Study on the Water Quality Prediction of Acid Mine Drainage from Many Different Perspectives

Abstract

Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) is one of the serious problems which are caused in the mining operation. The main factors which cause the problem are H2O and O2 and sulfide minerals such as iron pyrite. Sulfide minerals are usually contained in any type of crustal structure, and there is a possibility of generation of AMD in any area. The problem may impact on the ecosystem or people in the surrounding area since the acidic water is low-pH and usually contains high level of heavy metals. Therefore, it is important to prevent the problem in mining operation. A passive treatment is low-cost and easy to maintain for dealing with AMD problems. In a passive remediation, the study on behavior of AMD generation and elution behavior of heavy metals in a laboratory is necessary before introducing it in the mine site to construct it designed for the situation. Moreover, elution behavior may be changed by management of waste rock, as a practical matter, acidic water generates due to a rough treatment of waste rock in some mine sites. Therefore, in this research, the study on the waste rock was conducted for predicting a quality of acidic water by characterizing the rock and for elucidating effects of treatment of waste rock to elution behavior of heavy metals. This paper describes the results of laboratory experiments such as a column test and a sequence extraction for predicting elution behavior of heavy metals and an occurrence of acidic water, and treatment of waste rock for effective countermeasure for dealing with acidic water for a long term is discussed.