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Information and links on a variety of technical aspects of mining & mineral exploration.
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 Copper RecoveryWednesday, September 30, 2009The metallurgical heart of the majority of copper oxide processes is the heap leaching operation. Mineral Engineering Technical Services (METS) in Perth notes the success of this unit operation "is so important that operators need to understand the ramifications of their decisions or non-decisions and how they could affect the downstream processing" read more » Nevada Heap Leach Pad Gets Geosynthetic CoverTuesday, September 15, 2009Here is a story about the old Wood Gulch mine in Nevada where Barrick has installed a "synthetic liner" over the heap leach pad. read more » Heap Leach Pad Failure Modes & Effect AnalysisFriday, December 05, 2008Here is a PowerPoint presentation that correctly applies the Failure Mode & Effect Analysis methodology to a hypothetical heap leach pad. read more » Heap Leach QuestionsFriday, November 14, 2008Here are ten good questions that could be asked about decommissioning any heap leach pad. read more » Heap Leach Pad RisksWednesday, September 03, 2008Risk management enables you to identify risks and take action to avoid them before you get hurt. At least that is the theory. read more » Inproheat and Heap LeachingFriday, August 08, 2008Getting the lixiviant to all parts of the heap leach pad is a common operational problem. But if you can get lixiviant of the right temperature to all parts of the heap leach pad, the payback can be great. read more » Talvivaara Heap LeachTuesday, July 29, 2008This case history of a new heap leach operation is courtesy of E&MJ, May 2008. They describe a new heap leach pad at the Talvivaara Mine in Finland read more » Pierina Gold MineThursday, June 12, 2008GoldSim to the rescue again: an abstract for the conference on Tailings & Mine Waste ’08 tells of a water balance model for the Pierina Gold Mine in Peru using GoldSim for the entire plant. read more » Bellavista PhotosTuesday, April 22, 2008Words cannot quite convey what these photos show. Here are many more photos of the failed Bellavista Heap Leach Pad in Costa Rica. read more » Sullivan Mine Safety GuidelinesTuesday, April 22, 2008From the Proceedings of the Sixth Australian Workshop on Acid and Metalliferous Drainage, held in mid-April 2008 is a paper entitled "Sullivan Mine Fatalities Incident: Preliminary Technical Investigations and Findings". read more » Heap Leach Pad Application RatesWednesday, April 09, 2008The materials in a heap leach pad constitute a heterogeneous, anisotropic mass. Material hydraulic conductivities vary greatly from point to point. read more » FEMLABThursday, April 03, 2008FEMLAB can be used to model heap leach pad performance. Here is a description of the code read more » Costa Rica MiningFriday, March 28, 2008There are few mines in Costa Rica. Tourism is more lucrative. And it seems so too are displaced Americans and Canadians building houses at bargain basement prices. read more » Heap Leach SoftwareMonday, January 21, 2008Computer codes to simulate and model the performance of leach pads abound—any code that calculates a factor of safety against instability will work on a heap leach pad problem, and the same is true for most aspects of heap leach pad performance. read more » Bellavista Heap Leach PadFriday, January 18, 2008From the Costa Rica Tico Times comes a long article on the human impact of the closure of the Glencairn Bellavista mine as a result of the downhill sliding of the heap leach pad. read more » Bellavista Heap Leach Pad UpdateWednesday, November 21, 2007A few days ago, I received an unsolicited e-mail about the Bellavista heap leach pad failure. Here is an extract. read more » Conference of Metallurgists AbstractsWednesday, October 17, 2007At this link you will find the program and abstracts from a past Conference of Metallurgists. To keep you informed and help you decide, here are my edited versions of abstracts of papers that caught my attention. read more » Heap Leach Pad LawThursday, September 20, 2007The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Tribes reside on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, located in north-central Montana. Two cyanide heap-leach gold mines are located outside, but near the southern boundary of, the Fort Belknap reservation, in the Little Rocky Mountains mining district. read more » Performance Based CodesTuesday, September 11, 2007There has been much criticism of the draft Environmental, Health and Safety Guidelines for Mining recently published by the World Bank. read more » International Mining on Heap LeachingTuesday, September 04, 2007John Chadwick of International Mining brings us another of those timely reviews on a topical mining subject: heap leaching. read more » Heap Leaching for LawyersMonday, August 20, 2007You have to admire the skill of lawyers in crafting descriptions. Here is a legal description of heap leaching. read more » Glencairn in Costa RicaWednesday, August 15, 2007There is a lesson for us all in the failure of the heap leach pad at the Bellavista mine. Here is an edited version of the first news report I saw read more » Agglomeration for LeachingTuesday, August 14, 2007Here is an oft-repeated definition of the word agglomeration, the topic of this posting: The act or process of collecting in a mass; a heaping together read more » Agglomeration for BackfillFriday, August 10, 2007Here are some abstracts on the topic of agglomerating fine materials destined for the heap leach pad or for backfill underground. read more » Heap Leach Pad RaincoatsMonday, July 30, 2007The water balance of a heap leach pad may be detrimentally affected during the rainy season by excessive infiltration from heavy rains. read more » FracManWednesday, March 28, 2007It seems so obvious: most mines involve cutting into rock, and rock is fractured. Therefore the stability and groundwater flow patterns of the mine opening, whether open pit or underground, will be controlled by the fractures. read more » Monitoring a Leaching ExperimentWednesday, March 21, 2007We recently received the following figures from Amado Guzman, Principal Scientist at ARCADIS U.S. Inc. in Tucson, Arizona. The graphs show results from a monitoring system during a leaching experiment. read more » BioteQ MexicoWednesday, February 21, 2007Technical and financial innovation in one project: Columbia Metals Corporation (also at this link) has contracted with BioteQ Environmental Technologies (also at this link) to construct and operate a copper recovery and water treatment plant read more » I Think Mining BlogWednesday, January 31, 2007Some paper magazines will never die. They are the ones with high quality, thoughtful, well-written articles. The rest are doomed to fade and wither. Part of their problem is the competition of Blogs read more » Smith Williams ConsultantsTuesday, January 09, 2007The quality and quantity of information on consultants’ websites is a constant variable and a never-ending source of amazement and amusement. read more » Soilvision SystemsMonday, January 08, 2007Compliments to Soilvision Systems and to MetSoc who mistakenly call their site Heap Leeching—which is really rather different from Leaching. read more » Cyanide Code ComplianceTuesday, January 09, 2007Seldom does reading the news lift my spirits and make me feel warm inside. A happy exception is this announcement [edited and shortened by me]: "The Marigold mine in Nevada read more » Risk-Based Probabilistic Cover PerformanceMonday, January 08, 2007Little on the web impresses me; but this site does. I am not sure why. There is nothing new. There is nothing particularly profound. All the news and views are readily available elsewhere. read more » Unsaturated Hydraulic Performance of Mine Waste FacilitiesMonday, January 08, 2007Twenty years ago every mining-geotechnical conference was dominated by papers on slope stability. At the SME in St Louis, March 2006, it seemed as though every mining-geotechnical sessions was dominated by talk of unsaturated flow. read more » |
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