

You should check out pictures of the Jeffrey Mine in Quebec. It's an open pit mine that comes right up to the neighbouring town of Asbestos.

You can still run a mining operation from behind your desk. And you'll probably make more money than the men/women in work suits.

You’ll likely be thrown out by security for racking up a massive electricity bill before you start making money.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkch...

for the days before hazmat suits.

The main factor that improved the situation was regulation. People like to complain about OSHA and health/safety people, but they collectively preempt preventable tragedies like those described in the post. People also like to complain about lawyers and the threat of litigation, but that is also a key mechanism for enforcement. If those workers and/or their surviving family members had been fairly compensated, the mine operators might have prioritized safety. https://www.mines.edu/emcis/wp-content/uploads/sites/185/201...

Mining in general is a pretty complicated topic, and anecdata like the article are nice to have. One issue separate from the personal side is that nations need minerals. Minerals require mining. Mining breeds misery. The answer probably isn't to stop mining, but to subsidize mining safety and health. If mineral companies could provided better safer environments there would be less harm from mining and everyone could go about their business blind to the costs of mining. We do it for farming, why not dump a ton of money into mining(far more than we do currently)?

Dump more money into mining and more mining will happen (much as what happens with farm subsidies.). This probably wouldn’t achieve the reduction in suffering you’re looking for.

I don't know that that is true. Imagine buying more land is super pricey. So it pays to invest more in existing mines.

More mining, or mining becomes more expensive, in order to transfer the subsidies to various parties profiting from the mining in the first place.

Unless coupled with laws enforcing increased safety health&standards, or at least having the money earmarked for that, there's no reason for a company to improve on those.

These anecdata are from the 19th century, they don’t have much in the way of relevance to the way mining looks today, especially in a first-world country.

A few stats: https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/statistics-and-research...

in Australia’s enormous mining industry in 2018, there were nine fatalities. The fatality rate was 3.7 per 100,000. This puts it ahead of most industries but substantially behind “Agriculture, forestry and fishing” at 11.2 or “Transport, warehousing and transport “ at 5.9.

For further perspective, the death rate in Australian mining injuries is several times less than the murder rate in Chicago (23.8) or even San Francisco (6.3).

So although mining is still an intrinsically dangerous occupation which puts your soft fleshy body in close proximity with all sorts of heavy, moving, unstable or explosive objects, safety training, equipment and procedures have improved a lot over the centuries.

Deaths aren't really the most important stat though. Miners often suffer significant health complications over the course of their life and those are not only unpleasant but expensive.

So you're looking for something closer to injuries than deaths, but you want them to either be significant or long-lasting injuries, probably? Like, black lung may not be the same as getting crushed by a cave-in but that doesn't make it nothing...

The industry in Australia is currently working through the early stages of the transition to autonomous mining, so that problem is well on the way to being put down for good. Although we more or less solved that problem years ago with a little backsliding recently [0].

That 'mining breeds misery' comment is simply not correct for Australia; most miners are pretty chipper at all the money they are making relative to everyone else. May as well say 'overly abundant food breeds misery' or 'computer games breed misery'.

[0] https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/bla...

We could also subsidize a less wasteful economy. Buying less stuff, using it longer, repairing it and ultimately recycling as much of it as possible is a very effective way of reducing the need for minerals.

Not subsidise but require!

> If mineral companies could provided better safer environments there would be less harm from mining and everyone could go about their business blind to the costs of mining

Running an unsafe mine is a choice. A choice to drive down standards so you can drive down prices and win market share. The correct mechanism for paying for safety is higher market prices, by removing unsafe operators from the market and fining their profits.

It's also reasonable to make sure the workers are allowed to organize their own safety, usually through a union. These kinds of historic horrific fatalities were part of the drive for unionization in the first place.

Perhaps I should force myself to read that, as someone who uses electronics. But I bailed out after the descriptions of injuries and accidents in the second paragraph.

Mining is no longer anywhere near that dangerous in the West.

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