Environmental risk mitigation through concurrent disposal of tailings and mine waste rock at the Minago project in north-central Manitoba, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Minago Project, owned by Victory Nickel, is located in the north-central part of the Province of Manitoba, Canada. The site is perennially flooded and is covered with peat (muskeg), which overlies a variable thickness of hard and then soft clay underlain by dolomite bedrock. The site climate is characterised by warm wet summers, and cold and dry winters. The project, which is completed to the feasibility level design, will comprise of an open pit mine producing nickel ore, frac sand, dolomite, granitic rock, and ultramafic waste rock. The leachates from the dolomite and the granitic rock units are not expected to raise any environmental concerns with respect to acid rock drainage and metal leaching (ard/ml). however, ultramafic units are considered as potentially acid generating and metal leaching (PAG/ML). During initial studies of on-land disposal, three separate waste rock dumps for the ultramafic, granite and dolomite waste rock were considered. The ultramafic waste rock dump included a perimeter effluent collection system and post closure treatment in-perpetuity. This was not acceptable to the company and as such a new approach was required. The key objective of subsequent approach was to mitigate environmental risks related to the disposal of PAG/ML ultramafic waste rock. To meet this objective, a tailings and waste rock management facility (TWRMF) was developed to encapsulate the PAG/ML ultramafic waste rock with tailings in a single repository using a novel concurrent disposal approach. A review of published precedents for co-disposal of waste rock and tailings was carried out. Although a number of studies including laboratory/field-scale tests have been described in the literature, the results of the review confirmed a lack of direct precedent for efficient long-term co-disposal applicable to the Minago site-specific conditions. The development of the TWRMF disposal scheme draws upon selected components of precedents from the authors’ experience. It is supported by analyses required to confirm technical feasibility. There will be an emphasis on optimisation during detailed design and operational planning. Mitigation of environmental risks will be achieved by minimising ARD/ML potential by partially submerging the waste rock during operation, ultimately achieving full submergence of a combined waste rock and tailings mass, and controlling seepage to tolerable limits in the long-term. Field trials and a comprehensive instrumentation and monitoring program are planned. This paper focuses mainly on the environmental issues involved and the selected disposal scheme.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".