The JEB Pit Tailings Management Facility (TMF) is located on the eastern side of the Athabasca sedimentary basin, approximately 700 km north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The 120-metre-deep in-pit TMF currently stores approximately 70 m of tailings and features a granular drain that actively pumps water through its base, a water cover, and an engineered low-permeability embankment around its perimeter. Within the pit (below the engineered embankment), hydraulic containment is achieved by ensuring the tailings mass has a hydraulic conductivity approximately two orders of magnitude lower than the surrounding sandstone, making diffusion the dominant contaminant transport mechanism. The tailings are prone to segregation during deposition and vary from a non-plastic, coarse sand to a high plastic, clay-like material. Due to the heterogeneity of the tailings properties, ensuring the tailings meet the design objective is challenging.
This study presents phase one of the characterization of the spatial variability and hydromechanical properties of the tailings, and some preliminary large-strain consolidation modelling to estimate the distribution of the tailings’ hydraulic conductivity within the pit. The modelling presented herein is limited to a back analysis and does not provide predictions for future tailings performance.
Contact the authors through our Saskatoon office.
