HR: 1340h
AN: H33D-0492    [Abstracts]
TI: Implications of Metal Load Randomness for Mine Water Pollution Abatement
AU: * Baresel, C
EM: baresel@kth.se
AF: Department of Land and Water Resources Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Brinellv„gen 32, Stockholm, 100 44 Sweden
AU: Destouni, G
EM: georgia.destouni@natgeo.su.se
AF: Department of Physical Geography & Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Svante Arrhenius v„g 8C, Stockholm, 106 91 Sweden
AB: Spatial and temporal variability of pollution transport from point and diffuse mine water sources (e.g. mine wastes, abandoned mine voids, contaminated groundwater) in catchments imply uncertainty in mine water pollution loads at important compliance boundaries (CB) and in cost-efficient abatement solutions for handling these loads. We use a stochastic description of total pollution loading from different possible mine water sources and quantify the effect of random load variance on minimum abatement costs for various targeted zinc load reductions to the Dal River, Sweden. Consideration of randomness in mine water pollution loads implies that, under certain conditions, compliance costs may be lower for higher than for lower load reduction targets, for the same load coefficient of variation and required probability to reach targeted load reductions. In addition, we illustrate that total costs in the cost-efficient abatement solutions converge with increasing zinc load reduction targets. Cost-efficient abatement solutions and costs are therefore more sensitive to uncertainty in pollution loading at lower than at higher compliance targets. For the example case of the Dal River Basin, we also show that the generally increasing abatement costs with increasing load variance and desired probability to reach targeted load reductions is only step-wise continuous, because cost-efficient abatement requires both continuous (e.g. constructed wetlands) and discrete (e.g. soil covers) abatement measures.
DE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty
DE: 1899 General or miscellaneous
DE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects
DE: 1869 Stochastic processes
DE: 1871 Surface water quality
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting