Mass evacuation of informal settlements is one of several recommendations in a government-commissioned plan drafted in June to deal with 380 acid mine dumps – many of them radioactive.
In many instances, uranium is mined as a by-product of gold in South Africa and it is estimated that about 800 kilometers of tunnels exist underneath Gauteng after they were left over from more than one hundred years of underground mining. The mining companies have put together a R70 million ($9 million) project and appointed a cost-recovery company to solve the legacy problem and help provide extra potable water in the Gauteng province.
The city of Johannesburg is one of the 40 largest metropolitan areas in the world, and is also the world’s largest city not situated on a river, lake, or coastline. 
A fine example of chemically processed  mine waste is the Top Star mine dump was constructed from 1899 to 1939 reaching a height of 50 meters and containing 5.1 million metric tons waste. 
During the early 1960s, Top Star was converted into a drive-in movie theater, which showed movies until 2006, when it was shut down by DRD Gold to extract latent gold in the mine waste. 
Government is adamant it is managing the problem, and points to a R225-million treasury allocation to treat acid mine water - the first tranche of an estimated R2-billion water treatment plan.
However Environmentalist Mariette Liefferink told the media that government is overwhelmed by the problem ''Now the issue is of such a magnitude that they don't know how to solve it," she said.