Hacker News Reader

Comment by sacred_numbers | Hacker News Reader

There are different types of mine waste. Certainly you don't want to spread waste contaminated with heavy metals, but most mine waste is just rocks that have been ground up and filtered by a sluice or shaker table to get the tiny fraction of the ore that is actually valuable.

View on HN

That doesn't quite generalize to all mining/quarrying. For instance, talc(um) is often contaminated with asbestos because the two minerals often found in close proximity to one another. I don't think anyone is suggesting spreading either of those on fields, but a modicum of care needs to be taken regardless.

The problem is, once there's a commodity market for this product, unscrupulous suppliers are going to be adding the more hazardous mixtures to the market place.

You're allowing second-order effects to dominate your thinking about a first-order problem. I see this a lot, here, and in real life. Example:

A: "lets fit a defibrellator at the pool" B: "but what if we get sued" ?

outcome: nothing. Were they sued? were they less likely to be sued? what if they are sued for NOT having a defib? This is racionation to endless effect.

yes, there will be bad actors who contaminate their dust. There are bad actors who contaminate food, drugs, water, fertiliser, music, books, Luis Vuitton suitcases, Lobsters...

Yeah, the problem is, unless it's a specifically regulated substance, nobody's going to be looking.

Check this out:

https://vtdigger.org/2020/04/12/sewage-sludge-spreading-lead...

So it's not like this category of problem is totally unprecedented. Spreading waste products from mines is a bad, bad idea.

You know breathing rock dust is not healthy even if it's not got specific radioactive or heavy metals.

It's probably on the list of things that cause cancer in California.

Just because it seems very mundane doesn't mean it's harmless.

Typically speaking, if you're mining rocks, that's a quarry. The article also suggests using waste from steel and cement manufacturing, which is crazy.

sounds like biomass green hand wave all over again

If not rocks, what is it that mines dig out of the bedrock? What's bad about the wastes from steel and cement production?

Rock is not all made of the same thing. You don't want to put an arsenic-rich rock on farms, for example.

The article also suggests using waste from steel and cement manufacturing, which is crazy.

If the production process is happening anyway, and if the waste exists anyway, why is it definedly crazy to re-purpose it? It isn't neccessarily the best at scale economic source of the kinds of rock dust we need, but if you have it, and it worked, then (without citing specifics like cross contamination risks or at scale problems) why is this specifically more crazy than the idea itself?

Putting industrial waste onto food, bad, bad idea. Look into the amount of contaminants in former steel mill sites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com