Antinuclear

A rare earth mining project in Madagascar that has been in turmoil for the last two years took another blow in September, when its concession, previously valued at over $1 billion, was reappraised at just $48 million. Tantalum Rare Earth Malagasy (TREM), a company owned by firms in Germany and Singapore, holds the rights to the 92-square mile (238-square kilometer) concession, located on the Ampasindava peninsula in northwest Madagascar, just across the water from Nosy Be, the country’s main tourist destination.

Demand for rare earth elements, sometimes called “technology metals,” has risen in recent decades because they are used in the production of smartphones and other modern devices. China dominates the market for rare earths, having produced more than 85 percent of world supply for the last few decades. But the environmental and health impacts of rare earth mining have caused Chinese authorities to restructure the industry and close, or attempt to close, many of the mines. Now investors are looking elsewhere.

TREM’s project would be the first rare earth mine in Madagascar. For now, the project has stalled due to a lack of permits and unstable ownership. According to some scientists, going forward with the project would pose grave long-term threats to local people, who oppose the project, and to the surrounding rainforest, including a protected area home to endangered lemurs and other unique wildlife.

“It will be a nightmare for anything living there — humans, animals, or plants,” a geologist familiar with ionic clay rare earth mining told Mongabay. “It will be a huge disaster. It will destroy the whole peninsula,” added the geologist, who asked not to be named due to the sensitive nature of the situation.

Potential impact

The rare earth deposit in Ampasindava is of an uncommon type known as ionic or ion-adsorption clay. Most similar deposits are near Ganzhou in southeast China, although they make up less than 3 percent of China’s total rare earth reserves. Unlike other rare earth deposits, ionic clay does not contain high levels of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. However, mining ionic clay still causes extreme environmental and health consequences.

TREM has not yet decided which mining method it would use in Ampasindava. It is considering three techniques: heap leaching, vat leaching, and in-situ leaching. The first two would involve open-pit mining of the ground’s surface. When these techniques have been used on ionic clay mines in China, the results have been dire for local ecosystems. For every ton of rare earth oxide extracted, 300 square meters of vegetation and topsoil are removed, 2,000 tons of tailings are disposed in nearby valleys or streams, and 1,000 tons of highly polluted wastewater is created, according to a 2013 paper by Chinese researchers.

“[S]urface/mountaintop mining for ion-adsorption rare earth ores has become the dominant driver of land-use change and degradation in southern China, causing permanent loss of ecosystem, severe soil erosion, air pollution, biodiversity loss and human health problems,” the authors write.

There are hundreds of millions of tons of tailings from ionic clay mines in the Ganzhou area, and the environmental costs, measured strictly by how much it costs to restore the land, exceed the revenues produced by the rare earths, the Chinese state press has acknowledged.

In fact, if the project goes forward, TREM may not have any choice but to use an open-pit mining technique on most of the concession, according to the geologist familiar with ionic clay mining. The alternative, ostensibly safer in-situ method requires ground that is flat and porous, which is uncommon in ionic clay deposits.

Even if the in-situ leaching method is used, it may not prove much better for the environment. In-situ leaching does not involve highly disruptive surface mining, but it does require huge amounts of ammonium sulfate solution to be pumped into the ground with great force. Rare earth oxides then trickle through the ground to a collection trench — thus the need for porous earth. This method, if not applied with care, can lead to water contamination, mine collapses, and landslides.

Water contamination could spell trouble not just for public health but for the local economy. The streams in TREM’s mining concession serve as the water source for cash crops such as cacao, pepper, coffee, and vanilla. Thus far, no environmental impact study of the project has been completed, so it is difficult to know how severe the effects, both onsite and downstream, could be.

Some scientists working on the peninsula have expressed concern about the project. If it goes forward, the mine is likely to reduce the habitat of the Endangered Mittermeier sportive lemur (Lepilemur mittermeieri), which lives only on the peninsula, Leslie Wilmet, a doctoral student in conservation biology at the University of Liège and Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech in Belgium who studies the lemurs, told Mongabay in August. “The problem with the TREM project will be that lots of forests will disappear,” she said at the time. “We don’t know if the species will survive or not if the project goes on.”

Shaky underpinningsDelays in the TREM project are due not so much to environmental concerns as to management setbacks………. https://news.mongabay.com/2017/11/another-blow-to-troubled-madagascar-rare-earth-mine/