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by cgh 1278 days ago
Point 4 is mostly confined to old abandoned sites, as mentioned in your link. Modern tailings aren’t left to leach acid all over the place, at least not in North American mines. I get that all bets are off in eg Africa, however.
1 comments

Sure, but a lot of surface exploitation is planned globally. Africa and Asia are certainly going to be seeing new mines opening due to demand for solar/batteries.
For sure, I was taking issue with the absoluteness of the assertion that all terrestrial mines are leaching from their tailings piles/ponds. It’s not true of many (most?) modern mines.
I didn’t mean it as an absolute assertion, but I can see that I didn’t make that clear.