McLanahan deep cone thickener.
June 2015
|
World Coal
|
75
Tailings may not be aesthetically
pleasing but effective tailings
planning and management is
important in coal processing,
explains
Scott O'Brien,
McLanahan, USA.
R
eferred to as many things – tailings,
refuse, gob, etc. – it is definitely not the
most glamorous part of the mining
industry. Even to lay people, it is obvious
by the very words that we probably won’t see red
carpet stars adorned with, majestic high rises built
from or energy production fuelled by tailings (or
any of its other hopelessness invoking monikers). It
may just be human nature, but we mine because the
materials we work with have value. As
concentration and refinement processes reduce
these values to smaller volumes, we discard the
barren or low value materials and focus ever more
on the valuable materials: the gold, the clean coal,
the competent aggregate.
It is no revelation that mining companies’ past
practices of tailings ‘mismanagement’ haunt every
sector of the industry to this day. However, what
