Cyanide ecotoxicity at hypersaline gold operations

Summary

Two working hypotheses to account for absence of wildlife deaths at hypersaline tailings dams were derived from a longer list of nine.

In the second phase of the work one of these was modified slightly, and the additional chemical and ecological data from Phase I allowed testing against two mathematical models of cyanide degradation, and admissible explanations of the observed lack of wildlife mortality.

Keywords: hypersaline tailings, cyanide degradation, cyanide ecotoxicity, gold processing, wildlife mortality