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PGM Recovery from Mine Waste
Published in Hossain Md Anawar, Vladimir Strezov, Abhilash, Sustainable and Economic Waste Management, 2019
The major challenge facing most companies is how to properly manage the waste and tailings material so as to minimize or eliminate their impact on the environment. The key long-term goal of waste disposal and management is to prevent the mobilization and release into the environment of toxic constituents of these wastes. Tailings waste material is often stored in impoundments behind dams. However, the mining industry is filled with numerous cases of tailings dam collapse (e.g. the 1974 Bafokeng tailings disaster) leading to the flooding of communities (WISE, 2012; van Niekerk and Viljoen, 2005). The magnitude and often toxic nature of the material held within the tailings dams means that dam failure can have a massive impact on the environment, human health, aquatic life and economies. The impact can be felt in the immediate aftermath of the dam collapse with loss of life. The death toll on human and animals due to drowning or suffocation can be very high. In addition, the impact can be felt over the medium to long term, due to the long-term exposure to toxic contaminants.
Was the Environmental Assessment Adequate?
Published in Karlheinz Spitz, John Trudinger, Mining and the Environment, 2019
Karlheinz Spitz, John Trudinger
The environmental audit offers the mining industry an opportunity to improve its environmental image in the eyes of the public. The mining industry in particular is working hard to overcome the negative environmental image under which it operates. Tailings dam failures such as in Guyana, at the Marcopper mine in the Philippines, and the widely publicized tailings dam failure in Los Frailes, Spain, do not help this image and have reverberations in the mining industry throughout the world. Adverse publicity over the Ok Tedi mine in PNG and, some years ago, the New South Wales government’s refusal to grant permission for a US$ 1 billion gold project to proceed, citing environmental reasons, is representative of this attitude which is fueled by the environmental lobby groups.
Alternative and Innovative Integrated Mine Waste Management Approaches
Published in Bruno Bussière, Marie Guittonny, Hard Rock Mine Reclamation, 2020
Tailings dams are usually built using raised embankment design (i.e., the dam is raised progressively as the TSF is filled with tailings). Natural unbounded granular materials can be used for construction of retaining structures but, in practice, they have progressively been replaced by mine wastes since the mid of the 20th century (Bussière 2007), especially for cost reduction reasons. Starter dams, from where the dam is raised, are usually made of coarse waste rock. The dam themselves are usually built using the coarse fraction of the tailings, separated out either by cyclones or naturally during spigoting (Blight 2010). Starter and raising dams are exposed to atmospheric conditions and should be non-reactive to limit contaminated mine drainage generation.
Sustainable design of tailings dams using geotechnical and geomorphic analysis
Published in CIM Journal, 2022
N. Slingerland, F. Zhang, N. A. Beier
Tailings dams are constructed to retain the fine, typically slurried form of mine waste (called tailings) and are often constructed of mine waste themselves. Construction is completed over an extended timeframe as the elevation of tailings stored behind the dam increases. Traditionally, tailings dams have been designed for this operational period exclusively. Design considerations are site specific but generally focus on physical stability and prevention of viable failure modes. At the time of publication, tailings dams are being designed up to heights of 310 m, can be tens of kilometres in length, and can retain volumes in the millions of cubic metres. It follows that these structures have a substantial impact on the environment, including surface and groundwater flow and biodiversity, and a range of other implications (International Committee on Large Dams, 2013).
Effect of initial specimen height and solids concentration on the consolidation parameters of fine-grained coal tailings
Published in Mining Technology, 2021
Shriful Islam, David J. Williams, Chenming Zhang
The height of tailings dams is doubling every three decades, with the risk of tailings dam failures also expected to rise (Robertson 2011). There have been several high-profile tailings dam failures in recent years, such as Mount Polley, Canada in 2014; Samarco, Brazil in 2015; and Brumadinho, Brazil in 2019. Small and less well-publicized tailings dam failures include Hpakant, Myanmar in 2015; Dahegou, China in 2016; Tonglushan, China in 2017; Mishor Rotem, Israel in 2017; Cadia, New South Wales, Australia in 2018; and Cieneguita mine, Mexico in 2018. Among other causes, poor water management and under-consolidated tailings are among the major preventable causes of tailings dam failure (ICOLD 2001). Limiting the depth of the tailings slurry in each deposition cycle is one of the key means of improving the storage efficiency and stability of the tailings dam. Although deeper slurry deposition may be easier and less expensive to operate, it results in a longer drainage path to the surface and hence a longer consolidation time. If the permeability of the tailings is low, the tailings may remain under-consolidated for long periods of time.
A virtual geographic environment for dynamic simulation and analysis of tailings dam failure
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2021
Dayu Yu, Liyu Tang, Fan Ye, Chongcheng Chen
A tailings dam is typically an earth-fill embankment dam that is used to store toxic and potentially radioactive tailings (a slurry of fine particles) discharged from ore separation. Globally, due to the large number and various natural and human-induced factors (Azam and Li 2010; Rico et al. 2008b), dam-break accidents of tailings reservoirs have occurred time after time, which has caused catastrophic environmental pollution and the loss of property and human life, such as the Mount Polley accident in 2014, Samarco’s Fundão tailings dam crash in 2015, and Brumadinho’s Feijão tailings dam disaster in 2019. It is a challenging task for the government and the mining industry to prevent or at least minimize the potential hazard that a tailings dam failure brings. Therefore, the study of simulating and predicting the likely destroyed area from such a failure is of considerable significance to the mining industry.