In China, the true cost of Britain’s clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale

Daily Mail -

This toxic lake poisons Chinese farmers, their  children and their land. It is what’s left behind after making the magnets for  Britain’s latest wind turbines… and, as a special Live investigation reveals,  is merely one of a multitude of environmental sins committed in the name of our  new green Jerusalem.

On the outskirts of one of China’s most  polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of  bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat  and corn.

Yan Man Jia Hong is a dedicated Communist.  At 74, he still believes in his revolutionary heroes, but he despises the young  local officials and entrepreneurs who have let this happen.

‘Chairman Mao was a hero and saved us,’ he  says. ‘But these people only care about money. They have destroyed our  lives.’

Vast fortunes are being amassed here in Inner  Mongolia; the region has more than 90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of  rare earth metals, and specifically neodymium, the element needed to make the  magnets in the most striking of green energy producers, wind turbines.

Live has uncovered the distinctly dirty truth  about the process used to extract neodymium: it has an appalling environmental  impact that raises serious questions over the credibility of so-called green  technology.

The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its  environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and  mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made  lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the  massively profitable rare-earths industry that the ‘green’ companies profiting  from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing  about.

Hidden out of sight behind  smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by  platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile wide ‘tailing’ lake. It has killed  farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s  key waterways in jeopardy.

This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is  the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it  has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to  extract its components.

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