A Review about the Sustainability of Pit Lakes as a Rehabilitation Factor after Mine Closure

At the end of surface mining activities, the remnant voids are of great concern regarding rehabilitating the final open pits. The investigation of the sustainability of pit lakes in post-mining regions constitutes a challenging research problem. This paper aims to highlight the effectiveness of pit lakes as a rehabilitation factor. In this framework, several cases worldwide and in Greece were examined in detail and evaluated. The results indicate that mine pit lakes must be evaluated as dynamic systems, natural or artificial, which demand rational mine water management to ensure their sustainability. Specifically in Greece, it is of great importance during the transition to the post-lignite era.

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Geochemical Stability of Oil Sands Tailings in Mine Closure Landforms

Minerals ◽

10.3390/min11080830 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (8) ◽

pp. 830

Author(s):

Heidi L. Cossey ◽

Anya E. Batycky ◽

Heather Kaminsky ◽

Ania C. Ulrich

Keyword(s):

Oil Sands ◽

Chemical Constituents ◽

Surface Mining ◽

Past Research ◽

Mass Loading ◽

Water Fluxes ◽

Mine Closure ◽

Pit Lakes ◽

Tailings Ponds

Oil sands surface mining in Alberta has generated over a billion cubic metres of waste, known as tailings, consisting of sands, silts, clays, and process-affected water that contains toxic organic compounds and chemical constituents. All of these tailings will eventually be reclaimed and integrated into one of two types of mine closure landforms: end pit lakes (EPLs) or terrestrial landforms with a wetland feature. In EPLs, tailings deposits are capped with several metres of water while in terrestrial landforms, tailings are capped with solid materials, such as sand or overburden. Because tailings landforms are relatively new, past research has heavily focused on the geotechnical and biogeochemical characteristics of tailings in temporary storage ponds, referred to as tailings ponds. As such, the geochemical stability of tailings landforms remains largely unknown. This review discusses five mechanisms of geochemical change expected in tailings landforms: consolidation, chemical mass loading via pore water fluxes, biogeochemical cycling, polymer degradation, and surface water and groundwater interactions. Key considerations and knowledge gaps with regard to the long-term geochemical stability of tailings landforms are identified, including salt fluxes and subsequent water quality, bioremediation and biogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and the biogeochemical implications of various tailings treatment methods meant to improve geotechnical properties of tailings, such as flocculant (polyacrylamide) and coagulant (gypsum) addition.

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Money Code Space

10.1093/oso/9780197515075.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jack Parkin

Keyword(s):

Open Source Software ◽

Global Economy ◽

Research Problem ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Distributed Ledger ◽

Start Up ◽

Challenging Research ◽

Digital Politics ◽

Financial Transactions ◽

And Control

Newly emerging cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology present a challenging research problem in the field of digital politics and economics. Bitcoin—the first widely implemented cryptocurrency and blockchain architecture—seemingly separates itself from the existing territorial boundedness of nation-state money via a process of algorithmic decentralisation. Proponents declare that the utilisation of cryptography to advance financial transactions will disrupt the modern centralised structures by which capitalist economies are currently organised: corporations, governments, commercial banks, and central banks. Allegedly, software can create a more stable and democratic global economy; a world free from hierarchy and control. In Money Code Space, Jack Parkin debunks these utopian claims by approaching distributed ledger technologies as a spatial and social problem where power forms unevenly across their networks. First-hand accounts of online communities, open-source software governance, infrastructural hardware operations, and Silicon Valley start-up culture are used to ground understandings of cryptocurrencies in the “real world.” Consequently, Parkin demonstrates how Bitcoin and other blockchains are produced across a multitude of tessellated spaces from which certain stakeholders exercise considerable amounts of power over their networks. While money, code, and space are certainly transformed by distributed ledgers, algorithmic decentralisation is rendered inherently paradoxical because it is predicated upon centralised actors, practices, and forces.

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Underground Multiculturalism: Contentious Cultural Politics in Gold-Mining Regions in Chocó, Colombia

Journal of Latin American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022216x2000098x ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-28

Author(s):

Jesse Jonkman

Keyword(s):

Cultural Politics ◽

Gold Mining ◽

Political Life ◽

Mining Activities ◽

Unique Form ◽

Gold Extraction ◽

Mining Regions ◽

Instrumental Role ◽

Community Councils

Abstract This article maps the contentious forms of political life that emerge when multicultural rights and non-formal gold extraction coincide. Specifically, it shows how, in the Colombian department of Chocó, Afro-descendant community councils have produced a unique form of mining governance that, while depending for its legitimacy on everyday uses of Afro-Colombian legislation, consists of the organisation, taxation and policing of mining activities that are in tension with official notions of extractive and multicultural law. In exploring such ‘underground’ cultural politics, the article highlights the limits of state-centric analyses of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and, accordingly, underscores the instrumental role that governed subjects play in the on-the-ground unfolding of multicultural governance regimes.

