Book Review—Mine Pit Lakes: Closure and Management

Abstract

Mine Pit Lakes: Closure and Management, compiled by Clint McCullough and published by the Australian Centre for Geomechanics, provides an excellent overview of an important topic. The book is written with the practitioner in mind and the authors of the various chapters have done a fantastic job of summarizing how to plan, develop, and manage pit lakes. It is quite readable, without a lot of jargon, and will be useful to engineers and managers at mine sites who are involved in designing pit lakes and developing or implementing mine closure plans, as well as regulators who oversee pit lake development and stakeholders who wish to be well informed. It incorporates case studies from around the world and uses them to illustrate many key aspects of pit lake planning and management. Planning for mine closure is a central theme and is illustrated not only by technical considerations, such as planning lake design features (e.g. slope aspects, bathymetry, and water balance), littoral zone development, and biology, but also aspects that are not normally addressed in more technical books, such as various ways to incorporate stakeholder involvement, and the how’s and whys of water quality monitoring. Another nice aspect is that, in addition to pit lakes at coal and hard rock mines, pit lakes that will be formed as a result of oil sands development, which is beginning to be a hot issue in North America, have been incorporated. It is worth noting that another book on pit lakes is scheduled to be published by Springer in 2012. Since I have had the opportunity to read (and edit) the draft version of that yet-to-be-published book, I can report that there is surprisingly little overlap, since that one is much broader in scope, is focused more on the science than on the planning and management (engineering) aspects, and has a more academic orientation. Anyone who wishes to be completely up to date should, of course, read both. Mine Pit Lakes: Closure and Management is broken down into three sections, design, development, and closure (6, 4, and 3 chapters, respectively), but, since planning for mine closure is a central theme, pit lakes as a closure technique is addressed, to some extent, throughout the book. Each of the three sections is a compilation of fairly short chapters that can be read without reference to the chapters that precede it. The design section represents nearly half the book. The first chapter is a summary of things to consider before deciding whether and how best to backfill mine waste and tailings into a mine pit that will subsequently be filled with water, including material consolidation and using liners to protect groundwater. The second chapter in the design section summarizes virtually all of the other aspects of planning a pit lake into 14 pages, using a ‘‘lessons learned’’ approach. The next two chapters both address aspects of stakeholder involvement, which may be a little too much of a good thing; the second of these two chapters, which reports on the regional aspects of stakeholder involvement, is an overly detailed accounting of a specific case study that had barely begun. An excellent introduction to designing pit lakes based on engineering considerations follows; it successfully makes the point that pit lakes must be designed for long-term success, and illustrates how key aspects of natural lakes can, and should, be considered when designing a mine pit lake. This is followed by a chapter on how water quality models are used to design and assess pit lakes. It is a wellwritten overview, and includes an interesting case study based on a model developed for oil sands pit lakes that B. Kleinmann (&) Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: Robert.Kleinmann@gmail.com