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Time is running out for New Zealanders who want to have their say about the future of mining and the fate of New Zealand's conservation estate with just one week left to make submissions.
The risks and rewards need to be considered before deciding but after that deadline officials will start working out whether to allow mining on conservation land.
Kelvyn Eglinton from Newmont Asia Pacific says the high grade future of mining is underground.
He says all of the easy to get shallow gold has already been taken.
Getting what is left means miners have to blast, shift, crush and drench in cyanide 400,000 tonnes of rock to yield three tonnes of gold and 17 of silver each year. The rest has to go into earth dams sealed in clay 1.5 metres thick.
"They're built to withstand the biggest potential earthquake that we would expect to have here and the biggest potential storm we'd expect to have here," says Eglinton.
Newmont says the water running off is as clean as anything leaving the rest of the plant.
It is all very different from the 60s Tiu Mine on the Kaimai slopes above Te Aroha which is an example of what can go wrong.
The Tui Mine is an example of the negative side of mining as 100,000 cubic metres of toxic waste lies beneath the earth. For the last 40 years it has been slowly leaching out of the dam down through the river system and out on to the Hauraki Plains.
The mine went bust in 1973. The water can burn someone's skin and it is perhaps the most contaminated site in the country.
Denis Tegg, a Coromandel watchdog says something like 13 kilograms of arsenic and a whole cocktail of other heavy metals is entering the streams everyday.
"That's going into these streams and those streams flow into the Waihau River and the Waihau River flows into the firth of Thames which is our snapper fishery and our aquaculture industry," says Tegg.
The regional council and environment ministry are about to spend $17 million trying to clean it up.
Eglinton says the Tui Mine is a disaster for the industry and a mess for the country but he says it will not happen in his mine.
When the Newmont mines close authorities will hold a $30 million bond from Newmont while it cleans up.
Then a local trust takes over the land and responsibility for any future problems and the bond falls to $10 million.
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