...Rio Tinto is planning to build a second mine onor rather, underthe site.
The plan calls for five blocks of ore, each more than half a mile square and a third of a mile tall, to be carved out of the solid rock underneath the pit. In theory, the void created could swallow midtown Manhattan from 33rd Street to 57th Street; 500 feet of empty air would hang above the spire of the Empire State Building. The project would completely transform the mine's operations. Ore from an open pit is dug from above, like sugar spooned from a bowl. Ore from an underground mine is dug from below, like sugar spooned out from the bottom of a pile, except that the sugar is a city-size slab of solid rock.
...In the United States, planning is under way for Resolution, a mine 7,000 feet beneath Arizona, and for Pebble, likely a combination pit and underground mine, in Alaska. Each of these is a potential world-class operation, producing copper on the Bingham Canyon scale.
...Copper mining, even by modern best-practices guidelines, is a hugely costly endeavor from an environmental standpoint. The mines themselves are vast. Processing the ore consumes enormous quantities of fuel (often coal) and water. The waste rock producedknown as tailingsis suffused with toxic substances, including sulfuric acid, arsenic, lead, and cadmium. These substances are intrinsic to the ore, not a byproduct of processing. They cannot be avoided, and they render the tailings dangerous for tens of thousands of years.
...At Bingham Canyon, the latest expansion of the pit involves removing a wedge of rock a mile wide, 1,000 feet thick, and 3,500 feet tall from the pit's south wall. That rock is not ore; it's worthless junk, called overburden. The ore being targeted is buried beneath it. It will take an estimated seven years and more than $660 million in capital outlays before that ore is finally exposed. "Literally and figuratively, we've got a whole mountain to move,"
...The world is not running out of copper. But it is becoming harder to find and produce, ... "There's no more easy fruit." We've entered the era of tough ore.
...Gass and I watched as huge white tendrils of cloud broke loose and spiraled thousands of feet down toward its bottom. I said it looked like the mine was inhaling the storm. Gass said that it was: The pit is so big, it creates its own weather patterns.
http://forums.silverstackers.com/to...-the-epic-scale-of-our-copper-dependence.html
I have not laughed this much in years.
Blackjack is rigged too, but card counters still win.
What children? Do you know something I don't?
: /unloved....even an old ainslie bar :lol: kg bar you have
