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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773 |
Yes, of troy, I would think of the pile of stuff dug out and left from a mine as "slag," but with an awareness that I didn't really know if I were applying the word properly. The copper mines are in the UP. The salt mines are under Detroit. Around here, all we have are gravel pits, sand pits and oil wells.
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
In Australia and NZ, piles of tailings - the waste from the mining rather than the smelting process - were also called "mullock" piles. Here in Zild, when the price of gold shot up during the 1980s several small companies began reprocessing the tailings from the 19thC gold mines and did quite nicely, thank you. One Australian company also began working over ground which had been mined alluvially in Otago (Zild) during the gold rush and also did quite well while the price of gold remained over $300, but aren't doing quite so well now that the price has dropped to about $250. A marginal operation!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379 |
<<reprocessed the old tailings and did quite nicely, thank you.>>
I read, or heard, some time ago of a botanist who had developed a gold-loving lettuce or cabbage. The idea was to mine the top soil for gold as a trace mineral. And the idea was not so daft that, during the new economy, at least, it couldn't find good science and capital to back it.
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
Tin mines, too? Isn't that what brought the Roman's? Tin? to make copper (found on several places in europe) into bronze-- and tin is fairly rare on continent-- and found in Wales and Cornwall?
Certainly tin was important in Roman times, (and before - the Phoenicians used to buy it in Cornwall) and the ore didn't run out until the middle of the C20. Copper was mined in the Lake District, at Coniston, until the end of the C19, and into the v. early C20, I think. But neither have been important over the past hundred years. The only other really important mining opperations have been iron-ore (and that has finished now, so far as I know,) and Salt, which is still a big money-spinner in Cheshire.
"mullock" is a word that you still meet as a dialect word in the East Midlands andd East Anglia, meaning rubbish, or mess. A colleaghue iof mine, if he had a job to do, would always clear up any loose things lying around the work area before he started, saying, "I cain't abear to work wi' arl this mullock about me!"
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 819
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 819 |
You people have covered coal, iron, copper, tin, gold, and such, but nobody's mentioned the waste products of atomic energy. Are there any specific terms for them? On a less serious note, when former Washington State Governor Dixie Lee Ray was appointed US Atomic Energy Commissioner back in the 1970s, it was rumoured that she retired at night wearing a strontium nightie, but had to discontinue the practice because it gave her a radioactive waist. 
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
I remember reading that the tailings from concentrating uranium ore contained enough potassium that they could be sold as fertilizer for tobacco. I have wondered about the possibility of traces of radioactive material in such fertilizer could have contributed to the apparent increase in lung cancer from smoking after WWII.
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