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Tailings dam failures involving significant ecological damage include: the Jagersfontein Tailings Dam Collapse, South Africa in September 2022, was a structural failure of a tailings dam used by a stockpile mineral reprocessor, resulting in a mudslide through the town and surrounding farmland.
A tailings dam is typically an earth-fill embankment dam used to store byproducts of mining operations after separating the ore from the gangue. Tailings can be liquid, solid, or a slurry of fine particles, and are usually highly toxic and potentially radioactive.
The tailings storage facility must be essentially permanent, as the submerged tailings will remain chemically hazardous for about 10,000 years. [7] Tailings dams have a history of failure in Canada as well as around the world. [8] The rate of tailings dam failure worldwide is between 1/700 and 1/1500 per dam per year.
Dams holding some 700,000 cubic meters (185 million gallons) of uranium mine tailings in Kyrgyzstan have become unreliable following a 2017 landslide. A further landslide or earthquake could send ...
Number 4A in the Harmony Gold Mine tailings complex failed. The dam was designed in the early 1970s by the mine's metallurgical manager and a representative from the tailings dam contractor. [1] The town of Merriespruit, a 250-house suburb of the Goldfields town of Virginia, was already established when the No. 4 dam was started in 1978. The ...
The Mariana dam disaster, also known as the Bento Rodrigues or Samarco dam disaster, occurred on 5 November 2015, when the Fundão tailings dam at the Germano iron ore mine of the Samarco Mariana Mining Complex near Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, suffered a catastrophic failure, resulting in flooding that devastated the downstream villages of Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo (40 km (25 mi ...
The Ridgeway mine was a gold and silver open-pit mine near Ridgeway, South Carolina. In its eleven years of operation between 1988 and 1999, it produced 1,500,000 ounces of gold and 900,000 ounces of silver. [1] The mine's two ore bodies are part of the gold-rich [3] Carolina Slate Belt rock package that runs through the upstate Piedmont foothills.
The dam will hold 570,000,000 metric tons (560,997,721 long tons; 628,317,447 short tons) of tailings and the mine is expected to produce 546,000,000 metric tons (537,376,764 long tons; 601,861,976 short tons). [3] Upstream of the dam, a series of channels and embankments divert water from the Ayash River from entering the reservoir.