London 2012 Olympics: digging deep for medal gold in Utah hills

With 4,700 medals to be presented at this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games,
it is clear that obtaining the metals to make them was a major undertaking.

“You are looking at the very start of that process to create what the
athletes in London will be competing for,” explains Matt Lengerich, the
general manager of the Kennecott Utah Copper Bingham Valley mine.

He is standing on the edge of an enormous hole, three quarters of a mile deep
and nearly three miles wide. The open cast mine is the largest man-made
excavation in the world. The dumper trucks, with tyres twice the height of a
man, are dwarfed by the expanse of the mine’s towering yellow and brown
walls.

“We have sent $7.3 million (£4.6 million) of metal to the UK for the
Olympic medals and it has been the work of 2,000 people to obtain it.”

The London-based mining company Rio Tinto, which owns the Bingham Valley mine,
has supplied eight tons of copper, silver and gold for the medals. The
majority of the metal has come from Bingham Valley, with around one per cent
coming from a mine in Mongolia.

The ore is dug out of the huge open cast pit using a combination of explosives
and diggers. Waste rock is dumped further down the canyon, forming new
mountains of rubble that dominate the skyline when looking out of Salt Lake
City.

The ore is crushed into basketball-sized boulders before being carried on a
five-mile conveyor belt through a mountain tunnel to a plant known as the
concentrator, where it is pulverised into a fine powder in giant revolving
tumblers.

The powdered ore is mixed with chemicals and air is pumped through the
resulting gloop to form bubbles. These become coated with the metals
liberated from the ore, allowing them to be separated before being sent to
the smelter.

At temperatures of more than 2,500F (1,371C), the metal mixture is melted down
and poured into moulds to create large two inch thick plates.

The mixed-metal plates are then taken by rail to a refinery where they are
placed into tanks containing sulphuric acid. An electric current causes the
copper to separate from the other metals in the plates, including gold,
silver, lead and arsenic.

The heavier precious metals are taken to a precious metals plant, where they
are separated and melted down.

The gold and silver were poured into bars before being transported along with
the copper, which had been cut into button-sized pieces, to Britain, where
they were again melted down and moulded into blank discs that were sent to
the Royal
Mint
in Wales.

This year’s Olympic medals are among the heaviest ever to be created, each one
measuring 3¼in in diameter and weighing more than 14oz.

Rather than being pure gold, the gold medal is predominantly silver that has
been plated with at least a fifth of an ounce of gold, while the silver
medal is mainly silver with a small amount of copper. The bronze metal is
made from copper, tin and zinc.

In total more than £1.2 million of gold and £3.4 million of silver was used to
create the Olympic and Paralympic medals.

Squeezing the metal discs with forces of up to 936 tons, the Royal Mint
pressed the final design on to them – the Greek goddess of victory, Nike, on
one side and the London 2012 logo with the River Thames in the background on
the other.

Fergus Feeley, the director of programmes at the Royal Mint, said: “There
are more than 22 stages a victory medal goes through after we receive the
blank discs. It takes over 10 hours of work for each medal.”

The London Organising Committee (Locog) chose Rio Tinto to supply the metal
for the medals as part of its commitment to make London 2012 the “greenest”
Games ever.

But critics claim Rio Tinto is far from “green”. Doctors and
campaigners in Utah say the company’s mining activities create pollution
that causes hundreds of premature deaths each year. They have demanded Locog
launch an investigation.

Professor Richard Kanner, from the University of Utah Hospital and a member of
Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, said: “The adverse effects
of poor air quality are well established.

“Rio Tinto contributes at least 16 per cent and possibly as much as 33
per cent of the particulate matter in the Salt Lake Valley depending on how
the data is interpreted. About one third of their international profits come
from the Kennecott mine and we all would like to see them prosper in their
operations in Utah, but not at the expense of our health.”

Rio Tinto, however, insists it has been doing much to reduce pollution. At the
mine itself, tankers spray water constantly on the ground to help reduce the
dust thrown up into the atmosphere.

Along the shores of the Great Salt Lake it has regenerated salt marshes that
now support thriving populations of hawks, wading birds, antelope and
burrowing owls.

It has also emerged that Rio Tinto started production on the medals
without a prior audit by the Responsible Jewellery Council
to
demonstrate that the metal had been mined in an ethical and environmentally
sound way.

Locog was relying upon the resulting certificate to show it had reached its
sustainability goals for producing medals for the games. The certification
is now expected to be in place by the time the Games begin.

For the workers who have helped to produce the metal for the medals, however,
none of this matters as much as their pride in being such an important part
of Olympic history.

Lee Hutson, 64, a heavy equipment operator, has been selected by Rio Tinto as
one of four employees from the mine who will travel to the Olympics to see
the fruits of their labour finally presented to athletes in London.

He said: “I am privileged and honoured to have been involved.”

Anna Wiley, the general manager of the refinery, added: “The copper we
produce usually gets made into less-exciting things like piping or wire, so
to be making medals, it’s pretty exciting.”

The finished medals are currently being held in a high-security location by
the Royal Mint before they are distributed among the events for the Games.
It will only be a matter of time before some are back on American soil.

“Our athletes will bringing most of the metal back to the US,” joked
one mine employee.

Britain’s athletes, however, will no doubt be doing their best to ensure some
of that precious metal stays in the UK.

Views: 0

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Premium WordPress Themes | Thanks to Themes Gallery, Bromoney and Wordpress Themes