April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

P R Buzz

Written by Shaan Oosthuizen

Pretoria, South Africa, Apr 19, 2007 — /prbuzz/ — The CSIR and industrial partner Key Structure Holdings (KSH) have signed a contract with Anglo Coal for the building of a demonstration plant aimed at the recovery of products from waste gypsum, via the patented GypSLiM process.

Anglo Coal and the CSIR have cooperated for more than a decade in the development of water treatment technologies that addresses acid mine water problems. The successful implementation of the CSIR’s limestone-neutralisation technologies at Anglo Coal South Africa’s plants have cut the cost of acid water neutralisation in half, with water treatment plants based on the technology having been built all over Southern Africa and recently in Australia. Anglo Coal is presently constructing the world’s first plant to produce drinking water from acid mine drainage. The plant with a capacity of 20 megaliters per day (Ml/d) will aim to satisfy growing demand for drinking water at the Emalahleni Local Municipality….(Full Story — off-site)
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Note by folc.ca: Let’s hope that they will keep the radioactive heavy-metal isotopes from the waste gypsum within tolerable levels in the drinking water they will produce. — folc.ca

Posted in Pollution: Health Issues, Heavy-Metal Poisoning & Pollution, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Related Construction Costs | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

300 Chinese villagers still hospitalized after sulfur dioxide gas cloud from fertilizer plant

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING – About 300 villagers remained in the hospital after a huge discharge of sulfur dioxide gas from a chemical plant in southwestern China, state media said Thursday.

Fourteen were seriously ill from the leak, which was caused Monday by an equipment malfunction at the fertilizer plant in Guizhou province’s Xifeng county, the official Xinhua News Agency said….(Full Story — off-site, related story)

Posted in Pollution: Health Issues, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

ABC News Online [Australia]

Mining company Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines has been fined $25,000 by the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) for a breach of its operating licence nearly two years ago.

The penalty was issued over an incident in May 2005, when sulphur dioxide above permitted levels from the company’s Gidji roaster was detected at Coolgardie, about 30 kilometres away in south-east Western Australia….(Full Story — off-site)

Posted in Fines & Penalties, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Robson Valley Times [B.C.]

By Andru McCracken

Valemount’s volunteer fire department responded to a call for help from CN Rail last Tuesday afternoon.

Fire Chief Rick Lalonde said that a westbound train carrying sulphur had one car on fire and was headed towards Valemount….(Full Story — off-site)

Posted in Explosions & Fires, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

folc.ca

Is Fort Air Partnership “cooking the books?”

By Walter Schneider

The home page of the Fort Air Partnership (FAP) states that,

The Fort Air Partnership exists to develop relevant, credible information that can be used to manage regional air quality, protect environmental health, and influence policy.

The home page of the FAP repeats the preceding statement in the third and last paragraph on that web page.  To that end, the FAP operates and maintains 40 passive and 8 continuous monitoring stations in the 4,500 square kilometers of the FAP air-shed zone. (Note: That web page frequently does not work properly, it frequently fails to display correctly and often contains many non-functioning links.)

In examining publicly accessible environmental monitoring station data produced by FAP through its Elk Island monitoring station on April 19, 2007, a download at noon showed extreme exceedences that had vanished from the data set that was downloaded 5 ½ hours later, at 17:30 hrs.  There is nothing very credible about treatment of data that now you see and now you don’t. (Full Story)

Posted in Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »