Accidental Water Pollution Risk Analysis of Mine Tailings Ponds in Guanting Reservoir Watershed, Zhangjiakou City, China

Abstract

Over the past half century, a surprising number of major pollution incidents occurred due to tailings dam failures. Most previous studies of such incidents comprised forensic analyses of environmental impacts after a tailings dam failure, with few considering the combined pollution risk before incidents occur at a watershed-scale. We therefore propose Watershed-scale Tailings-pond Pollution Risk Analysis (WTPRA), designed for multiple mine tailings ponds, stemming from previous watershed-scale accidental pollution risk assessments. Transferred and combined risk is embedded using risk rankings of multiple routes of the “source-pathway-target” in the WTPRA. The previous approach is modified using multi-criteria analysis, dam failure models, and instantaneous water quality models, which are modified for application to multiple tailings ponds. The study area covers the basin of Gutanting Reservoir (the largest backup drinking water source for Beijing) in Zhangjiakou City, where many mine tailings ponds are located. The resultant map shows that risk is higher downstream of Gutanting Reservoir and in its two tributary basins (i.e., Qingshui River and Longyang River). Conversely, risk is lower in the midstream and upstream reaches. The analysis also indicates that the most hazardous mine tailings ponds are located in Chongli and Xuanhua, and that Guanting Reservoir is the most vulnerable receptor. Sensitivity and uncertainty analyses are performed to validate the robustness of the WTPRA method.

Examining features of the process of heavy metals distribution in technogenic placers at hydraulic mining

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Risk Assessment of Upper-Middle Reaches of Luanhe River Basin in Sudden Water Pollution Incidents Based on Control Units of Water Function Areas

“…The second is defined as the combination of hazard and vulnerability [10][11][12]. We construct environmental risk assessment model or system for environmental risk assessment of regional or watershed scale according to the second definition [13][14][15][16][17].…”

Mechanism of groundwater inrush hazard caused by solution mining in a multilayered rock-salt-mining area: a case study in Tongbai, China

“…Many scholars (Clark and Fritz, 1997;Liu et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2016) have studied groundwater inrush hazards in both coal and metal mines, and some adopted methods are as follows: the use of water level/temperature criterion (Yuan and Gui, 2005;Ma and Qian, 2014), stochastic simulation (Fernandez-Galvez et al, 2007), numerical simulation (Liu et al, 2009;Kang et al, 2012;Shao et al, 2013; Figure 1. One of the long-term (longer than 2 years) groundwater inrush points with stable discharge (Y3).…”