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Mine water management and controls in an environmentally sensitive region

Mine Water and the Environment ◽

10.1007/bf02919606 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 27-39 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

M. Sivakumar ◽

R. N. Singh ◽

S. G. S. Morton

Keyword(s):

Water Management ◽

Mine Water ◽

Sensitive Region ◽

Mine Water Management ◽

Environmentally Sensitive

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Realizing Beneficial End Uses from Abandoned Pit Lakes

Minerals ◽

10.3390/min10020133 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 133 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Cherie McCullough ◽

Martin Schultze ◽

Jerry Vandenberg

Keyword(s):

Water Quality ◽

Carbon Fixation ◽

Mine Closure ◽

Pit Lake ◽

Safety Issues ◽

Pit Lakes ◽

End Use ◽

Project Closure ◽

Active Recreation ◽

End Uses

Pit lakes can represent significant liabilities at mine closure. However, depending upon certain characteristics of which water quality is key, pit lakes often also present opportunities to provide significant regional benefit and address residual closure risks of both their own and overall project closure and even offset the environmental costs of mining by creating new end uses. These opportunities are widely dependent on water quality, slope stability, and safety issues. Unfortunately, many pit lakes have continued to be abandoned without repurposing for an end use. We reviewed published pit lake repurposing case studies of abandoned mine pit lakes. Beneficial end use type and outcome varied depending upon climate and commodity, but equally important were social and political dynamics that manifest as mining company commitments or regulatory requirements. Many end uses have been realized: passive and active recreation, nature conservation, fishery and aquaculture, drinking and industrial water storage, greenhouse carbon fixation, flood protection and waterway remediation, disposal of mine and other waste, mine water treatment and containment, and education and research. Common attributes and reasons that led to successful repurposing of abandoned pit lakes as beneficial end uses are discussed. Recommendations are given for all stages of mine closure planning to prevent pit lake abandonment and to achieve successful pit lake closure with beneficial end uses.

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Effect of natural conditions and mining activities on vegetation variations in arid and semiarid mining regions

Ecological Indicators ◽

10.1016/j.ecolind.2019.04.034 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 103 ◽

pp. 331-345 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Shiliang Liu ◽

Wenping Li ◽

Wei Qiao ◽

Qiqing Wang ◽

Yanbo Hu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Mining Activities ◽

Natural Conditions ◽

Mining Regions ◽

Arid And Semiarid

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Coal mine water management: optimization models and field application in North China

Hydrological Sciences Journal ◽

10.1080/02626661003798310 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 55 (4) ◽

pp. 609-623 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Qiang Wu ◽

Bill X. Hu ◽

Li Wan ◽

Chunmiao Zheng

Keyword(s):

Water Management ◽

Coal Mine ◽

Mine Water ◽

North China ◽

Field Application ◽

Optimization Models ◽

Mine Water Management ◽

Coal Mine Water ◽

Management Optimization

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From Hotel Reviews to City Similarities: A Unified Latent-Space Model

Electronics ◽

10.3390/electronics9010197 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 197 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Luca Cagliero ◽

Moreno La Quatra ◽

Daniele Apiletti

Keyword(s):

Research Problem ◽

Hospitality Management ◽

User Generated Content ◽

Urban Context ◽

Large Cities ◽

Effective Strategies ◽

Point Of Interest ◽

Latent Space ◽

Challenging Research ◽

Textual Form

A large portion of user-generated content published on the Web consists of opinions and reviews on products, services, and places in textual form. Many travellers and tourists routinely rely on such content to drive their choices, shaping trips and visits to any place on earth, and specifically to select hotels in large cities. In the context of hospitality management, a challenging research problem is to identify effective strategies to explain hotel reviews and ratings and their correlation with the urban context. Under this umbrella, the paper investigates the use of sentence-based embedding models to deeply explore the similarities and dissimilarities between cities in terms of the corresponding hotel reviews and the surrounding points of interests. Reviews and point of interest (POI) descriptions are jointly modelled in a unified latent space, allowing us to deeply investigate the dependencies between guest feedbacks and the hotel neighborhood at different aggregation levels. The experiments performed on public TripAdvisor hotel-review datasets confirm the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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