Photo: Elwyn Tinklenberg, in Anoka on Sunday, March 16, 2008, saying Larry Zanko had "certified" taconite tailings as safe for use as aggregate in paving Minnesota roads. And he will get you a copy of the study. Just ask him.
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I certainly would like to review all the field notes of the geologist taking tailings samples for any study NRRI does. Otherwise, what’s the study worth?
Without that detail, it’s only, “Trust me,” from NRRI, which clearly admits it has an innovative and advocatorial bias not an objective safety-assessment role in things. It is tasked with ways to fob the waste off as a useful product, and if that’s not a starting bias, what is?
Can you imagine the legitimacy of a study and its process if it is only a call from a NRRI desk over a cup of coffee, to each mine manager, “Could you go get and then UPS me some tailings samples? I want to assess safety and suitability of removing the waste piles from your life and concern, by using the stuff statewide and possibly nationwide, in paving?” Plant managers being who they are, on the payroll they are on and all, say, “Sure,” and then call laborer Jankevic from whatever he’s doing at the time, and tell him, “Go over to the windward side of that pile, where the rain and wind hit it and wash the fines off, and off the top, at the edge say five feet from the edge, fill this gallon ziplock with tailings from the top. And here, take this Tyler #8 sieve screen, and screen out the fines, anything that passes through that sieve, before you package any of the rest of it.” Great protocol, that way, eh? No matter what lab precision you use after that, how worthwhile is your data? How worthwhile are your conclusions?
So like I say, look for a trained geological engineer doing the sampling, and look for and expect careful and sensible field notes. If you don’t find that, the study is trash, and not worth your time to contemplate.
Clearly, sampling is the first and probably the most pivotal step in any legitimate study.
And it is not simple. And I am not a trained geologist, but I have worked in the chemical industry where product sampling and quality control is understood.
I do not know what a taconite tailings pile looks like.
I do not know what a holding pond, a mining hole filled with tailings and allowed to accumulate rain water looks like.
I have not been up on the Iron Range visiting any mines, or seeing things on the ground.
But I have some idea of how you’d probably have to legitimately sample a tailings pile.
First, imagination; the beast is 200 – 400 feet tall, covering six acres, a big rubble heap. And for what I know that could be a tiny heap, in the nature of taconite tailings pile sizes. Or larger than actual piles on the ground, but I doubt that would be the case.
How do you legitimately and representatively sample the thing, taking say twenty baggie samples, i.e., taking a gallon size ziplock for each sample.
First you get an accurate GPS device from Garmin or some firm, because without it you have no really good way to say what sample came from where. Then you walk the perimeter of the pile getting a baseline height profile. Or you would hold an accurate and reliable aerial mapping of the pile to start with, giving the pile’s outer topography. I presume a magnetic compass would be worthless to use around there, given the iron content and magnetite left in the tailings. Best to have aerial mapping first, then the GPS readings can be converted to map points.
Twenty representative spots on a pile that size. Not a simple thing to set. However, with a starting aerial map of each pile you have a valid place to start. But, if it’s two hundred or more feet deep, how, short of core drilling, that type of thing, do you proceed? Make things simple. Get a 25 foot galvanized pipe, sink it, tilt it to not spill, and pull a sample from the bottom 20-25 foot level of what you can reach. And understand you still are only sampling the top of the beast. Then, near the perimeter, to be fair in having an idea of what’s deep and not being scrubbed by rain leeching, you go to the pile-soil interface, and grab GPS noted samples from both parts of that interface. That gives you a notion of how the fines get scrubbed down to the soil level, presuming that fines accumulate atop the soil and are not washed deeper into the soil. That’s a big presumption. The interface could be tailings atop rock, so sampling there would differ. You go at least 5 – 10 feet into the pile if the incline is not too great. You do that to avoid edge bias. Any you shovel away the overlay to get to the interface, and carefully pull each of your interface samples that way. Who knows whether thats deep enough to avoid biased sampling at the very edge of the pile, but try to go into the pile for something more representative. You have to go into the pile and shovel and do that carefully.
Then, twenty soil-pile interface samples from the perimeter, twenty tailings-only samples from within the pile, taken from at a depth you can reasonably reach. And you will be looking at all of that for asbestos fiber to get a feeling for leeching and what might, absent rain in dry weather, blow around from a storage site. All sampling must be carefully labeled on the bags and noted on the topographic map. Then you review the completeness of your notes, in a notebook and not loose paper that later can be lost or edited, and if satisfied, you leave the site for the next one.
It’s not sampling representative of things deep in the belly of the beast, but tell me short of drilling into a pile how you’d reach that?
Then, off to the lab. You ship the samples if you are not yourself at NRRI doing the lab work, and if it is an industry sweetheart lab in Pennsylvania that you use, do you really control your study, no matter how good your sampling protocol was?
The allegation of using a sweetheart Big Steel friendly lab has been made with regard to the NRRI studies, so in investigating the protocol that question would be the next thing to investigate. Thoughts about that may be in a subsequent posting.
There are two Achilles heels to the thing. One bottom line is that an entire study is only as good as the sampling protocol, and the reliability of the testing lab and what it does in handling the samples is the second most important factor. If either is insufficient, your study is garbage.
And there is a third factor. Dusting and the fines abraded in shipping and handling is an obvious safety concern for truckers or rail workers, and for citizens living near where the stuff is off-loaded for the local asphalt or concrete plant. Nobody wants mesothelioma. It’s a killer.
So, is there a testing protocol to assess dusting? To simulate shipping and handling to get a measure of abrading and dust content and a proneness of susceptibility to airborne dissemination? You tell me? I don’t know. Does NRRI know? Have they thought over that question? Have they tested or had testing of that done?
BOTTOM LINE TO ALL OF THIS: You always want to know as much detail as you can learn about procedures before believing anybody’s study, unless you are a total fool. And anyone “selling” you somebody’s study is a totally unreliable sophist unless he has and can communicate a convincing knowledge of details of the reliability of procedures involved in a study. Not just conclusory, “Tailings from the east are fine. Tailings from the west have problems.” If that’s what you get, and believe it reliable, bless you because your vote counts as much as mine, anyway, despite your extreme gullibility. P.T. Barnum loved the trusting and believing people he could lure like that. He made his living off them. P.T. was a shill. But he never went hungry. He made a good living gulling folks.
Yet, we live in a more sophisticated time, don’t we?
Hunter-Garcia have a lyrics line, "Shake the hand, that shook the hand, of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan."