I'll just draw a picture like this. This is the cross-section of the Athabasca River. The oil sands sit like this. Near the Athabasca River the oil sands are shallow, so near the Athabasca River oil sands are mined with surface mining, big pits. Further away from the oil sands, where the deposit is deeper—200 metres or so—that's where the industry uses in situ techniques, where they basically go down and have to blast it out from here.
The tailings pond issue that we're talking about is only an issue in the surface mining area right beside the Athabasca River. That's the first thing to understand. Why are the tailings ponds there? Well, when they're mining they just have a bunch of rock and they want to get that bitumen out of the rock, so the industry figured out how to boil it, basically. They boil it up and they're able to take off that bitumen layer. They need a lot of water to boil up and extract out the bitumen, so that's why there's a need to extract water from the Athabasca River.
When they're boiling it all up, they're not only pulling up the bitumen; they're creating this tailings slurry. That tailings slurry has to go to a tailings pond and settle. That overlying water, once it settles, can be reused and it can go back into the processing. Actually, to the industry's credit, they've increased the rate at which they recycle the water over time, but the problem with this recycling, reusing the water over and over again, is that it becomes more and more contaminated every time it goes back. Even though it makes sense, from a policy perspective, to encourage the industry to recycle their water, what it has created is a big problem with these massive ponds on the landscape of highly toxic water.
This is highly toxic water. We're not talking about subtle effects. Animals that are in contact with this water, land on this water, die. These are not subtle effects.
These are just open systems. These tailings ponds are basically mines, mine pits. They're not a sealed unit. They leak. There are drainage ponds around that leak bitumen and pump—