I guess brightly colored netting mounted on buoys is out of the question. You know, because it would cost jobs.

Sheesh. Expensive and tedious tasks.

Moving this video to eric3579's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

I found the whole story pretty interesting *promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by original submitter eric3579.

I remember a video about a LA reservoir that covered the entire surface with 96M plastic "shade" balls - seems like they could do that here (unless the water is so acidic it would melt the balls?)

https://youtu.be/uxPdPpi5W4o

Or it's a money issue, and when is it not when a corporation (mining company) has to foot the bill. Actually who knows why but i have to assume that covering it has been thought of.

Yeah, if each ball is ~$0.33 and that reservoir needed 96 million, would have cost them $32M. (they say they last about 10 years and can recover some of cost via recycling, but also it saved them a lot of money on chlorine, because less of it was needed to keep algae down).
So, even if they need fewer balls and they last 20 years at the copper mine, I highly doubt it costs them $1M a year in staff+drones+bullets.

But I bet there's other materials that are cheaper that aren't food-safe like they need for drinking water reservoirs... another re-use for floating-ocean-trash? In that case they could actually charge by the ton like other waste-management companies.