Their chief concerns were over plans to use cyanide to extract gold and silver at Rosia Montana, warning of a “cyanide lake” that would be created in a mountain valley near the mine. Irina Bandrabur of Greenpeace Romania tells bne IntelliNews that 215mn tonnes of toxic sludge would be produced during the mine’s life, and that insufficient precautions are planned to protect underground and surface waters. “Romania will end up having an ecological disaster in the area... and a tailing pond of hundreds of hectares contaminated by cyanide. This would be a burden for generations to come,” Bandrabur says.
Environmentalists have also pointed to the precedent set by the Baia Mare disaster back in 2000, where 100,000 cubic metres of cyanide-contaminated water burst through a dam contaminating large swathes of farmland and leaking into the Tisza and Danube rivers to affect Hungary and Serbia as well as Romania.
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