Paste and thickened tailings — friend against acid and metalliferous drainage?

TL;DRAbstract

Tailings management has been a rapidly growing and demanding challenge across the global mining industry over the past century, primarily due to growing metals demand (and consequently production), declining ore grades (including refractory mineralogy issues), and increasingly stringent environmental and technical requirements. The typical approach historically has been to build engineered storage structures, involving valley fill walls or ring dykes, with the tailings delivered to the tailings storage facility (TSF) via a slurry pipeline. Conventional embankments, however, can fail under a variety of mechanisms and cause catastrophic environmental and public health impacts — the most recent event being the red mud dam failure in Hungary. Another major environmental issue associated with tailings (and waste rock) is the generation of acid and metalliferous drainage or AMD (also commonly known as acid mine drainage). The cause of AMD is the exposure of sulphidic minerals, such as pyrite

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