A slurry pipeline is a specially engineered pipeline used to move ores, such as coal or iron, or mining waste, called tailings, over long distances. A mixture of the ore concentrate and water, called slurry, is pumped to its destination and the water is filtered out. Due to the abrasive properties of slurry, the pipelines can be lined with high-density polyethylene (HDPE), or manufactured completely from HDPE Pipe, although this requires a very thick pipe wall. Slurry pipelines are used as an alternative to railroad transportation when mines are located in remote, inaccessible areas.
A dam is a barrier that stops or restricts the flow of surface water or underground streams. Reservoirs created by dams not only suppress floods but also provide water for activities such as irrigation, human consumption, industrial use, aquaculture, and navigability. Hydropower is often used in conjunction with dams to generate electricity. A dam can also be used to collect or store water which can be evenly distributed between locations. Dams generally serve the primary purpose of retaining water, while other structures such as floodgates or levees are used to manage or prevent water flow into specific land regions.
The St. Francis Dam, or the San Francisquito Dam, was a concrete gravity dam located in San Francisquito Canyon in northern Los Angeles County, California, United States, that was built between 1924 and 1926. The dam failed catastrophically in 1928, killing at least 431 people in the subsequent flood, in what is considered to have been one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th century and the third-greatest loss of life in California history.
In mining, tailings or tails are the materials left over after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction (gangue) of an ore. Tailings are different from overburden, which is the waste rock or other material that overlies an ore or mineral body and is displaced during mining without being processed.
Virginia is a gold mining town located in the Lejweleputswa District Municipality and on goldfields of the Free State province in South Africa about 140 km (90 mi) northeast of Bloemfontein, the provincial capital.
The Wolf Creek Dam is a multi-purpose dam on the Cumberland River in the western part of Russell County, Kentucky, United States. The dam serves at once four distinct purposes: it generates hydroelectricity; it regulates and limits flooding; it releases stored water to permit year-round navigation on the lower Cumberland River; and it creates Lake Cumberland for recreation, the largest man made lake by volume East of the Mississippi river. The Lake has become a popular tourist attraction.U.S. Route 127 is built on top of the dam.
A tailings dam is typically an earth-fill embankment dam used to store byproducts of mining operations after separating the ore from the gangue. Tailings can be liquid, solid, or a slurry of fine particles, and are usually highly toxic and potentially radioactive. Solid tailings are often used as part of the structure itself.
Fontenelle Dam was built between 1961 and 1964 on the Green River in southwestern Wyoming. The 139-foot (42 m) high zoned earthfill dam impounds the 345,360-acre-foot (0.42600 km3) Fontenelle Reservoir. The dam and reservoir are the central features of the Seedskadee Project of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Fontenelle impoundment primarily as a storage reservoir for the Colorado River Storage Project. The dam suffered a significant failure in 1965, when the dam's right abutment developed a leak. Emergency releases from the dam flooded downstream properties, but repairs to the dam were successful. However, in 1983 the dam was rated "poor" under Safety Evaluation of Existing Dams (SEED) criteria, due to continuing seepage, leading to an emergency drawdown. A concrete diaphragm wall was built through the core of the dam to stop leakage.
The Church Rock uranium mill spill occurred in the U.S. state of New Mexico on July 16, 1979, when United Nuclear Corporation's tailings disposal pond at its uranium mill in Church Rock breached its dam. The accident remains the largest release of radioactive material in U.S. history, having released more radioactivity than the Three Mile Island accident four months earlier.
The Sand River is a river in the Free State province, South Africa. It is located close to the towns of Welkom and Virginia in the gold mining centre of the Free State. Its source is located close to Tweefontein NW of Ficksburg not far from the South Africa-Lesotho border. This river is famous because of the historical Sand River Convention signed nearby, an important event in South African political history.
The 2000 Baia Mare Cyanide spill was a leak of cyanide near Baia Mare, Romania, into the Someș River by the gold mining company Aurul, a joint-venture of the Australian company Esmeralda Exploration and the Romanian government.
The Omai Gold Mine is located in Guyana on the north coast of South America near the west bank of the Essequibo River in the interior of the country. Access to Omai is by road from the capital of Georgetown on the coast, and from the town of Linden approximately 60 km away. There is an operational airstrip on site which can accommodate aircraft from Georgetown. Gold mining at Omai is known from at least the 1880s, and when it was developed as a large scale mine in 1992 by Cambior, the mine was the largest gold mine in the Guiana Shield and a major source of income and employment in Guyana. During the period from 1992 – 2005, Omai produced 3.7 Moz of gold at an average grade of 1.5 g/t Au from the Fennell and the Wenot open pits.
The Jameson Cell is a high-intensity froth flotation cell that was invented by Laureate Professor Graeme Jameson of the University of Newcastle (Australia) and developed in conjunction with Mount Isa Mines Limited.
The Mount Polley mine is a Canadian gold and copper mine located in British Columbia near the towns of Williams Lake, and Likely. It consists of two open-pit sites with an underground mining component and is owned and operated by the Mount Polley Mining Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Imperial Metals. In 2013, the mine produced an output of 38,501,165 pounds (17,463,835 kg) of copper, 45,823 ounces of gold, and 123,999 of silver. The mill commenced operations in 1997 and was closed and placed on care and maintenance in 2019. The company owns 20,113 hectares (201.13 km2) of property near Quesnel Lake and Polley Lake where it has mining leases and operations on 2,007 hectares (20.07 km2) and mineral claims on 18,106 hectares (181.06 km2). Mineral concentrate is delivered by truck to the Port of Vancouver.
The 2015 Gold King Mine waste water spill was an environmental disaster that began at the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado, when Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) personnel, along with workers for Environmental Restoration LLC, caused the release of toxic waste water into the Animas River watershed. They caused the accident by breaching a tailings dam while attempting to drain ponded water near the entrance of the mine on August 5. After the spill, the Silverton Board of Trustees and the San Juan County Commission approved a joint resolution seeking Superfund money.
The Mariana dam disaster, also known as the Bento Rodrigues or Samarco dam disaster, occurred on 5 November 2015, when the Fundão tailings dam at the Germano iron ore mine of the Samarco Mariana Mining Complex near Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, suffered a catastrophic failure, resulting in flooding that devastated the downstream villages of Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo, killing 19 people. The extent of the damage caused by the tailings dam collapse is the largest ever recorded with pollutants spread along 668 kilometres (415 mi) of watercourses.
The Padcal tailings spills of August-September 2012 were a series of mine tailings spills from Tailings Pond 3 of the Philex Mining Corporation's Padcal mine in Benguet Province, Philippines.
The structural failure of tailings dams and the ensuring release of toxic metals in the environment is a great concern. The standard of public reporting on tailings dam incidents is poor. A large number remain completely unreported, or lack basic facts when reported. There is no comprehensive database for historic failures. According to mining engineer David M Chambers of the Center for Science in Public Participation, 10,000 years is "a conservative estimate" of how long most tailings dams will need to maintain structural integrity.
The 2022 Jagersfontein Tailings Dam Collapse was a structural failure of a mine tailings dam near Jagersfontein, located in the Free State province of South Africa, resulting in a mudslide.
