Arrrrghinish

Bauxite is a locally [Les Baux-de-Provence, Jamaica, Guinea, Hungary] abundant reddish rock which is mostly Al(OH)₃ but run through with iron Fe silicon Si and titanium Ti congeners. Bauxite is the most abundant source of alumin[i]um for our take-out trays, soda cans and airplane wings. In broad terms, getting dirty bauxite to Shiny Al is a 4 step process 

1. Crush it to increase the surface area for chemical action
2. Slop in A Lot of hot caustic soda NaOH and boil it up under pressure to create pure sodium aluminate Na₂O·Al₂O₃
3. Discard the alkaline sludge aka red mud into tailing ponds until the end of time
4. Apply A Lot of electric current to reduce the alumina / aluminium(III) oxide / Al₂O₃ crystals to pure metal

Step 3 is a mill stone round the neck of share-holders and requires the company to divert significant dividend money to maintenance costs for the tailing ponds. In 2014, The Blob described the ruinous consequences of failing to front up these infra-structural costs in Ajka, Hungary. There on 4th October 2010, a berm failed after a rainy ould Summer. Seven people and 7 million fish died in the tsunami of toxic waste.

Long ago and far away??  On 4th September 1983 Aughinish Alumina Limited (AAL), a partnership of Alcan (40%), Billiton (35%) and Anaconda (25%) started operations in Co Limerick, using steps 1 - 3 of the ELI5 protocol above. You can see the consequences of 40 years of productivity from space:

on the South of the Shannon Estuary ~10km WSW of the Airport and about half that distance W of Askeaton, Co Limerick. AAL was the largest producer of alumina in Europe, making 35% of this key industrial resource at one time. Mergers, sales and acquisitions found AAL in the hands of Rusal in 2007.  Rusal is the creation of billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska Олег Владимирович Дерипаска.

So there was a Russian asset in the Republic when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 but the once and future Taoiseach Micheál Martin claimed Irish exceptionalism w.r.t., like, sanctions and Kevin Sheahan, Askeaton publican and Fianna Fáil CoCo councillor echoed this unprincipled parochialism. Because 450 of his parishioners were directly employed by Rusal and he needed their votes next time around - he had secured 1,246 first prefs in 2019 . . . the Irish for shame is náire. The fact that Deripaska is a citizen of CypRus and deplores the invasion of Ukraine shouldn't make no differ.

A couple of weeks ago the YT algorithm dropped me The Aughinish Incident a very Irish Disaster [26 min] by Kev Collins. It addresses another facet of the Aughinish / Askeaton story . . . tl;dw? AAL started ops in 1983, over the next ten years there was an uptick in a range of human and animal health issues locally. Cattle dying from vet-baffling ailments, stillborn and deformed calves. And children too. It's not much use cherishing AAL as a major likely employer for the next generation of Askeatoneers if those youngsters are disabled or dead before they can be hired. Public and political pressure built up and up until in 1995 the EPA was tasked to determine a) if the uptick was within the normal range b) if not, what was the cause.

After 3 years, and £5million, that investigative study concluded that there was a) nothing to see here b) no cause could be assigned with statistical confidence to the nothing. The skeptical minority report of environmental statistician Dr Sarah Walters from U.Birmingham was suppressed. So only 5 volumes and a summary [PDFs downloadable] totalling 1,280 pages were published . . . in 2013.  Unless a) you live in NW Co. Limerick && b) you're doing a degree in stats && c) your crap-detector is particularly well polished I doubt you're going to read the report with a jotter on the table for taking notes. Kev Collins runs a channel on which he can make articulate assertions w/o itemising all the supporting evidence. A bit like some of The Blob, do I hear you say? His Aughinish piece-to-camera is a useful teaser or call-to-arms, but you'll have to Work to determine if a) the EPA was suborned and bought off by oligarch-roubles or b) the adverse health storm in West Limerick was hard to endure but not attributable to anything but the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or c) little gr👁👁n men.

One of Kev's points is that the fissured limestone nature of the bedrock upon which the AAL red mud mountain is piled up is not uniform in texture. The subterranean fissures have capacity to funnel toxins underground quite a distance from the Aughinish source . . . to blurf up in some unfortunate Askeaton farmer's borehole - but not the neighbour's. The geology around the plant is quite diverse

with a thesaurus of limestones, siltstones, mudstones, shales and sandstones; variously cherty, muddy, laminated . . . and differentially porous. Which is an unfortunate reality because, it seems, the EPA adopted a model of uniform geology which was all about the Mean values while smooshing the variability around those means. Must hunt down Dr Walters' minority report.

Maybe refer back to the cluster of Down syndrome kids born to a cohort of mothers who had earlier attended the same secondary school in Dundalk. At the time my boss and his boss crunched the numbers and concluded that so many cases in such a small cohort was vanishingly unlikely BUT it was a) wrong and b) counter-productive to point the indignant finger of blame at The Brits and their Sellafield nuclear facilities just 100km E across the Irish sea.

The day after YT delivered The Aughinish Incident, Wikipedia headlined "The High Court of Justice in London rules BHP liable for the 2015 Mariana dam disaster in Minas Gerais, Brazil". That is Ten Years ago! BHP was originally an Australian mining corp but went multinational megacorp by merging with Billiton Maatschappij. Yes, yes the same Billiton which [see above] had a 35% stake in AAL when that enterprise floated . . . kleine wereld!  The High Court judge handing down that condemnation was/is Finola O'Farrell. Justice O'Farrell has acquired a lapel-full of gongs and honours from The Brits but I bet she's eligible for an Irish passport. As with Aughinish, the wheels of justice / fact-finding ground slow for downstream Minas Gerais. But a sorry tale of corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, failures of technical oversight launched 45 million tonnes of toxic crud into the Doce River killing 19 people and uncountable millions of fish. That was +40x as much as at Ajka in Hungary 5 years previous. 

I trust that the EPA, Micheál Martin TD and Kevin Sheahan CC will own their responsibility when/if [whc heaven forfend] corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, & failures of technical oversight cause a similar breach of berm into the mighty Shannon.

But for me, the bottom line is that the State should cherish all those who are crushed by misfortune [in maternity hospitals, sketchy work-places, on the roads, at the seaside]. Then we'd be less quick to lawyer up and/ or Go Tribunal and assign blame at ruinous cost to everyone involved except the lawyers.