I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose, but a portable pilot plant is built inside a shipping container. It has connections to the outside for power, feed water, and water drain, and is currently running on an extension cord coming from another building.

It's a few years old, exactly how many I don't know, and has travelled to several places before I saw it this winter. Its age shows. In the leaky clean water tank, the mis-labelled lines and controllers, the pipes that go nowhere, and the squeaky pump I have kicked no less than six times while writing this sentence on a scrap of paper in one of my minutes here and there of inactivity. A well-placed kick gives me sometimes as much as a minute with no shrill squeal in my ear.

The seacan itself is inside a building, one of the old mine's outbuildings, in what is now a museum. In the other room are rows upon rows of boxes containing sorted minerals, and a rolling, freestanding chalkboard. I haven't yet seen anybody in that room.

Operator... or tour guide?

Since the pilot plant is in a museum, we get the occasional tourist looking inside and wondering what's going on. I'm happy to explain, because I am enthusiastic about both the technology in general and this project in particular. The tech is just plain cool, and this project - turning a closed mine infamous for its polluting acid mine drainage into a zero-waste site - is the kind of thing that gets me excited. I'm working on pilot-scale tests to see if it can be done. I think so. I hope so.

And if so, I think this would be a great place for a technology showcase. It is a museum, after all.

It's kind of funny, though. I have the keys to the museum but I've never actually done the tour. I have, however, done a bit of a tour of some of the restricted areas. Like the one marked "unsafe building - do not enter", which I use to get to the main shutoff valve for my feed water.

Waitaminute... it never snows on the wet coast

There was a one-month gap in which I wasn't working at the pilot plant... because it froze. Our 900-foot feed line froze, the tap water we mix chemicals with froze, even the water in buckets would freeze overnight. Even the full-sized water treatment plant that's already operating up there froze up.

We had a choice between waiting for it to thaw or heat-tracing and insulating 900 feet of pipe, which is expensive and a huge power draw. It thawed over christmas, and we were back at it in January.