The “coal mining capital’s” Mayor Oleksandr Lukianchenko had to admit recently that the much-hyped local spoil pit sales program was not working. In his words, no one wanted to take part even when private firms were offered an old refuse heap for a song, practically in the city center, so that they could clear it off and use the place as they thought best. Having assessed the likely expenses, businessmen chose a less exotic option even if a given place was located on the remote outskirts.
Donetsk seems to continue to be “adorned” with dozens of manmade rock piles which Soviet-era poems so lyrically extolled. But, in reality, local coal mines’ spoil tips are causing nothing but problems for the city. The problem is not only in that winds are blowing around fine, biting and all-penetrating dust, but also in that a major part of these heaps of empty rock, once extracted together which Donetsk coal, is slowly decaying and polluting the air with carbon monoxide and sulfuric compounds.
From time to time, these poetic “blue Donetsk mountains” turn into veritable volcanoes by suddenly exploding and spitting the many tons of stone slates out into the air. The most high-profile event of this kind, which once happened in Selidov near Donetsk, led to human causalities.
Meanwhile, there are civilized methods of solving the problem of spoil tips. One of them was devised by Anatolii Mnukhin, deputy director of the State Mining Safety Research Institute. This well-known expert says that rock heaps disposal is very profitable – each of them will fetch at least a hundred million in the hard American currency. Hence, ten spoil tips equal a billion. And the very fact that there are over a thousand of these abandoned “treasures” all over Donbas send your mind reeling.
“We are invited to process the accumulated rock on a comprehensive and 100-percent basis,” Mnukhin told The Day. “First, one must remove the iron ore from there. There is not much of it there, but the fact that the raw material is literally at our feet guarantees commercial success. Then comes aluminum. Do you know that alumina makes up almost a half of a spoil tip? Yes, the material which Ukraine imports from as far away as Nigeria to make ‘winged metal.’ Then come rare earth metals: germanium (used in medicine, electronics, artificial materials with preset properties), scandium (high-quality steels, aerospace equipment, physics of ultra low temperatures), gallium (nuclear energy, lasers, solar batteries). In this case, the output is calculated by the kilogram, not by the ton, but market prices for these products are comparable to that of gold. Incidentally, the noble yellow metal also occurs in the coal rock, but this is a different subject.”
What is left at the end of a disposal cycle is high-quality raw material for construction materials, including bricks. After all, an unnecessary spoil tip will give way to a gentrified area suitable for construction and even for farming. Meanwhile, the processing complex, consisting of several mobile modules, moves to another place.
“But, as is known,” I asked Mnukhin, “extracting rare earth metals, as well as dressing any mineral raw material, is a pollution-related process which exerts additional pressure on the environment. So it poses a considerable threat to the Donbas which has had its share of the ‘benefits’ of industrialization.”
“There are new state-of-the-art and ‘clean’ methods of dressing now,” Mnukhin reassured me, “for example, electrostatic fractionization of raw materials. Besides, it is dozens of times cheaper than traditional old technologies which usually use huge-size separators with special technical fluids. What we suggest for grinding the rock is the so-called electro-explosion.”
One more positive point: the elimination of a spoil tip makes it possible to profitably sell greenhouse gas quotas under the Kyoto Protocol. For the world economy is now reorienting towards green solutions — saving energy and using resources efficiently.
And while the Donetsk manmade mountains are still standing strong, one more researcher has devised an original method of utilizing them. Prof. Viktor Kostenko, head of the Nature Conservation Department at Donetsk National Technological University, suggests installing wind power units on pit refuse heap tops. The professor is putting forward convincing arguments: a power generator put up at such heights will “catch” stronger and longer winds. Besides, the law demands that a sanitary exclusion zone be set up around spoil tips, which means that the low-frequency sounds of a turbine’s huge propeller will not affect the populace. This even drastically diminishes the likelihood of migrating bird flocks suddenly getting into a “grinder” of sorts.
It is not exactly a new idea to use Donetsk rock heaps for harnessing wind power. About a quarter of a century ago a Soviet research institute planned to install an experimental wind turbine right in the center of the industrial Horlivka, on the spoil tip of Kochegarka coal mine. The researchers had calculated that, if the idea proved successful and the experiment were further continued, the entire coal mining industry of Donbas could be provided with pollution-free electric energy. However, spoil tips were forgotten for a long time.
The impression is that even now nobody, except for a few enthusiasts, care about “Aladdin’s mountains.” The regional authorities are still waiting for coveted foreign investments and big business is squeezing the last profits out of what has remained of Soviet steelmaking and other assets. Is there nobody to care about our tomorrow?
