Waste sitting in pits could fill almost 883,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, and oil companies say they need to find a way to reduce it
The companies, including an affiliate of Exxon Mobil, are lobbying the Canadian government to set rules that would allow them to treat the waste and release it into the Athabasca River by 2025, so they have enough time to meet their commitments to eventually close the mines.
Of course they are.
We give the nuclear Industry tonnes of flak for their minute (in comparison) amounts of waste. Meanwhile, it’s government regulations that prevent that waste from being reprocessed back into nuclear fuel.
the Oil-Sand industry should do like cities do and process their waste water.
The nuclear power industry is essentially the only one that’s been mandated to be responsible for the cleanup of the entire lifecycle of their product. No other industry has to pay clean up after the mining, refining, use, recycling, long term storage, and disposal. And to be clear, that’s good – every industry should be like that. Nobody should have the “freedom” to dump without repercussions.
I think if the fossil fuel industry also had to shoulder the costs of all their externalities, they would be far less profitable than nuclear power. The entire industry is basically reliant on their ability to dump toxic garbage wherever they want, because if they couldn’t do that, there would be no industry.
privatize profits socialize losses.
Same old playgame. In the end, if you cant turn a profit without destroying the lands, you cant turn a profit.
They definitly need to process the water to the point that its “clean”, before discharging it somehow, but the standard for clean needs to be… well, clean from impurities, heavy metals, ect.
Flush the water out is really the only option, the longer it sits in tailings ponds the more likely it is to have an uncontrolled spill. We absolutely need someone we can trust to define ‘clean’ though – and that’s not the government nor the mining companies; and we need someone we can trust to monitor it and confirm it is ‘clean’.
Flush[ing] the water out is really the only option[:] the longer it sits in tailings ponds the more likely it is to have an uncontrolled spill.
I bet there’s a third option, at least, that involves properly shoring up the tailings pond until they can process the toxic mess into something else.
I think we are saying the same thing. The best option is the recycling the toxic mess into valuable commodities and clean water.
No, of course oil and gas industry, we’d love to bear the cost of more externalities for you. I’m sure we can trust you to do things right.
Tell them they’re welcome to flush as much downstream as they like; as long as it’s first been filtered through the bowels of the executive board.
« Look we’ve profited off your lands. Now how about you stop whining. We certainly won’t do our part in dealing with the after effects of our activities. How preposterous» - Some rich board member probably …
When will we stop accepting the privatization of profits and socialization of costs ?
Lmao oil companies asking politely for permission to cause unimaginable ecological damage like they haven’t been doing it for decades. Is their argument that the Athabasca is already so heavily contaminated that they might as well dump the tailings straight into it? Because I imagine that’s all they really have here. What a ridiculous proposal.
I guess I’m just glad the Alberta government doesn’t get the final say here, because they’d be pouring that shit into every single waterway and trying to bill the rest of Canada for the “export” of residual bitumen.
Look, a rig pig isn’t going to be able to waste his paycheque on coke and hookers if you don’t allow this.
and our tax dollars help them do this.
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
880k is probably more Olympic sized pools than the oil company execs own, eh?
Maybe they can dump the rest into their own drinking water, then.
