Fifth Grade
Worksheets
Cyanide Polluted Danube River
A spill at the Aural Mine Tailings Recovery Plant in the city of Baia Mare, Romania, had far-reaching environmental impacts. The area around Baia Mare is rich in gold, silver, copper, and other metals, and it has a long mining history.
The Aural Mine Tailings Recovery Plant processed mining wastes and recovered additional gold that was not extracted in the original mining. The company provided much-needed jobs for this area which had high unemployment.
The process they used began with mixing mining wastes, known as tailings, with water in a pond. This formed a slurry that was fluid enough to be pumped to a processing plant. There, cyanide, the poisonous chemical used to extract the gold, was added to the mixture. High concentrations of cyanide were needed for the process. The gold was extracted, and then the slurry, including the poisonous cyanide, was pumped into a second pond lined with plastic that was not supposed to allow any overflow.
The presence of this pond containing its soup of deadly chemicals provided a constant threat of an environmental disaster for this region in Romania.
