In Hungary an ecological disaster is taking place where toxic red mud from an aluminum smelter is flowing into the Donau river.
What can the red mud be ? Not Fe2O3 as that is nontocic. Cr2O3 ? not_important - 6-10-2010 at 11:01
Mostly hydrated iron and silicon oxides, with hydroxides/oxides/carbonates of many of the other metals present in the as-mined bauxite; meaning
exactly what's in it depends on the particular bauxite(s) used.
The high alkalinity reported is interesting, suggesting that they were rather wasteful or there's a lot of fresh mud as the alkali rapidly reacts with
the CO2 and any other acidic gases in the air. franklyn - 6-10-2010 at 11:18
" heavy metals such as lead " read caption frame six
Alarmist headline given the 4 casualties resulted from inundation.
What effect runoff may have on the Danube's fish is another matter.
.Rogeryermaw - 6-10-2010 at 13:06
sludge from an alumina processing plant. so basically it is mud. mineral filled mud. same kinda crap we all played in around construction sites as
children.aonomus - 6-10-2010 at 14:21
While it may have the consistency of mud, the fresh stuff most likely to be at the top (and the supernatant) are supposedly quite alkaline. There were
reports (somewhere) of people needing treatment for caustic 'burns' (I use the term burn loosely as we consider a burns something that leaves you
missing a few grams-pounds of flesh, while the media considers a burn a red skin rash). There were a few fatalities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajka_alumina_plant_accident ) but no cause of death listed on the wiki page (ie: physical causes such as drowning,
being crushed by debris, etc vs chemical).
Aside from the alkalinity, also the presence of heavy metals such as vanadium and other unlisted ones is cause for concern as it may contaminate their
aquifer for a long period of time.chemrox - 6-10-2010 at 14:42
Hungary? the aquifers there have been contaminated for so long already the surface waters they discharge to are toxic waste by anybody else s
standards. not_important is exactly right about the chemical mineralogy and probable waste. Red soils are not at all unusual. Where I live in the
PNW we have an old soil series called the Nekia that has many laterites and bauxites within it. One geologist wrote a paper about a terrain near
where I live as a potential aluminum resource. As an aside the Jory Hill and Nekia soil series are derived from the Columbia River Basalt Group
(CRBG). These are Tertiary flood basalts that comprise one of the great cataclysms that shaped the region, southwestern Washington-northwestern
Oregon. Most flood basalts are submarine and form pillow lavas. The CRBG flowed across the land, hundreds of miles. New flows happened every
5-10,000 years over a 1-2 my period. Wonder what the ET's thought of that shit? Between flows there was just enough time to begin a veneer of soil
at the flow tops. The incipient soil combined with the cooling fractures and shattering on the new flow bases created horizontal permeability in
otherwise generally massive units. These little interflow zones are exploited as aquifers today.not_important - 6-10-2010 at 17:22
Again, concentration of "heavy" metals is going to depend on the source of the bauxite. V, Mo, Zr, are common trace metals.
peach - 8-10-2010 at 14:59
I saw a picture of it on a news paper cover this afternoon. It certainly looks evil, but right from the minute I heard about it I was thinking... it's
probably not that bad.
Alarmist media reports, yes.
I also agree with franklyn, the real problem will be what all that alkali is going to do to the water table. It could be salted out, but then the
fresh water becomes seawater.
Another problem is, a number of the people around there are drawing water up from the table. Obviously, that's not going to be drinkable with the base
dissolved in it.
It will depend on what the soil is like round there. My back garden is already very basic. There was an iron works near the place when they were
building the estate around a hundred years ago, and they've used the caustic clinker from the slag as hardcore in the foundations, so it's leached and
the soil is ~8, way above the 6-5 plants like.
If the soil around there is already acidic, and there are acid producing minerals within it, it'll tend towards neutralizing it's self on the way
through.
Not going to do the plants any favours. Plants universally hate alkaline soils because it locks the nutrients into insoluble forms, as they were doing
with the ore in the first place.
The real impact will be ecologically. Crops dying, rivers messed up, undrinkable well water, but not the toxic sludge burning people to death that the
media depicts.
Speaking of base, I was scooping some KOH pellets out of the bucket with my bare hand this afternoon. It doesn't get much basier than that without
special effort. Still, absolutely nothing done to my hand.
Strength is one thing, but so is contact time.
{edit}Alarmist reports and the BBC
And speaking of alarmist media reports, they did the same thing with the various flues that appeared recently. Including BBC Radio 4. They didn't say
"Oooooo, it's gonna kill you all!", but they did miss out important information that would significantly reduce peoples' worries to a realistic level.
For example, the World Health Organization tracks diseases, like those flues, on a daily basis and plots them as they move around the globe. They
follow all the patients and report on what's been done to help and how they responded, and how the strains are changing in terms of resistance, every
day.
