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Paste Supplement
Fitton Tailings Consultants is an Australia-based
consulting engineering firm headed by Tim
Fitton, a civil engineer with a PhD in tailings
beach slope prediction. The company offers
worldwide services related to conventional
tailings storage and transport, thickened
tailings, paste, or filtered tailings
underflow up to the stack apex. This
approach requires a greater amount of capital
expenditure up front for the construction of
the thickener platform, but this may be
mitigated if the mine requires the removal of
a large amount of overburden material before
the orebody can be developed, as the
overburden would provide a cheap source of
construction material for the thickener
platform. Alternatively, it might also be
possible to place the thickeners on top of a
prominent local topographical feature, such
as a hill or crag, if such a feature exists at the
site. This would also reduce the capital cost.
The approach can be further optimised by
initially constructing a platform in the centre
of the TSF that is only as big as is needed for
the thickeners (with a cartwheel radius that is
smaller than is required for the final TSF
configuration), with the spigots subsequently
extended beyond the edges of this platform
once the beach builds up.
Figure 2: This could be the future of the CTD,
where a large cartwheel will enable the
splitting of the flow into many more streams
with minimal merging occurring on the beach
Truncated CTD technology promises to offer
significant benefits over a regular CTD:
n Less land required
n Less area to be rehabilitated at the end of
mine life
n Less thickening required
Like the regular CTD, the Truncated CTD still
enjoys the same major benefits over
conventional impoundments:
n Avoid large dams for tailings containment
n Potential for greater water savings
n Avoid the need for a pond on the tailings
n Reduced risk of leachate seepage into the
ground. IM
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