Chemistry, Biology and Politics—The Case for Excellence in Environmental Assessment of Mining

Abstract

From my perspective, the first part of this essay’s title encapsulates the essence of the environmental assessment of mining, namely the relationship between the chemistry of the aquatic environment (water quality), the organisms that live in the water, and the human interpretation/perception of the consequences of this interaction. In this essay I will refer to some specific examples from the tropical monsoonal region of Australia’s Northern Territory, a small part of which is shown in Figure 1. However, the issues I raise are generic to the mining industry and its relationship with chemistry professionals, regulators, and the community. Mining suffers from a number of perception issues in the public eye. The first of these often relates to location, since mining within or adjacent to areas of high conservation or environmental value is of concern to the community. The common perception is often one of mining as the despoiler, rather than of being potentially of net benefit to local communities and the Australian economy when it is appropriately carried out. A very potent image that regularly appears in the media is that of fish kills. If a mining operation is present in the general vicinity, the almost immediate reaction is to associate this event with the mine. However, in Northern Australia, especially in the rivers and wetlands of Kakadu National Park, large-scale mortality of fish is a regular natural occurrence and not a consequence of mining. Contrary to popular perception, the limnological environment in the northern wet–dry tropics presents one of the harshest of all freshwater habitats (Fig. 2). Rain falls for five to six months of the year—no rain for the rest—so the land alternates between flood and drought. Much limnological research on the topic of fish kills has been conducted across the floodplain environment over the past two decades. The data show that fish kills occur most David Jones is currently Principal Chemist and Manager of the Earth and Water Sciences group in Earth Water Life Sciences Pty Ltd (EWLS), a private consulting firm with an environmental science R&D focus, based in Darwin. Previously, he was a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO, where he worked on elucidating bio-geochemical processes that control the release, subsequent transport and fate of inorganic contaminants from mining, electricity generating, and urban waste water sources. His current research interests lie in the multi-disciplinary application of the chemical, biological, and earth sciences to develop solutions for minimizing the environmental impact of mining, work over the past five years with EWLS focusing on the Ranger and Jabiluka uranium mines.