Groundwater Model Validation of Water-Covered Tailings Facilities at a Closed Uranium Mine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Closure strategies for metal mines must consider the long-term performance of waste materials such as tailings. Mine tailings have associated physical and geochemical risks that must be managed throughout the mine’s life cycle, including the closure period. Acid rock drainage (ARD) is a common geochemical risk for metal mines that is often managed with the use of a water cover. Historically, many mines have chosen to manage tailings as a slurry deposited behind containment dams with a water cover, but this solution comes with physical risks in terms of dam stability. A careful balancing of physical and geochemical risks must be made when selecting a preferred decommissioning strategy. This research considers a closed uranium mine site, the Denison mine, in Elliot Lake, Ontario. The Denison mine operated with two tailings surface impoundments (TMA-1 and TMA-2) surrounded by containment dams. The closure of TMA-1 and TMA-2 required a careful balancing of physical and geochemical risks to select a preferred decommissioning strategy. As a uranium mine, the management of long-lived radionuclides was also considered in closure planning. The Denison mine was ultimately closed by stabilizing the perimeter dams and establishing a water cover over the tailings. The Denison mine provides a useful case study of a water covered tailings site, with nearly 30 years of post-closure data. The purpose of this study is to examine the hydrogeological and geochemical performance of the Denison mine with respect to predictions made in the closure planning stage. The post-closure monitoring data from the Denison site was used to conduct a validation of the predicted groundwater seepage rates, groundwater flowpaths, source terms, and performance with respect to ARD. A numerical groundwater model was developed to determine groundwater seepage rates and flowpaths, and a preliminary contaminant transport analysis was completed using groundwater model outputs and an updated source term calculation. Mass flux calculations are made from the TMAs to receiving water bodies based on seepage rates and flowpaths from a numerical model. The results serve as a foundation to support future post-closure studies. Recommendations to refine the modelling going forward were developed.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".