Towards an integrated approach to tailings management

Abstract

Tailings management aims to dispose of tailings at the minimum cost consistent with meeting or exceeding imposed standards, including legislative obligations. This simple business objective requires managing the tailings storage facility (TSF) risks associated with surface water, groundwater, dust, sustainable closure and potential catastrophic failure. The individual nature of every ore body and specific site topography ensures that no 'one size fits all'. It has been suggested that paste and thickened tailings (P&TT) provides the ability to tailor the production and transportation of tailings to suit the deposition site, rather than the traditional approach of accepting that the deposition site has to accommodate tailings of high variability. While the traditional approach can be made to work, it is directly linked to the catastrophic failures of tailings impoundments, where large volumes of decant water have triggered failures due to overtopping, piping or slope instability, or saturated tailings have simply liquefied. P&TT offers an ability to mitigate these risks and when implemented into new projects with variable tailings streams there are significant benefits to be realised. The paper identifies the inter-dependencies between the various tailings disposal processes, such as thickening, pumping and deposition. It demonstrates that there are benefits in taking a more integrated approach to the design and operation of tailings disposal facilities. A collaborative industry project to tackle this challenge is described.

Re-Thinking Mining Waste through an Integrative Approach Led by Circular Economy Aspirations

“…In addition, increasing demand for essential metals is leading to the extraction and development of complex finer-grained low-grade orebodies. The mining of lower grade and/or complex ores will produce greater quantities of tailings per ton of product and will also increase the fines content of the tailings [3]. If not managed properly, mining waste can generate significant pollution, both through air pathways (dust and gas emissions) and water leaching (acid mine drainage) [4].…”

Online rheology monitoring of a thickener underflow

“…An accurate, reliable and robust means of measuring suspension rheology in real time has applications in thickener control, pipeline transport, pump operations and tailings deposition (Chryss et al 2012). The need for this technique has arisen from the greater demands being placed on mineral processing operations (Calvo et al 2016).…”

Studies on thickened tailings deposition in flume tests using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method

“…It is necessary to investigate lateral spreading considering that the proposed method is based on planar simulations. Moreover, it is not easy to determine the rheological parameters in the field, such as the yield stress, viscosity and density, because of the variation of thickener output (Fourie and Gawu 2010;Chryss et al 2012). In addition, although the value of 0.038m for characteristic thickness of the deposited tailings, which is necessary for the beach slope prediction with a non-zero works very well for the flume tests, further investigations into this value for the field deposition of thickened tailings are required.…”