USING BIOGEOCEMENTATION TO REDUCE PHYSICAL INSTABILITY AND WIND EROSION OF MINE TAILINGS
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mining industry in Canada is an essential driver of economic growth as societal demands for minerals increases with advances in technology. The waste generated through these mine operations is one of the biggest environmental and safety hazards in the world, with the long-term storage of this waste in tailings dams being a geotechnical and geochemical hazard. \nThe biogeocementation of tailings, using calcite produced by microorganisms to create rock-like tailings deposits, is an attractive concept because a bio-cement can be formed that is durable enough to improve the mechanical behavior of the tailings. In this work, the microorganism Sporosarcina pasteurii was explored for its effectiveness at performing biogeocementation to physically stabilize gold and nickel mine tailings and prevent the wind erosion of gold mine tailings deposits. S. pasteurii was proven to be resilient when exposed to heavy metals at low concentrations, from temperatures of 4 to 31C, and pH values from 2 to 12, indicating S. pasteurii can survive in the potentially harsh conditions of tailings dams. S. pasteurii was then utilized to strengthen undrained gold and nickel tailings. Gold tailings from the Dominican Republic showed a 6.8% increase in shear strength with bacteria inoculation whereas nickel tailings from British Columbia showed an 18% decrease in shear strength. This indicates biogeocementation was successful for the gold tailings and unsuccessful for the nickel tailings which could be due to pore clogging. Finally, S. pasteurii was investigated for its ability to withstand wind speeds up to 15 km/h with the average percent mass lost reduced to 0.46 0.22% from 3.99 0.88%. The most effective application method for biogeocementation was found to be a single application of S. pasteurii followed by a continuous application of nutrient amendments, which has positive implications for field level scale-up. The promise of biogeocementation is demonstrated in this thesis, however, future proof-of-concept work needs to be performed to further characterize the robustness of S. pasteurii and determine its effectiveness in real-world environments, such as tailings dams.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it