RMGC plans to dig four quarries on mountain tops, where open pits are necessary to extract the gold and silver particles embedded in the rock, and four of the 16 villages will be largely destroyed.
Cyanide will be used to separate the metals, and the waste treated, then stored in a mud pond where the concentration will be reduced to 5–7 milligrams, below the EU’s legal limit.
The pond, one of the most contested issues in the project, would wipe out Corna village. This patch of chemical waste will be contained by a dam the company says can withstand massive earthquakes and rainfall.
Memories of the potential for broken dam disasters are fresh after Hungary’s 2010 red sludge spill. Romania has a poor track record of its own after a dam broke in 2000 at a gold processing plant and cyanide poured into the river Tisza, affecting much of eastern Europe, including Hungary.
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