Abstract
Deep sea mining tailings disposal is a new environmental challenge related to water pollution, mineral crust waste handling, and ocean biology. The objective of this paper is to propose a new tailings disposal procedure for the deep sea mining industry. Through comparisons of the tailings disposal methods which exist in on-land mining and the coastal mining fields, a new tailings disposal procedure, i.e., the submarine–backfill–dam–reuse (SBDR) tailings disposal procedure, is proposed. It combines deep sea submarine tailings disposal, backfill disposal, tailings dam disposal, and tailings reuse disposal for the deep sea mining industry. Then, the analytic network process (ANP) method is utilized to evaluate the performances of different tailings disposal methods. The evaluation results of the ANP show that the new proposed tailings disposal procedure is the most suitable for the deep sea mining industry.
Highlights
As resources consumption continues to increase, the mining industry has become one of the most important economic activities in the modern world [1]
This paper focuses on the tailings produced at sea, which include waste water, waste rocks, overburdens, benthic flora, and fauna
For the tailings dam evaluation system, the criteria consist of economic consideration, flood and earthquake design criteria, environmental design flood criteria, water cover, long-term stability of the tailings dam, the dam safety, and risk estimation
Summary
As resources consumption continues to increase, the mining industry has become one of the most important economic activities in the modern world [1]. Tailings are the by-products of hard rock mining operations. They are removed from the valuable mineral ores after filtering and milling processes [2]. With the gradual decrease of mineral reserves and varieties on land, deep sea mining (DSM) has been put forward by mining researchers since the 1960s [4]. The DSM operation is confined to a limited field, far away from the coast. The range of activities and available areas of tailings treatment equipment are limited to the ship for DSM tailings disposal. The dissolved heavy metals from tailings can have a long lasting influence on the deep sea environment for up to 60 to 70 years. There is not sufficient knowledge on the potential values of benthic flora and fauna [2,3,4,5,6,7]
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