What is decant tailing?
The two most common methods of water control within a tailings storage facility are a decant barge and a decant tower. A decant barge consists of a floating platform that houses the pumps used to reclaim water from the supernatant pond back to the processing plant or holding ponds.
How does a tailings pond work?
When you take the rock out of the ground, you grind it up to particles about the size of sand and silt, then you run it through what they call a concentration plant and it separates the minerals of interest from the waste. The waste becomes tailings, and it gets mixed up with water, and it’s pumped out into this pond.
What can you do with mine tailings?
Tailings ponds are used to store the waste made from separating minerals from rocks, or the slurry produced from tar sands mining. Tailings are sometimes mixed with other materials such as bentonite to form a thicker slurry that slows the release of impacted water to the environment.
What is supernatant pond?
The Supernatant Pond is a pond that forms in the tailings facility basin due to: •Supernatant runoff; and. Precipitation. It defines the interface between the sub-aerial and sub-aqueous beaches.
Why do tailings ponds exist?
Tailings ponds are ostensibly designed to allow minerals to “settle out” in order to prevent seepage of polluted water outside of containment zones, but evidence shows that the dirty water is interacting with the Athabasca watershed.
How does a decanter work?
The decanter scroll rotates at a slightly different speed than the bowl and conveys the separated solids toward the conical end of the bowl. This differential speed determines the residence time of the solids in the decanter bowl.
What are tailings impoundments?
What is a Tailings Impoundment? If the ore used by a mine is high-grade material, then the operator may choose to process it in tanks for better recovery of metals rather than using a heap leach process. The ore is finely crushed and the metals are extracted from a slurry made of crushed rock, chemicals and water.
What hazards can tailing ponds pose?
A breach from any one of these mine-tailings ponds would pose enormous risks to local communities and the surrounding boreal forest ecosystem.” These are: arsenic, benzene, lead, mercury, and air pollution. Every year, the toxic materials in tailings ponds increases.
Is there gold in mine tailings?
Tailings are the major wastes produced from gold extraction and they contain high amounts of heavy metals (HM). These metals leach out in an uncontrolled manner into surrounding environments on exposure to water or through dispersal by wind.