Sustainable Development and Risk Assessment in Mine Closure ⎯ Case Study of Elliot Lake Uranium Mines, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In June 2001, BHP and Billiton merged to create what is now the world's largest diversified resources company with some 37000 employees working in more than 100 operations in over 25 countries. Through this merger, the company inherited closed mining properties in a number of jurisdictions. BHP Billiton adopted a leading practice Closure Standard in July 2004 that is being implemented at all BHP Billiton sites worldwide. It provides a framework which ties closure planning to a set of objectives that clearly support the Company’s Charter, its sustainable development policy and commitment to zero harm. In addition, the BHP Billiton Closure Standard is in line with the International Council on metal mining’s ten principles for sustainable development. In the Base Metals business unit, closed mine sites are located in 3 countries and include over 25 properties in various stages of closure. Included in this number are the 9 Rio Algom Limited, Elliot Lake uranium mine properties that were first developed in the 1950s (Table 1). This paper will focus on how the latest practices in risk assessment and closure planning are applied for these properties 10 – 20 years into the post-closure period. Important elements of the long term plan sustainability will be touched on, including cumulative effects assessment and communications. Table 1 Rio Algom Limited, summary of Elliot Lake uranium operations Mine Water Treatment Tailings Area Mine Site Or Tailings Operating Period Size Ha Closure Method Million T Buckles 1957-1958 NA - Keep saturated - Milliken 1958-1964 NA 23 Tailings to Stanleigh 0.08 Lacnor 1957-1960 Treat at Nordic 27 Soil cover, vegetated 2.7 Nordic1 1957-1968 Lime 117 Direct Vegetation 12 Stanleigh 1958-1960 1983-1996 Lime and BaCl 411 Water covered 21 Spanish American 1958-1959 NA 12 Water covered 0.5 Panel 1958-1961 1979-1990 Lime and BaCl 123 Water covered 16 Quirke I and II 1956-1961 1968-1990 Lime and BaCl 192 Water covered 46 Pronto2 1955-1960 Lime and BaCl 47 Direct vegetation and paper mill sludge cover for fines 4.4 1. Includes 0.04 Mt of contaminated sediment consisting of fine tailings and Ba(Ra)SO4 in 10.3 ha Buckles Creek 2. Includes 2.1 Mt of uranium tailings and 2.3 Mt of copper tailings Mine Closure 2006 ― Andy Fourie and Mark Tibbett (eds) © 2006 Australian Centre for Geomechanics, Perth, ISBN 0-9756756-6-4 Mine Closure 2006, Perth, Australia 95
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".