If one consulted the free, easy to navigate, detail rich WHO site, they'd have seen that the mortality rates for those flues were tiny. The same is
true for numerous highly contagious diseases people expect to bring about the next era of darkness (Anthrax too). Even Radio 4 would routinely neglect
to mention things like that, and solely focus on the contraction rate, "... MORE people have the flue", as opposed to "...more have caught it, but
hardly anyone is dying from it".
Having grown up listening to Radio 4 everyday, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that a lot of it, including the news, is absolute rubbish.
All the reports from the war zones come from behind a military lead escort, so they're biased. Channel 4 does a better job of actually getting in with
the dirty shit, where bullets are actually coming towards them. The 45 minute claim was never discussed in detail; e.g. what it actually meant and how
it related to Iraq. The Archers is Eastenders for the middle class. At 5.55pm a few days ago, just prior to the 6pm news coming on, we had a
discussion about "Are clowns scary?", regarding a new ride at Alton Towers; in a program "reporting on breaking stories and summing up the day's
headlines". On Gardener's question time today someone was asking "What should I do with my spare acre?".
We can add to that, the BBC was previously entirely a government regulated agency, and is still heavily regulated. And then add to that, that no one
actually elected Gordon Brown as the PM for the UK.
Combine that with the military escorted news reports from the BBC and have a think about what that means and how it might look if you were seeing the
same tree of things in the Middle East.
If it was a high quality service in the past, it certainly isn't now. And it certainly isn't the pure, refined source everyone thinks it is.
Worst of all, because it has the facade of being something it is not, in the Queen's English, people mindlessly buy into it. Still. At least the Sun
is mainly about tits and drama, and the guys reading it, know it. Saying that, I believe it was the Sun who got the tapes from the US A-10's strafing
the UK convoys by mistake.
As the saying now goes, it's not what you say, it's what you 'accidentally' forget to say. The audience can often paint a more graphic picture from
the missing details than you can write down, and there are no liable charges when someone proves your made up elements are factually incorrect.
[Edited on 8-10-2010 by peach]chemrox - 8-10-2010 at 16:01
Red soils are often acidic.. naturally.mr.crow - 8-10-2010 at 17:24
true, as they have had most of the alkali and alkaline earth elements washed out of them, as well as many of the D-block metals. Plus they generally
are well oxidised, with whatever D-block elements are in them push up to the more acidic higher oxidation states.
But bauxite refining waste is not red soil, having been extracted with strong NaOH, so the natural soils conditions really don't apply.
franklyn - 8-10-2010 at 19:50
The flood itself killed 7 and 115 reported injured.
16 square miles are now covered by sludge.
Testing of the rivers indicate a pH approaching 10
This would explain why individuals wading through
the sludge would experience epidermal exfoliation.
Update on the composition of the sludge
45 % Iron Oxide
15 % Aluminum Oxide
15 % Silicon Dioxide
Hydration water must constitute much of the remaining 25 percent.
The risk now is that the slude will dry and heavy metal-containing dusts will be kicked up into the air.
I don't know if the media is being "alarmist." It's kind of a big deal.
Peach: let's see you wet your hands and then try to scoop up KOH pellets peach - 9-10-2010 at 05:17
Quote:
Spokesman Herwit Schuster said: "We found levels of arsenic, mercury and chrome and the arsenic level especially was double that we expected, double
what is usually contained in such red sludge."
Here we see precisely what I was talking about in action, again.
Double what? One other spill they've seen, the concentrations at the plants? And what does double mean? Balls all to slightly more than balls all? Or
lethal to super lethal?
No dimensions given, or note about actual risk, just that is higher than some other dimensionless reference.
Note the wording, it actually says;
1.) They've detected the other heavy metals
2.) Arsenic is double some other sludge they've measured
But by clumping the two into one sentence, it appears like all of them are double their reference. They could be detecting trace quantities of the
other heavy metals.
The BBC, rather than have it's own lab report done for those levels, which is well within it's budget and the expected level of quality from them, is
relying on the comments from a renowned environmental activism group.
The public won't understand offhand PPMs, but they would understand, "this is the dangerous level, this is the level in the sludge".
There is a malevolent agenda at work, well beyond reporting the facts.
[Edited on 9-10-2010 by peach]morrie - 16-11-2010 at 05:11
I worked for 20 years in the bauxite alumina industry.
Red mud is alkaline!! No doubt about it. Nasty, burny stuff. It is not simply some kind of clay or iron oxide. It contains caustic soda as
residual liquor.
Here, in Oz, we produce more of this stuff than anywhere else in the world. Vast lakes of it.
The typical composition? It depends on the bauxite and therefore the process used. But it contains iron oxides, sodium aluminium silicate
(desilication product = dsp), residual caustic liquor, detrital minerals, unreacted bauxite, quartz.
