The environmental mobility of critical elements in mine waste: rare earth elements, antimony, tungsten, and cobalt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Very little is known about the environmental mobility of many critical metals, particularly how they are leached from primary host minerals, mobilized under different conditions of pH and redox, and potentially sequestered in secondary phases. We have conducted field and laboratory studies of weathered wastes from operating or formerly operating Canadian mines to study mineral-water interaction of rare earth elements (REEs), antimony (Sb), tungsten (W), and cobalt (Co). For REE, concentrations are expected to increase substantially as pH decreases in water associated with mining activity. Antimony is mobile over a range of pH values but can be sequestered in secondary minerals, although their stability is variable. Tungsten is relatively mobile at alkaline pH values and is commonly sorbed to Fe-oxyhydroxide minerals at lower pH. Cobalt is leached relatively easily from mixtures of primary sulfide minerals and secondary weathering products in the presence of near-neutral water. In Canada, no mine effluent regulations currently exist for any of these elements and, for REE and W, there are no guidelines for either drinking water or ecological protection. Expertise from geochemists and toxicologists needs to be combined to guide future mine waste management at critical mineral mines.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".