Hello everyone,
we all know and have heard that "every mine is different".
What are some of the most "different" mines, active or closed, that you've heard of or have visited where you've thought: "Huh! Interesting!"?
What unique problems had to be tackled, and were they resolved in an unconventional way? What concepts or technologies have you seen that you found surprising? Or is it located in a very unique setting?
For example, from my point of view:
- Ok Tedi (Papua New Guinea) - mostly for being located at such altitude with such extreme precipitation, and its controversial way of tailings disposal
- Lihir (Papua New Guinea) - for being located in a "geothermically active extinct volcano", which is an issue for the explosives (in fact, there is a competition out there looking at this problem)
- Cigar Lake (Canada) - for its jet boring concept
- Königstein (Germany) - apparently, the concept of stope leaching (in-mine recovery) was applied for the extraction of uranium?
- I knew surface miners were being used in limestone, coal and bauxite, but I didn't know that they also found application in the Pilbara region (Australia)
- Sotkamo (Finland) - polymetallic, bacterial heap leaching in the subarctic
- The arctic coal mines of Svalbard
Looking forward to learning more about unique and interesting mine sites!
Comments
McArthur River (another uranium mine in Canada) did raisebore mining, which was quite interesting. They would raisebore holes adjacent to each other, then fill them with concrete, and raisebore the small pieces in between the holes, including some of the surrounding concrete. The Uranium grade was so high that the concrete dillution was not an issue, they had to blend the ore it to be processed anyway. I think they produced about 200 tonnes per day, and it was pumped to surface in a slurry pipe.
Sounds nifty, I'll have to look into that a bit more! I find uranium to be highly interesting because of its variety in deposit types - well-documented by the IAEA and Dahlkamp - and the different challenges that go with it. Thanks for reminding me about this when mentioning "raise", there's a mine utilizing what they call the "vertical raise mining method" on a steeply dipping marble deposit. I'm not exactly sure of how it works, but from what I've heard raises are drilled, and rings of blastholes are then drilled from the raise. The raise is expanded into a sort of cavern this way.
Yes, Fredric
I learnt about "Drama Coal Mine" because of it's location in Drama in East Macedonia and Thrace in Greece. The mine has coal reserves amounting to 1 billion tonnes of lignite, one of the largest lignite reserves in Europe.