New Afton Convergence Monitoring and Rehabilitation Planning in the B3 Footprint
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: New Afton's B3 block cave footprint has been in steady state production since 2022. During mining, the production footprint is subject to changing stresses that have been observed to cause squeezing and convergence of the drift profile at drawpoints and extraction drives. This can present challenges to the mining operations in terms of drift stability and accessibility of the footprint for equipment. Robust geotechnical monitoring practices have been developed to address this. Convergence is monitored using periodic visual inspections, LiDAR scanning, and multi-point borehole extensometers. These geotechnical monitoring activities generate data that requires interpretation and review during rehabilitation planning. Geotechnical monitoring data is assessed before, during, and after rehabilitation to understand the effectiveness of rehabilitation activities. This paper discusses two practical examples of New Afton's convergence monitoring and rehabilitation practices in the B3 footprint with the objective of documenting the importance of timely and well-planned rehabilitation in achieving safe and efficient production. 1. INTRODUCTION TO NEW AFTON The New Afton Mine is a block caving operation, located approximately 10 kilometers outside of Kamloops and 350 kilometers northeast of Vancouver in British Columbia. The copper-gold orebody is situated on the Stk'emlupsemc te Secwépemc territory, within the unceded traditional lands of the Secwépemc nation. In 2021 and 2022, New Afton completed its first two Block Caves on Lift 1, the West and East Caves, which mined over 24.5 MT and 23.7 MT respectively. Currently, New Afton successfully initiated and is monitoring steady state caving of a third cave (B3) beginning in January 2022 with 8.8 MT (probable tonnes). Production involves milling over 8,000 tonnes per operating day from the B3 cave. Footprint development and drawbell blasting is ongoing at a fourth cave (C-Zone), which comprises 29.5 MT (probable tonnes). These mining areas are shown in Figure 1.
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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".