ESEL Paper Review_20111126
By Hong Guo
1,Title and Author
Title: Quantitative Risk-Based Approach for Improving Water Quality Management in Mining
Journal: Environmental Science and Technology
Authors:
Wenying Liu,*Chris J. Moran, and Sue Vink
Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry, Sustainable Minerals Institute,The Universit of Queensland, Brsbane, Queensland, 4072， Australia
2. Summary of Paper
In this paper, the author proposes and approach that could assist mine sites to manage water quality issues in a systematic manner at the system level. This approach can quantitatively forecast the risk related with water quality and evaluate the effectiveness of management strategies in mitigating the risk by quantifying implications for production and hence economic viability
2.1 Risk Quantification
The author found that the surface water conductivity is significantly affected by the rainfall event and the combustible recovery increased linearly as water conductivity increased. In a word, the use of salty water in coal flotation has a positive influence on the process performance. And the risk in relation to water conductivity radiation was coupling the frequency plot of conductivity and flotation experimental results that is represented by the solid line and the aim of this plot is to tell us the higher recovery more often by giving the mine site.
2.2 Risk control
The solution for the risk control is to adjust flotation chemistry by adding flotation reagents including collector and frother. And the result shows that the the increase in both frother and collector usage failed to maintain flotation yields due to the rainfalls events. At the CHPP operators were unaware of this variation and were responding relatively to poor recovery by changing reagent use more or less haphazardly.
The risk-based approach provides a framework for considering water quality management, production, and environmental consequences in a systematic and quantitative manner, which was demonstrated by single water ?quality variable case.
3. Contribution:
The author does approach to deals with complexity and allows specific situations to be considered in a generic manner. This approach combines risk
quantification and system-wide risk control options. The latter allows opportunities to be identified from the entire mine water system as opposed to separately dealing with each impact in tis local area. I learn the ideas of systematic approach to improve the water quality by control the each site in this paper. Moreover the paper gives the water quality control on the mining site.
4. Author information:
Email: wy.liu@uq.edu.au