Abstract
The Sillamäe tailings pond contains some 12 million tons of waste material from various industrial activities over the past 50 years. These activities included the production of electricity from local oil shales, the extraction of uranium from local and imported uranium ores, and the extraction of rare earth metals and chlorides from imported loparite ores.’ The process wastes were initially deposited on an unprepared surface, and later behind a wall constructed of this early deposited material, creating a sandy/muddy mass partially covered by a solution whose pH varies between 6 and 10. This formation is typically called a tailings dam or tailings pond. From the data in Ehdwall et al. [3], it appears that the Sillamäe tailings pond, which has a solids volume of 8 million m3 and covers an area of 330,000 m2, consists of a lower layer of oil shale ash, a middle layer of uranium tails, and an upper layer of loparite tails mixed with oil shale ash, corresponding to the chronological sequence of industrial activity at Sillamäe. The tailings dam wall consists mainly of uranium tails, but includes some oil shale ash. According to [3], the total solids content of the tailings pond weighs some 12 million tons, although Silmet reports that the pond contains only 4 million tons of uranium tails, 1.5 million tons of oil shale ash, and 140,000 tons of loparite tails. Thus, there is some discrepancy as to the quantity of material within the pond.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Habashi, Fathi, ed. (1997) Handbook of Extractive Metallurgy, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim.
Hedrick, James, Shyama P. Sinha and Valery D. Kosynkin (1997) Loparite, a rare earth ore, Journal of Alloys and Compounds 250 467–70.
Ehdwall, Hans, Björn Sundblad, Vladimir Nosov, Henno Putnik, Raimo Mustonen, Laina Salonen and Henning Qvale (1994) The Content and Environmental Impact from the Waste Depository at Sillamde, Swedish Radiation Protection Institute, Stockholm.
Henderson, P. (1996) The rare earth elements: introduction and review, in Adrian Jones, Frances Wall, and C. Terry Williams (eds.), Rare Earth Minerals: Chemistry, Origin and Ore Deposits, Chapman and Hall, London, pp. 1–19.
Condie, Kent C. (1997) Plate Tectonics and Crustal Evolution, 4 th ed, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.
Taylor, Stuart Ross and Scott M. McLennan (1985) The Continental Crust: Its Composition and Evolution, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford.
Anselmo, Peter C. (1999) Outline of a multiattribute utility approach to development of a waste management strategy at Sillamäe. This volume.
Energy Information Administration (1995) Decommissioning of U.S. Uranium Production Facilities, US Dept. of Energy, DOE/EIA-0592, Washington, DC.
Tschabrun, Donald B. (1981) An economic evaluation of the rare earth industry, unpublished M.S. thesis, Colorado School of Mines.
Padilla, D.D., D. Hill, F.C. Prenger, E. Roth and L.A. Worl (1999) Magnetic separation for rare earth oxide recovery at Sillamäe, Estonia. This volume.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Davis, G.A. (2000). The Potential for Economic Recovery of Metals from the Sillamäe Site. In: Rofer, C.K., Kaasik, T. (eds) Turning a Problem into a Resource: Remediation and Waste Management at the Sillamäe Site, Estonia. NATO Science Series, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4092-8_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4092-8_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-6187-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4092-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive